Dave Malouf, @daveixd, is currently the Manager of Product Design at Rackspace, the open hosting company (RAX). They are responsible for all the administrative control panels for our Infrastructure as a Service, Management as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Networks as a Service system. Dave has been working primarily in Internet front-end design for the past 20 years.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Malouf On Interaction Design
An Excerpt from the Podcast:
Joe: How did storytelling relate to that, because that’s how I ran across you is in the storytelling book? How do you use user stories and maybe expand into how storytelling relates to the two?
Dave: User stories are very functionally focused. They are very Hemingway-like in a way. They don’t add a lot to the perspective, to the emotion around the impact of the things that we do. And so when I think of narratives and storytelling, it’s really about communicating impact or expected impact. And that’s not just on the RLI level, it’s also on the level of the true emotional connections and emotional pieces that come together because of what we design.
Joe: When you are looking at storytelling you’re looking to put, as you said, more of a narrative than just kind of this explanation of data?
Dave: If we look at what we’re trying to achieve through building systems – I’m trying to use as generic terms as possible – we’re trying to create a story. We are assuming that people or types of people, personas if you will, are passing through a chapter by chapter story. As they go through that they’re experiencing something at a visceral, cognitive, perceptive level, but also at an emotional level, an aesthetic level of understanding and they have purpose and goals that are driving them through the system.
Sometimes those purpose and goals are in reaction or in dialogue with that system and thus they come through it and sometimes never leave it, because they’re embedded in it. Like do you ever really leave Facebook if you’re truly engaged in it? It’s something that as a touch point you go to and then leave. But it’s always kind of omnipresent for those people who are engaged in it. There are similar tools like that whether that’s social tools or email, but also the tools like my timesheet. It’s like I make decisions about what I do based on how I’m going to need to log it. It’s easier for me for example, to make sure that my activities are in longer chunks of time as opposed to shorter chunks of time which then impact how I decide “what am I going to do?” because of my timesheet software.
It’s like this system that’s created just by a single touch point that I don’t even use most of the time. But there’s a story around how that touch point impacts my total life around that system. And a user story won’t think about that. A user story will come in and say “User will add project. User will then declare time for project.” That’s not really what the user thinks about. That is how the system needs to be written from a functional perspective. But that’s not what the user is thinking. That’s not their context. That’s not their world. It’s very much from the developer or from the architect’s perspective.
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