Storytelling

Challenge & Selection.

Storytelling is a tool to empathize. I am a student who has been working on an App with  other students. The App was chosen to be developed in a business incubator. In the  incubator, they helped us to emphasize that the problem we were attacking (traffic in big  cities) was an urgent and necessary matter. As part of this, we should underline possible  moments in which our problem would be a suffering one. For that, we use "storytelling",  not only to understand our user but also to put ourselves in his shoes.

Practically, through "Storytelling" we could feel the user's pain.

And it is through telling stories that we can connect with people through emotions.  Developing the stories is not only about the people with whom we want to connect but also  about who is telling the story, knowing the trajectory and the dream that is being pursued.  As David Harris says, in Module 2, "Storytelling is the difference between solving a  problem and creating a cause."

Application

In the incubator, they supported us to use Storytelling to connect with investors. Finally, we  used it in a contest to connect with the audience and the public. Our App-idea was not the  winner of the competition, but they congratulated us on our pitch, they thought that traffic  was something that affected us all and that, in moments of emergency, could be the  barrier to being or not in an unforgettable moment in the lives of the people around us. To  connect with emotions and feelings, we used a template in which we described what our  target thought, heard, saw, wanted, and what hurt him/her. Something that I would have  done differently in the storytelling application is to have met our users, especially during  the traffic, observe them and analyze them to understand them better.

Insight and Approach

As I said before, the way we used this tool was through describing our users, similar to  Mind Mapping, where we discussed what our target was possibly thinking, hearing, seeing,  wanting, and hurting. Although now I can understand much of the work that we performed,  shall not be done only in debates and analysis tables, but in reality, while our pain or  people wanted solutions. That is why you should see people while they are in problems  that they could solve through your solution, analyze how they would react or develop with  your service. What I would do differently would be to work with few targets in a more  personalized way and this will help us to understand them better.

