New book underway: “Storytelling for User Experience Design”

I’m delighted to report that Kevin Brooks and Whitney Quesenbery have begun work on a new Rosenfeld Media book, tentatively titled Storytelling for User Experience Design. We’re all familiar with the power of storytelling—most UX people already use stories to help communicate research and data, explain design concepts, and persuade colleagues, often without realizing it.

So perhaps the time has come for a practical book that teaches UX practitioners to use storytelling in a more active, explicit way. We hope that Storytelling for User Experience Design will place storytelling alongside other, more conventional research and design methods. And we invite you to engage with the book from its inception by sharing your questions, comments and ideas with Kevin and Whitney and others interested in the topic. Please bookmark their “book-in-progress” site or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Whitney and Kevin bring wonderfully complementary perspectives to the topic. As past UPA president, highly involved in the STC, a UXnet co-founder, and one of the instigators of World Usability Day, Whitney is well-respected in the UX world. Kevin is a professional storyteller, regularly writing and performing at festivals; he’s no UX slouch either, with a PhD from the MIT Media Lab and a day job researching new technologies for Motorola. You can learn more about Kevin and Whitney from their site. I’m really looking forward to working with them both.