I am a visual learner and practice conveying my ideas visually as well, so pulling out note cards and sticky notes to draw diagrams or put quick notes out is something I am very comfortable with. While it feels and can get chaotic, I see what Jeff mentions about getting a shared understanding and something visual, like notecards or sticky notes, that can be seen together and talked out to flush out questions or ideas is a practice I am thankful to have down. In that vein, I believe storytelling has been a key part of design processes that I have used in the past. While being a visual learner is great and all, I have definitely struggled with understanding visuals that others have produced, so I would naturally elicit further explanation and engage in discussion by bringing my own perceptions in as well. As such, I have grown to share my own understanding in a narrative sense as well in a means to open dialogue and reach a place of shared understanding around a project or idea in the past.
Where I see myself differing from Jeff is my understanding of requirements and their relationship to storytelling – this could be because I have not necessarily considered it this way before or just never learned/was exposed to this way before. While I didn’t consider stories to take the place of requirements, I did feel like they were a great facilitator to get us from start to finish in tackling a requirement. I guess that is somewhat of what Jeff mentions when he refers to stories as a “mechanism,” reading his take on requirements definitely makes me feel like I’ve been approaching it, or at least thinking about it, in another way.
The final idea which wasn’t distant to me at all, but rather reassuring was the notion of building less. During my previous internship, I was introduced to design sprints and Agile, it was all new but very interesting because the team culture wasn’t pressuring on output. Rather, it was outcome oriented and I had the opportunity to work on a long-term project for my 3-month internship where I had time to prototype and iterate and produce a tangible deliverable that is now implemented and being used in the product and not sitting in some intern file or database somewhere where it might be opened in a couple of years!
