Broadband and Me

Use of Narrative in Product Design

f r e e g o r i f e r o | weblog

Tools for Tales.

Personas and scenarios can be very powerful design tools, both internally (within a team) and externally (with a client).
The simple reason being, in my humble opinion, that we can all easily relate to a well-written narrative: scenarios allow anyone in product development to use a shared vocabulary, the one we learned hearing our mother's bedside tales, reading comics and books, watching movies.

Great post from Fabio Sergio on use of narrative in design. I've attended a seminar where David Snowden went through this from his perspective but I haven't seen anything else in this area. We currently work from abstracts (well actually the Product Manager and I will susually huddle in a corner and put somethign on a white board) which usually are as simple as flow diagrams or when we want detail we produce UML but this is more at the translating for techies level than actually communicating real world requirements.

Must take time to go through this article and look at all the links.