Storytelling with Comics: Communicating UX Research Findings

okay um see so like she said um I'm going to be talking about storytelling with Comics today um and we'll discuss how we can use storytelling with comic strips to better communicate our research findings so to start out um my name is Nicole hunt I'm a user experience researcher at JB Hunt like she mentioned um I do a lot of my ux research uh with Enterprise Products um and uh again it's in like a tech setting um of a Bach's degree in anthropology I live in Arizona and a fun fact about me is that uh before I worked in the ux research field I ran a maternal Health nonprofit so um I'd like to know from everyone here today if you could put in the chat what role are you in and what industry are you in that would be helpful for me to kind of get an idea about um what kind of um people we have here today you have financial services for one and just wanted to check here are you guys seeing my presentation okay what was that Courtney I can see it looks good okay great entertainment marketing that's cool okay cool awesome we have a variety of people here today so I I'm sure that um for anyone who's not a dedicated ux researcher that these will still be relevant regardless of whatever field you're in so I'm excited to have youall here today okay so I'm a ux researcher um and I at work I like to use Comics I use them with a couple different audiences and I've seen some good results doing that so far um this is one comic that I've used at work obviously the details are changed um but we'll dig into it a little bit more later so no need to like squint and read it right now but we're going to pick it apart as we go along today so the people that I usually use my comic strips with at work is is um large product teams who aren't directly involved with my research they may not be familiar with the products or the project well they're familiar with the product but they're not familiar with the projects that I'm doing um I also use it when I'm presenting to large groups of ux designers especially those groups who uh don't work on my product directly and may be unaware of my research projects um I also use it with Executives especially Executives that I know are very visual people and really appreciate visual present presentations um every time I use comics when I'm presenting I always get positive feedback um people um tell me that they're engaging that it's easy to understand the information in them and that they're fun so some um some bonus points there for having it be fun as well okay so today we're going to talk about um some common research report pain points that I see um specifically in the ux field um but I I'm sure that this will translate across the board um and we'll talk a little bit about how Comics can address those and then we'll dive into storytelling and then getting started with comics and if you have questions throughout here we'll pause a couple of times in the presentation and answer those um so feel free to put those in the chat or in the Q&A section okay so um one of the first pain points I see here is um that people don't read your research report um that can be frustrating obviously um another paino I see is that people don't pay attention in meetings where you do present your findings maybe you Wrangle a bunch of people together um and you're still finding that they're not paying attention um there might be too much information for you to cover in a report and the product team might be pulled in a lot of different directions to focus on your research results and read your report um stakeholders don't see how research findings are immediately relevant to you to them and then stakeholders don't do anything with your research findings now obviously there's a lot of different ways to tackle these problems and Comics will be one of the things that will support you as you're working through some of these issues um so some of the things that Comics can offer is first that they're concise um they can convey a lot of information quickly and in a way that's easy to understand um so that's really great for when you're trying to present stuff to people where it feels like it might be a lot um Comics are great for being concise um also they catch people's attention um I don't think you we usually read Comics at work it doesn't usually happen um not in a professional setting so um they're novel and eye-catching compared to other mediums like a Word document for example so um they're also enjoyable to consume which is great Comics also are able to convey emotion which is going to build empathy um with the reader and they're also gonna convey info as well um uh like I said they convey a lot of information quickly and then they also um if we can build empathy with our stakeholder they're more likely to act on our research findings so Comics can support us as we're doing that okay so we're going to get started with uh storytelling here and we're going to talk about how we can translate that into our um into our Comics um if we need so we need to have that solid storytelling background if we want our Comics to have that intended outcome and uh we're going to look for a few important facets of story storytelling today and talk about how we can apply them so the first thing we're going to talk about here is some of the common storytelling pitfalls that I see um so so these are just common things that I've noticed um one of them is when a person's telling a story in a professional setting they may not be taking the audience's prior knowledge into account um that's going to leave the audience to get confused and if the audience is confused the stakeholders aren't going to act um on research because they're confused so U we want to make sure we're taking that into account the next thing is the story jumps all over the place and when it's not in a chronological order um again the stakeholders are going to get confused and we can't expect our stakeholders to act on anything if they are confused uh lastly the story is not engaging um so when the story is not engaging our audience is going to have a hard time staying alert and um again if they don't listen they won't know what to do with our findings because they weren't listening okay so let's start with the audience prior knowledge here I'm going to show you a comment here and from what I've seen in the chat with people in market research and uh research writers entertainment marketing Financial Services things like that um this comic is not going to be written for us maybe there's some people in hiding out here that didn't put their um their uh field in the chat maybe it will be written for you and you'll be like I totally know what this is but I think for the for the majority of us we're not going to be the intended audience for this so they're not taking our prior knowledge into account in this comic so let's take a look okay so we have a guy on the left here at a computer he looks like he's talking um on the top it says Hotel it's crossed out it says pet clinic and then we have guest booking and room crossed out and it says pet appointment and doctor and then we have a guy on the right that looks confused and I'm kind of in the same place as the guy on the right I don't really know what's going on here I can make some guesses um I'm wondering maybe are we modeling like a business model after for a pet clinic off of a hotel or remodeling software off of it I don't really know exactly what a hotel and a pet clinic have to do so I'm just kind of guessing trying to put those together um I don't know who these people are um I don't know why the blue person is confused I don't know if it's the same reason I'm confused um I don't know what the context or the setting is for this so this is not intended for us as um as the audience our PRI knowledge is not taken into account here and so we want to avoid having this kind of experience here when we create a comic for our stakeholders so we want to make sure that we're we're knowing what they already know taking that into account and presenting our findings um our research findings in a comic in a way that's going to um start from zero and then build up to make sure that they know um what's going on so some of the questions as you're creating a comic or you're telling a story in general um with in a business setting that you want to take into account um and ask yourself are who's going to see this comic or the story you're telling what role are they in what do they already know about the product that you're going to be talking about um it's safe to assume that people don't know much partially for the reason that people are often contact switching all day you know maybe some person is in back-to-back meetings some one one day they drop into your meeting to get research results from you and their head's kind of swimming because they've been in all these different meetings all day and now they're trying to get their head on straight so they can listen to you um if we can kind of start from zero and build up then that will help make sure that everyone's on the same page and also help people who are context switching um we want to make sure we're including things like context information on the product information on the character and Persona so I think back to that comic that we read before we didn't really know what was going on um just try and answer all the questions that you have about that pretty much um you also want to ask yourself what's my goal in sharing this comic uh maybe you're wanting someone to create a solution to a paino so you want to highlight that paino in the comic um maybe you're just trying to showcase the value of uh your research in general um there could be a lot of um situations where you'd want to do that um those would be some things you'd want to consider and make sure you're really driving that point home when you're creating that comic um what action do you hope the audience is going to take want to keep that in mind and then also um what is the audience trying to get out of the comic an executive might just want an executive summary of your project and so you're going to put that in there um maybe a ux person or like a designer on a different product you're going to do a highle summary because they don't really know anything about it maybe they just want to get familiar with what your research is so those are some things to keep in mind as you're creating your comic here so let's look at an example this is the comic I briefly showed at the beginning and we're going to start to pick it apart now so we're going to go through and read it together um I made this comic for ux designers um who didn't know anything about my product um my goal was to share my research findings with them um in case it was relevant to their products and then also um they wanted to to um they were there viewing it just to get greater knowledge about my product in general okay so this is made up obviously gift card software is probably not a real piece of software but that's what we're going with today um so our person here says hi I'm I work for Target I need to order one million gift cards and need them ordered within the next three days I've reached out to to a competitor and you gift card ordering Inc uh can you give me a quote hey there I work in the million plus department where we handle large orders among other things I'm happy to help all righty time to work on the target account I also need to get started on large orders from a different from different accounts I use gift card software to place these large orders because our website doesn't allow for large orders okay so he goes from happy to neutral so frustrated and now he's frowning hey research Riley I have a few things going on here that are making my job a little harder than it needs to be I guess I can keep doing them but it seems unnecessary and then our ux research here on the right says I'd love to hear about them the product team actually sent me to come talk to you we heard you're having to open tons of different screams to get your job done um can and we want to create something that's going to make accessing your tasks easier can you show me what's going on okay so that's our comic there um hopefully we saw that um you were able to follow along with that because um I assumed no one knew anything about this product when I was creating this so hopefully all of us were able to follow along as we were doing that um you'll see here also that um um it was pretty simple we were pretty straightforward with everything we talked about um when in doubt when you're writing a comic simplify it um I only touched on one example of that is that only touched on one thing that this piece of software did um it probably does all these other cool things but I only talked about the one thing that was relevant um because my purpose was just to highlight one paino here um and the images can also help convey what we're trying to talk about for example this really drove home some of the frustration that was going on with this user okay so the next thing we want to talk about is chronological storytelling um that's going to be helpful when we're we're creating our comics okay so we're going to look at an example here of a a comic so first we have a thief that's getting shot in the back okay we have a thief that's now shooting his gun he somehow picked it up off the ground and then now he's asking for money and the the bear is standing up now and now he's shoot he's just pointing his gun and the bear is surprised so this comic we kind of get the main points there's some sort of stickup happening the thief gets shot at some point and he also shoots his gun so it's a stickup that's kind of what we get from this um but this one was actually I put it in here out of order so let's put the frames in the correct order now and see what kind of difference that's going to make for us okay so on the top left we have the be uh the be surprise and we have our Thief pointing a gun top right he's asking for money the bottom left the thief shoots his gun and it goes through the frame and shoots himself in the back like okay that's actually pretty funny pretty cute he accidentally shoots himself okay so um this is the order that the comic strip was designed to be in and the order is so important in this that they even um numbered each frame to make sure that we're reading it in the right order um helps us Lost Get U not get lost in the story we also notice that when it wasn't chronological we kind of got the of it we've kind of had a high level overview but we missed some important parts of the story when it was out of order so um we want to make sure that whenever we're telling our stories with Comics that we're going in a chronological order that's going to really help our um our audience so um there is such a thing as a non-chronological narrative but I don't recommend using that when it comes to research reports so just stick with chronological um I can see this play out in research reports sometimes where they feel like they're bouncing all over the place um and as an audience member it can be very like discombobulating and you're just trying to follow along um and we're really wanting to make sure that we can smooth that out for our our um our audience and what's great is that Comics are sequential images so they lend themselves to creating a chronological story just by the nature of what Comics are so um if we ever want to create something chronological putting it into a comic strip is going to kind of Aid Us in doing that okay um so the way that I structure most of my Comics um to make sure that they're chronological is first I'm going to start off with a brief introduction of the character or Persona that's kind of a nice thing we can do is if you if your company uses personas you can plop that Persona into your comic strip and use that as your character um then I'm going to bring briefly introduce the product if you remember back to our last when we picked through that comic that I had written um it was a very brief introduction of what that product did um then we're going to State the situation or the user's goal we're going to illustrate the paino and then we're going to end with a call to action so that our audience is going to know what we want them to do with it um so an early American comic artist named will Eisner he Co the term sequential art for comic strips saying that Comics are sequential art um we have been using sequential art for a super long time as human beings all the way back to cave drawings to hieroglyphics this is the way that humans have been telling stories for a really long time and it helps us understand stories and ensuring that our stories are sequential in nature and using art to support that sequential storytelling um that can really help us tap into our long history of understanding there narratives with art with them so let's look at this comic here that we had picked apart so we have um our second frame here Middle top that's when we introduced our Persona just very briefly um the next one we introduced both the product and the user's goal and then we Illustrated the paino and then we had a call to action at the end my call to action in this was that I wanted to go into some additional detail with my audience um wanted to share some videos and things like that um that would illustrate some more details about the paino so um that's an example of how we can put uh chronological storytelling into action with Comics okay our last storytelling thing we're going to touch on is engaging storytelling so we're actually going to watch a video here don't move please welcome the Emmy Award winning South Park Matt Stone Trey Parker you think I'm kidding right oh shoot sorry don't move please welcome the Emmy Award winning South Park Matt Stone Trey Parker you think I'm kidding [Music] our whole South Park Riders room one whole wall is is one of these and we've got it split up in in three app we have different color markers just like here too look y we have that and I walk around with the markers like this and we'll go okay we do show WR okay okay well somewhere okay this would be a funny scene if we had this each individual scene has to work as a kind of find Sketch you don't want one scene that's found out this really simple Ru that maybe you guys have all heard before but took us a long time to learn but we can take these beats which are basically the Beats of your album and if the words and then belong between those beats basically you got you got something pretty B what should happen between every beat that you've written down is either the word therefore or but right so so what I'm saying is that you come up with an idea and like look this happens right and then this happens no no no should be this happens and therefore this happens but this happens therefore this and that as soon as we are able to and literally sometimes we we'll write it out to make sure we're doing U we we'll have our beats and we'll say okay this happened but then this happens and that affects this and that does to that and that's why you get a show that feels like okay this to that to this to that but this was the compation to that and there's so many scripts read read from new writers and things that we see I see movies yeah yeah you see movies you're just watching it's like this happened and then this happens and then this happens that's when you're in a movie what the am I watching this mie like this happened and then this happened and this that's not a movie you know that's not a story like Trey said it's those two but because therefore that gives you the causation between each be and that makes that that's a story okay so um those were the writers of South Park um a lot of people find them to be fantastic writers so their kind of tip for making sure storytelling is engaging is making sure that we're using therefore but therefore um blank effects blank things like that so when we're creating our Comics we want to make sure that there's something in there uh like that so we're gonna read a comic here as an example and uh we're going to see how it flows ah what a beautiful day good morning fuer Kitty and now it's raining so here there wasn't too much to of a point to that we had and thens in between that which our writers at South Park said that that wasn't we want to avoid that um now this is chronological like we had talked about but it doesn't seem like there's a point to it so let's read it the way uh let's go ahead and add in the frame that I took out this is kind of our therefore frame okay ah what a beautiful day good morning fur Kitty hi Fran have you figured out the long-term trajectory of your career yet then it's raining so here that's kind of our therefore moment is when that kitty on the bottom left is um asking about his career tra trajectory so we want to make sure that we have a therefore um thing that happens in our comics strips to make make sure they're engaging a lot of times that therefore is going to be a combination of the user's goal and the user's paino and we're going to present that with both facts and users emotions um and the visuals of the comic are going to help us communicate that paino effectively so in this comic the therefore moment was when he started working on a started using the software and then we saw him trying to accomplish his goal and failing and getting frustrated so was our therefore moment so if you can just present what if we're using that chronological format that I had given you before um and we're illustrating a paino um we're going to see that therefore get smushed into your comic pretty much pretty naturally okay so uh let's go ahead and pause here what kind of what kind of questions do you guys have about the storytelling things we've talked about so far go ahead and put those in the chat or the Q&A section if you have any okay I'm not seeing any questions come in we'll have time for questions later so as they come in if if you think of any go ahead and just put those down and we'll touch on them okay so we're going to move on to Comic Basics now so um the big tips I have when you're writing comic is to focus on only one to two pain points if you go more than that it's going to start getting super detailed and um a little bit too much information um since since Comics are so compact with information if we put too many pain points in there it's going to start um just be kind of overwhelming to our audience and we want to be very um to the point when we're creating these Comics the other one is to use a specific tool when you're creating your comic so this is the comic I I had shown before and the great news about this is that I did not create this from scratch I have a drag and drop tool I'm going to show you guys so that you don't have to start from scratch you don't have to be an artist to do any of this you don't have to be a designer yourself um just a drag and drop tool the other thing is I only talked about one main paino here um and I highlighted that here and then at the end let them know we were going to go into more detail okay so let's look at this tool um so okay so this is if you visit this website here on the top this is um the uh the link here to get to this tool I highly recommend using it the big thing you're going to get out of it is this download file um and in that download file you're going to get a bunch of drag and drop pieces and you can drag and drop them to create scenes like here on the right um You can also um put your own designs into the product into your um into your comic strip to make it more real and if you scroll all the way down to the bottom they even have some resources here so if you really want to dig into Comic Strip making they have books and blogs things like that that you can use to make your comic um make your comic working a little bit more mature um so let's look at the file itself that you're going to download I'll scroll all the way to the top up here your top three slides are just going to be examples of things that you can do with the comic strip uh with the drag and drop pieces here um lots of examples here and then the best part of this is the element Library so these are all the drag and drop pieces so here's a laptop that you can drag and drop um there's also other devices like we see a camera a tablet a phone um so that we can um whatever your product is on you can use that for it um and then we also have different arms in different positions so you can put your character into the position you want and we have all these different types of bodies facing different ways doing different things different colors we also have um again all of these stuff is drag and drop here so we also have different faces with different hair dos different colors as well and then we have um drag and drop uh faces as well ranging from like neutral to angry and on the bottom right we also have things you can put on top of the head of somebody to really emphasize what kind of emotion is going on with them we have talk bubbles here and then we also have um different settings so wherever your event is happening wherever you conducted that research wherever your users do that thing we can put them in that situation and then at the end here we have some example scenes of putting all of those things together and again it is all drag and drop so you can put it into whatever setting that you want um and uh yeah you have a couple examples here at the end um I highly recommend using something like this I've tried other comic making tools and this is the easiest one especially because since I work in Tech um I wind up using um I wind up needing the things that they already have in here since it's design ux okay so some of the applications with Comics that we've talked about so far um and a couple things maybe I haven't mentioned yet are first um I I have used Comics just to introduce a product and a Persona to a group that isn't familiar with my products um and then I'll share research findings afterwards so I'll kind of make sure get everyone on the same page I like often like to use Comics whatever the difficult thing is that I am trying to convey um I'll put that into a comic because if I can put it into a comic anyone's going to be able to understand it um I'll show it I'll use it when I'm presenting to designers who are unfamiliar with my product I especially like using it with designers because they're visual people and so when I put my findings into a visual format like that that really works for them um I also use it to present case studies to ux leadership that aren't familiar with my product I also use it to present to non ux people uh to showcase the value of ux and also just show what ux research has the ability to do um sometimes I like doing that with devs um and also um I like putting praise from users into a comic strip to send out to devs because devs don't always get to hear positive things about the thing that they're working on um so this is a nice way to convey that to them and then some additional ways to use this is to use this as um an executive summary when you're sharing out your research um I haven't used it specifically for that yet but I know that that would be one um one application here so just to wrap up the things we talked about today um when you're doing your storytelling and comic making the the highlights of what you want to make sure you're doing is make sure your story is chronological make sure you're factoring in the audience's prior knowledge make sure your your story is naturally including a therefore or a because and only highlighting one to two pain points and in addition I recommend using this tool here um I not I did not create that tool I found it but um I love it it's great okay so we're going to pause here for Comics I mean for questions um we're at the end of our time here together so just let me know what kind of questions you have well I have a question um generally how much time do you spend on a single comment comic that's a great that's a great question so when when I first started making Comics I think the first one I ever made took me like two hours to figure out how to do everything and make it look the way I want it to look and now it takes me about 30 minutes because I just reuse the the formats that I've already done um so like the one that I showed you I'll just swap out the text for whatever other situation I'm trying to share so um there is a learning curve but once you've done it a few times it only takes about 30 minutes have you ever received anything negative like any negative comments about it like I'm personally thinking of a former boss who probably would have hated it because it would be too unprofessional or childish right yeah um I have never honestly I never have um that's one of the reasons I I haven't shared it when I like um one of the things we often do in my company is we'll send out like a formal email with our research findings in it I haven't put it in that email yet because I'm nervous about that much wider audience yeah I'm like I don't know exactly what's going to happen but in less formal settings that it's like my go-to thing though so so yeah I haven't be partially because I'm like cautious about about that that makes sense it goes back to knowing your audience right yeah yeah okay someone asks what the price was for that tool it's free tool is totally free yeah yay yes I tried to find the person who made it but I had a hard time tracking them down I was going to give them a shout out here but if you find them give us give them a big thanks for us he awesome any other questions anybody has okay I'm not seeing any other questions um if you guys think of any questions feel free reach out to me on LinkedIn or just connect in general I'd love to connect with y'all um yeah thank you everybody all right