Story telling ¹⁾ is a paperless sketching method by using mind play sketches to help discover new design ideas and use cases. The main concept is the development of a story around the main interface/device. Therefore Bill Buxton recommends: „These things are far too important to take seriously.“ With that quote he means it is the purpose of stories to (verbal) play around with thoughts, that are triggered during conversations with others. Be aware, that a bad story is time consuming and painful for the listener and a good story is memorable and will be retold. Therefore a good story is a form of „viral marketing“ for design ideas.

"A [good] story is worth a thousand pictures." (Gershon & Page 2001)

The most famous example for good story telling are fairy tales. Fairy tales are triggering pictures of human experience from their imagination, child hood memories or common sense. The following example is taken from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. ²⁾

Once upon a time . . . 
there was a lovely little princess named Snow White 
who was forced to dress in rags and do menial work around the castle 
by her wicked stepmother, the Queen. 

To develop a good storyline ³⁾, the storyline should give answers to the following questions:

• Where does the interaction takes place?
• What is the problem?
• What is the task that people are trying to do?
• Which people are present and what are their actions?
• What kind of objects or digital devices do they use?
• What is the possible input and output for each digital system?
• How do the actions of people and/or devices solve the problem?

The storyline also should follow the basic and well established form of a plot. In the beginning the characters, the place and the main problem should be established. Then a arc of suspense should be created and lead to a climax (suspense maximum) as solution of the established problem. This follows a conclusion, which emphasizes that the story is at the end.

The picture shows the structure of a storyline suitable for a five framed narrative storyboard.

Example (suitable to the sketching storyboards example):

A group is discussing something in a bar 
and does not know if some fact is right or not.
But everybody has a smartphone in the pocket.
Therefore they start googling the question, 
each of them with their own smartphone.
Then they are comparing the results and 
discussing the which answer could be right.

Role playing is a specialization of story telling. The first option are designers, that playing the role of the user (e.g. tape the own fingers to experience arthritis ⁴⁾ ). The other possibility is to actually play the role of the device. The difference to the wizard of oz technique is that the user never should believe, that the system is real. It's more the way around. The designer should experience what it feels to be the device, the user is not involved. Both options are giving the developer a deeper better understanding of the user and the purpose of the device. As an example: To develop a home entertainment system that developers and designers should feel at home during the development.

"Interaction is about roles and their changing relationships." (Bill Buxton)