Stop Naming Everything a Story
Designers overuse 'story' as a label, leading teams to waste time adding narratives to work that doesn't need it, affecting productivity and focus.
By Ray with my favorite human, Benjamin Scott. Design Brief,
Somewhere along the way, "storyteller" became the title every designer wanted on a slide. The problem is that the word now hides more than it reveals. A chart gets called a story. A slide deck gets called a narrative. And the team spends hours dressing up data that had no point to make in the first place. The fix is simple to say and hard to do: use story structure when you have a real through-line, and skip it when you do not.
The deep cut
- A story needs a point before it needs a shape. Stefan Sagmeister warns that "storyteller" is a label designers slap on work that carries no narrative at all.
- Decoration is not storytelling. Jeff Cardello is blunt that data storytelling is not just a fancy term for nicer-looking reports.
- Pick one story shape and keep it tight. Userlane offers hero's journey, before-and-after, and customer voice as ready tools.
The word means less every time you use it
Sagmeister pushed back on the whole idea that designers are storytellers by default. His point lands: when the term covers everything, it covers nothing. A logo is not a story. A color palette is not a story. Calling them one lets you skip the harder question of what you are actually trying to say.
This matters for a leader because the word shapes behavior. When your team believes every piece of work must be a story, they add narrative framing to things that do not need it. They waste time building an arc around a feature that just needs a clear screen. Reserve the word for work that has a beginning, a tension, and a payoff. Everything else is just good design.
Data stories work only when the numbers have something to say
The best data storytelling does not drown you in figures. Matt McGregor points to CSIS's "Murky Waters" piece, which tracks China's shipbuilding by using size and color instead of a wall of numbers. The Arab News piece on the Jews of Lebanon used the simplest figure it had, raw community size, to carry a hard human story. Less data, more point.
The trap is treating data storytelling as a way to make a boring report look busy. Cardello is direct that it is not just nicer-looking reports. If the data has no insight behind it, no visualization will save it. Before your team opens a charting tool, make them say the one thing the data proves. If they cannot, there is no story to tell yet.
The through-line is the whole job
McGregor notes that the barriers to data storytelling have dropped fast. More data, better access, friendlier tools, and no-code platforms mean anyone can publish an interactive chart now. That is good news and a risk. When the tools are easy, the temptation is to make something because you can, not because it earns its place.
So tie the work to a real reason. McGregor lists plain business cases: branding, content that holds attention, work that scales without a dev team. Spotify Wrapped works because it turns your own listening into a point about you. Impossible Foods built a slider that shows what changes when you eat less meat, without shaming anyone. Each has one claim and builds everything around it. If your team cannot name the claim, stop.
Use the known story shapes, do not reinvent them
When you do have a real story, you do not need to invent the structure. Userlane lays out three shapes that already work: the hero's journey, before-and-after, and customer voice. Pick the one that fits the launch and commit to it. Before-and-after is strongest when your product changes a clear state. Customer voice is strongest when the user can say it better than your marketing can.
Before writing, study what already landed. Thomas Buckland rounds up six product stories worth copying and a few worth avoiding, which gives your team a benchmark instead of a blank page. Userlane's own advice is to keep the story tight. One shape, one point, no extra arcs bolted on. The goal is not more story. It is the right amount, in service of a point that was there before you reached for the word.
Three questions for your team
- Before we build this, what is the one point the data or the feature proves? If nobody can say it in a sentence, we are not ready to tell a story.
- Which story shape fits this launch, hero's journey, before-and-after, or customer voice, and where can we use the customer's own words instead of ours?
- Looking at Buckland's strong and weak examples, which patterns match our voice, and which ones are we about to repeat by accident?
