Victoria Kirk Owal. Protagonist Studio
Talk Title: Narrative Prototyping: Using Stories to Make Better UX Strategy
Victoria Kirk Owal @kirkitude
Protagonist Studio
Time: 13:00, Friday 24 January 2020
Room: A214
You’re designing a new service, product, app, website, etc., and you want all the parts to work together. You want it to make sense; to be seamless. You want it to be *meaningful*. But where do coherence and meaning come from? In our experience, it’s narrative: the most meaningful experiences have the strongest stories, and a clear narrative arc makes for good strategy. This talk discusses the psychology of storytelling and why humans tend to think in narrative. More importantly, it presents a concrete approach for turning written and visual narrative into a robust UX planning and prototyping tool, that enables rapid conceptual iteration early in a project (rather than burning hours on premature Agile sprints). Drawing on numerous real-world examples, this talk demonstrates Narrative Prototyping can inform user journeys, scenarios and service maps, and get design teams and key stakeholders communicating and working in the same direction.
Bio: Victoria helps businesses succeed by mitigating the risks of innovation. She synthesizes business strategy, and insights from culture, data, customers, and stakeholders into future-state strategic narratives people can understand and act on. Then, she aligns the cross-functional teams that design and deliver results. In nearly two decades at some of the world’s most successful creative consultancies, she’s helped her clients in over 100 companies in 36 countries interrogate assumptions, uncover fresh insights, and serve new and underrepresented customers — both B2B and B2C — across healthcare, energy, consumer goods, banking, computing, software, fashion, beauty, travel and leisure. In 2018 Victoria co-founded Protagonist Studio, a boutique strategic design consultancy for UX leaders in London and Amsterdam because she and her business partner, Carl Alviani, have seen firsthand how useful narrative is at shaping experience strategy, and they have formalised the process of applying it.
Take a look at the whole City HCID research seminar series at https://hcid.city/seminar/
