The storyteller's superpower

Claude is sleeping, and I take this moment to write an article about stories. LLMs as well, are great storytellers and even better storytelling companions. This article is a personal take on how people who can tell stories have unleashed superpowers in the LLM era.

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My son sits on the floor, next to his bed, comfortably on a pillow he repurposes for that exact moment, every day. The evening is calm now, after the dinner storm, it’s warm like these few days before the humid and hot Korean summer starts. We are in June, the sky is getting enveloped by a dark blue coat, and 8 PM just passed.

He is steady, calmly waiting for what is to come. In a day, this is a rare picture. A 4-year-old isn’t meant to stand still (you will agree if you have or had kids of this age, you can trust me if you don’t).

I realize once more how much he has grown up. I do this often. The usual next thought I have is that these moments will be cherished later, and so I should take a mental picture of this scene.

He can now reach the higher shelves with pride. And so just in front of him are books. These are books he has already read, probably a few dozen times before. And the reason he is here, on his pillow, calmly waiting, with these 2 books perfectly disposed in front of him, is, as you could guess by now, to read them.

And so the story starts, and no matter how tired I am from the day, work, and dinner prep, I always enjoy these moments.

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Just like my kid, I enjoyed stories from a very young age. My mother was an elementary school teacher when I was my son’s age, and she, like me, also enjoyed reading stories to my sister and me.

Since a very young age, I liked stories, then I liked reading some, and then later on, when older, I loved to write my own. Never to the point that I wanted to share these with others, but I did love the time writing, whether this was for a class homework, or something more personal.

This particular trait of mine, the skill I was passively developing, never really helped me in my studies, and as the education curriculum intensified over the years, I stopped writing stories, focusing on fitting the education mold.

Even today, I am not sure what exactly the relation was between the two, but this period of my life was the least happy I have ever been. I felt stuck, and I just followed the flow imposed by the French education system.

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Then came the baccalaureate and the escape. I joined l’Ecole de Design de Nantes Atlantique, a Design school 1200km away from my home.

Despite the difficulties, I took this challenge as I could foresee an escape. And an escape it was!

The first year was basically about breaking down the mold we were stuck in. It was hard; it was pushing a very introverted young boy to take immense risks, almost every week. But it felt good. I was pushed to tell my stories through many forms and share them out there for others to see and react to them.

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As I learned Design, I also learned the importance of telling stories. I opted for the interaction design Master’s, and as I embarked on a 5-year educational journey, I immensely developed my capacity to tell stories, sometimes verbally, but often through other means.

Design can be described in many ways, but to me, it can be reduced to the capacity to convey stories. These stories can be about a product that doesn’t exist yet, or be more focused on a feature that isn’t supported yet. We used videos, decks, and prototypes, and even developed an MVP of the product to convey our stories with as many details as possible.

I became good at it. Because I was driven by this goal of conveying my ideas clearly, I learned the tools and the methods quickly. And because these were often never enough, I started very early to build my own techniques and tools. I also learned early to code, to better frame and deliver the product intent, where it lives.

I often use this metaphor: if you design a chair in a studio, in foam, you are likely to miss out important things. If you build the chair where it belongs, in the materials it will be made of, then you are likely to get closer to the results from the production line, and in a real usage situation.

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But until recently, this was heavy, and thus, despite what I knew was right to do, I directed design to deliver on Figma. This was more scalable, and Figma kept developing features, making the shape of these products closer and closer to the actual product. But it also never breached the gap either.

Designers across the industry heavily relied on Figma to tell stories via mockups, protos, and slides. And it worked well, as we were working in product lines where design was passed to PM and devs.

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Today, LLMs change all that. It changes the way we tell stories, and in my view, in the most familiar, natural possible ways. It changes the way we deliver our stories, in the most straightforward possible way: in the product directly.

6 months ago, I was still pushing pixels to convey product or feature stories. Today I tell this product or feature story.

I always loved working on the tiny details, the small interaction that makes a product feel natural, or fun, depending on the circumstance. But to convey these, it often required an extra effort, and often these never passed the effort vs impact review.

Now, I can describe all these small details and have them integrated right inside the product. If a customer suggestion surfaces and is judged a real improvement, design can directly implement it, without the need for review, as the effort is reduced to nearly 0.

To bring back my previous metaphor, it’s like if a customer was pointing out an uncomfortable part of the chair they are sitting in, and this comment triggers a short discussion quickly followed by the designer directly implementing the request as the customer is still seated (minus the awkwardness of that metaphor).

From a design perspective, even if my ideas worked well in my head or in a prototype, they could never be autonomously tested on the live product. It created issues, surfaced edge cases, etc.

I can test the product update in real conditions, I can identify these edge cases well in advance, and I can address them autonomously. So it clearly improves a lot our product quality and velocity.

Imagine that you sit on that chair, and while you do, you can fix all the small problems surfacing, see live if it improves or deteriorates the experience. And as you sit on it, if you start challenging the material’s stability or solidity, you will know it right away, as soon as your butt hits the floor!

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And so the second book closes, and he asks for one more. Every night, the same negotiation to stretch the moment a bit longer. I say no, it’s late.

I look at him on his pillow and it hits me that we are doing the same thing, him and me. He listens to stories, I tell them. It just took me most of my life to figure out how to tell mine.

The tool, even if for now interfaced through a terminal, has never felt more natural to use. Between the stories I have in mind and these stories tested on the product, the gap has narrowed down to only a few prompts.

So if you ask me what makes a good designer today, my answer is simple: a good story, and the guts to tell it.

Claude is still asleep. I have a few minutes left. What a time to be alive, what a time to tell stories!

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P.S. Full disclosure: I did wake Claude in the end, to read this over before posting.