Enterprise Storytelling Sessions
Summary
A highlight of the conference every year, the Storytelling Sessions are a set of five-minute talks from enterprise professionals who share their challenges, opinions, failures and successes. Here are the storytellers for Enterprise Experience 2019: - Stephanie Albright, Experience Designer, a story about cleaning bathrooms - Spencer Icasiano, Product Designer II / UX Researcher, Care.com, a story about transitions - Malia Nagle, Director, UX Research, PayPal, a story about two apologies - Laura Nash, Senior UX Designer, Boston Consulting Group, a story about personas who think for themselves - Jenn Noinaj, UX Designer, U.S. Digital Service, a story about stereotypes - Ilona Posner, UX Consultant, a story about keyholes - Malini Rao, Senior Manager, UX, Kronos Inc., a story about a fight
Key Insights
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Storytelling became widespread in conferences in the last five years to counter audience distraction and increase engagement.
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Audience attention varies drastically during the day; storytelling aims to combat mid-day and end-of-day disengagement.
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The concept of 'keyholes' illustrates how limited perspectives obscure important organizational context and cause unexpected conflicts.
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Professional expertise, like UX skills, doesn’t always apply in personal or emotional domains such as parenting, which require empathy and time.
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Moving abroad triggers emotional phases—excitement, frustration, acceptance, and adjustment—that teach resilience and growth.
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Organizational resistance can impede UX progress, but persistence, collaboration, and design thinking can bridge gaps between user needs and business goals.
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Apologizing openly and vulnerably can transform difficult relationships into productive partnerships in product teams.
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Personas can become more effective by adopting qualities from role-playing character sheets: accountability, conflict, temporary states, and evolution.
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Bringing authentic, even quirky personal interests into work can foster memorable and genuine connections.
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Queerness as a concept symbolizes embracing change and rejecting binary thinking, a principle that strengthens personal identity and innovation in UX.
Notable Quotes
"The more specific a story gets, the more universal the themes are felt by everybody."
"Outside of our keyholes lies information we’re completely oblivious to that can come to haunt us."
"No matter how good I am at my job, it doesn’t make me a good parent. What makes a good parent is time, love, compassion, and a sense of humor."
"Pushing my boundaries and getting out of my comfort zone helped me learn what I was capable of."
"Make an uncredible experience credible. That was the directive from organizational resistance to UX."
"In a fight, there’s a winner and a loser. But for a product to be successful, it has to work both for users and business."
"It’s never too late to apologize. And don’t be afraid to say, I’m sorry."
"Personas need to push back. Conflict makes for better stories and better products."
"When I let my outside interest in, I suddenly had really memorable conversations with people."
"Queerness is change. The power to shape that change is within every one of us."
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