"Accepting Star Wars at Work" by Henning Brau

Red cascades of data flicker rapidly through my right eye. They move with me as I turn my head, telling me where to go; I now have to turn right. I mechanically follow the instructions, getting closer to my destination.

My mission is clear: find artifact A2000 4356 7832, pick it up, bring it back home. As easy as that. Yet I have never been in this sector before; I must rely on the information that appears in my eye.

I listen to the metallic pounding of my heavy boots on the floor, echoing and fading away. My hand wanders over the touch pad in the beltmounted device at my side and I change the intensity of the rays.

Distant machines stamp out their never-changing beat. The hall I enter lies bathed in dim light.

Although the walls numb the senses with their icy greyness, I am not cold; it is warm in here, maybe 27° Celsius. A bead of sweat runs down my forehead into my eye. I feel a sudden sting, but I do not dare to wipe it away, afraid to lose sight of the thin red lines.

A man comes round the corner and stops in his tracks as he sees me. His mouth opens in disbelief. He certainly wasn’t expecting me—the cyborg—to appear here. ...

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(Image: Peter Taylor)

"One Thing, Many Paths" by David St. John

When I graduated from college the only computer programs I knew how to use were Word, Internet Explorer, and the popular CD-ROM based PC game called Myst. This was still the height of the dot-com boom, so while I had limited technical experience, my college education and a healthy local economy lead to plenty of work as a contractor for several startups in the Seattle area. Most of the assignments were not glamorous (data entry, quality assurance and categorizing products), however these experiences opened my eyes to the way of life in several technology companies that were still grappling with how to turn a profit using this new thing called the Internet.

It was during this early period that I participated in the launch of a new category of products for a large and successful e-commerce company in the Seattle area. All of the employees I met were extremely accomplished. Several people had companies that were acquired during the Internet’s growth spurt, while several others abandoned previous careers to join the tide of new companies flowing onto the Internet. It seemed that no matter your background, there was a place for you in this new economy.

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"Moving into Non-Linear Iteration" by Dave Malouf

... and Managing People Who Haven’t Arrived There Yet

Have you ever noticed that all stories are really sub-stories of a bigger story? There is no true beginning and there is no true end. Really great stories actually begin to develop their back-story in fuller depth as you move forward through the part of the tale that the teller wants you to focus on. As I begin to write this story, I’m struck by this same problem. Where exactly does the introduction start and where does the conclusion end? Through the iterations of this very paragraph I have started and restarted a host of times. At some point, you just have to throw the proverbial dart at the screen and let it fly from there: Design.

That is my introduction to how I learned about iteration as a primary concept and tool for design. Of course, even the simplest story is strewn with nuances and sub-themes and hopefully a few of those will rise to the top as well.

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More than 100.000 downloads

The other day we crossed the 100.000 downloads benchmark. Isn't that amazing? A big thank you goes out to all the authors who contributed to this project. Another big thank you goes out to the entire team that worked on this project for almost a year - back in 2010. And of course: a big thank you to you, dear readers. Thanks for downloading this free eBook.

Hey, why not repost parts of the actual UX Storytellers foreward? Here we go:

I contacted many potential authors, and over the next 10 months, we—Jutta, Stephen and I—set about collecting and reading stories. Reading and re-reading them. And re-reading them again. Sending suggestions back to the authors who were so generous to submit a story for this book. And so on. Finally, we ended up with 42 extraordinary authors, all people I admire and look up to. Take a look at their lives, their books, their blogs, and their achievements. Jaw-dropping, isn’t it? You can’ t help but be astonished and inspired. Not only are they leading experts in UX and related fields with strange acronyms, but they are also the most wonderful people. Please take the time to read and truly listen to their stories in this book—or in person, if you happen to bump into them at one of the many conferences that take place around the world nowadays. Dear authors: I salute you.

Moreover, a special thank you must be said to all the non-English speaking authors who had the additional challenge of writing in English, but kept at it and delivered really marvellous stories. We have carefully polished their stories while retaining the local flavour—always wary of reducing them to bland uniformity.

Why are there so few female authors in this book? Well, I can assure you I honestly tried to contact as many female authors as I could think of (ok, there was a bottleneck right there). I am all the more grateful for the contributions of Andrea Rosenbusch (Switzerland), Colleen Jones (USA), Deborah Mayhew (USA), Marianne Sweeny (USA), Olga Revilla (Spain) and Sylvie Daumal (France).

"Almost Dead on Arrival: a Tale of Police, Danger, and UX Development" by Aaron Marcus

How We Got Started: It is not often that the lawyer for a prospective client, that is heavily armed, calls us in for a new project. Starting off with lawyers and police, we were already on alert. Still, we anticipated that this job would be different, challenging, and perhaps dangerous. It happened about five years ago.

The lawyer (for the policemen’s union) explained that the police department of a major Silicon Valley city was rolling out a new mobile information display system, but they were running into problems. The police officers who had to try the new system found it problematic, sometimes refusing to even use it, because they said it might endanger their lives. What a customer or user reaction! As we learned more and more about the context, the application suite, the software developer, the threads of politics, software development and organizational behavior became more and more intertwined. We felt like we were detectives ourselves, trying to understand how things had come to this situation; that the police officer’s union (which hired us) was about to sue the software developer, the police management, and the city for creating a fiasco. The newspapers were also beginning to sniff around. ...

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"Wine, Women and Song" by James Kalbach

Hello, Deutschland: “Wine, women and song.” That’s the short answer I tell people when asked how an American ended up in Germany. Either that or “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll.” Both jokes, of course. But it usually brings about a chuckle.

Actually, there were a lot of converging reasons for my coming to Germany and staying there. The most important was meeting my lovely wife. There was also the excitement of living in Europe: Prague, Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris—all a short flight or train ride away. And the European way of life simply appealed to me, particularly their orientation towards time. A saying I once heard sums it up well: in the U.S. you live to work; in Europe you work to live. Who wouldn’t want 30 days of vacation? Compared to the measly 5-10 vacation days you start with in the States, a month and half of paid time off is luxurious.

Work-wise, job prospects kept me in Germany as well. If doors open up, you sometimes have to take the opportunity. So the whole moving-to- Germany thing wasn’t planned at all: it just kind of happened. But in moving to Germany, I also found a career that matched my academic background, experience and skills: information architecture, usability, and, later, user experience.

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"UX the Long Way Round" by Ken Beatson

User Experience Design (UX) is a much younger profession than its practitioners. We’ve almost all migrated here from other professional “lands”, bringing our own unique histories and perspectives. I came here from fairly nearby places; I was a database developer, web developer, designer and web project manager. Others came from slightly further away: product designers, graphic designers, librarians, marketers and many other interesting starting points. So here’s the story of my journey to UX, together with some of the things I picked up along the way.

Love at First Sight: I was instantly addicted to the web. Love at first sight. It was late 1996, about halfway through second semester, just after morning tea on a Saturday. I could still smell the “new” in the University of Tasmania’s shiny, modern North West Study Centre, which felt like a brave new world of academic prosperity brought to the declining small industrial city of Burnie, Tasmania, Australia. Tasmania, for those of you who are American, is that little triangle-shaped island at the bottom of the Australian continent. It’s not that I am picking on Americans or taking sides with those unkind people who regard you as geographically challenged. I just appreciate that you’re surrounded by a heck of a lot more of your own country than other nationalities and so it’s harder to get out as often. ...

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"A Journey from Machine Design to Software Design"by Sameer Chavan

How It Began: I come from Sangli, a small town in central India, famous for sugar manufacturing and a large temple of Lord Ganesha. My family and I lived in sugar factory campus housing until I completed my engineering degree. I used to sit on the back of big trucks loaded with sugar cane, chewing on the sweet canes. My father worked as a chief engineer for, then, Asia’s largest sugar factory for 30 years, until his retirement. I cannot imagine working for the same company for three decades. I certainly can’t.

In 1991, mechanical engineering was the favorite course at every engineering college in India, and it was the subject I chose for my 4-year bachelor degree, too. A mechanical engineer himself, my father always urged me to improve my skills in managing big machines and shop floor workers. During my internship at the Cummins Company, I was fascinated by the unbelievably huge diesel engines manufactured for ships and mining haul trucks.

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"From Consultancy to Teaching" by Olga Revilla

I had been invited to teach User Centred Design (UCD) at a university. Being a 32-year-old User Experience (UX) consultant with a work experience of ten years, should be a great background for transmitting my know-how to 19-year-old Design students.

Suddenly, I realized that most of my knowledge in the field has come from non-university methods: jobs, blogs, Internet references, books, etc.; all not very scientific stuff for teaching at the university. So I started to research what was taught in other places about UCD and found that very little was done at universities. (Or public information was very difficult to find.) Then I turned to the places where I had learned and noticed that this discipline (I still don’t consider it a ‘science’) is mostly done by non-scientific professionals of design, librarianship, engineering and hundreds of other different backgrounds and profiles that had all given their “two cents worth” based on their experience.

So here are my “two cents worth” based on my experience, what I learned and what I teach on my courses.

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"Building Arcs with Wall-Hung Urinals" by Jan Jursa

I’m no longer quite sure whether it was the summer of ‘99 or 2000, but I still remember exactly that we were sitting in an old pub in Frankfurt. I was just in the final throes of my biology studies, my thesis was almost finished and I had been accepted to do doctoral research in Toronto.

I was virtually on my way over, and my buddies and I had come together to celebrate my departure. A friend gave me a map of Toronto that evening; I still have it, but I never made it to Toronto. Instead, I moved to Berlin and became an information architect.

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