We’ve been using narrative to solve complex UX and service design problems for over a decade, for clients ranging from small startups to Fortune 100 companies. Through that experience, we’ve come to embrace storytelling as a uniquely powerful and underutilized tool for shaping design strategy, especially with multi-disciplinary creative teams.

By putting narrative at the center of the design process, we use it as a hub for creating a variety of assets, from video prototypes to wireframes and user stories. We’ve also trained numerous design teams and student cohorts in this process, through Narrative Prototyping workshops.

Each of the projects below had real impact on subsequent innovations. Signet, for example, helped shift high-level discussions around how postage is purchased, and piqued the interest of private postal service providers. The girl-centered development workshops provided a template for building trust between NGOs and government agencies. And so on.

The challenge

The editors at WIRED challenged a team at Ziba to redesign the most mundane, overlooked activity we could think of. So we picked personal shipping. Starting with the observation that most shipping tasks are simply information management, we asked what it would look like if all that data were made digital, and how that could transform the experience. A mixed team of visual, industrial, and interaction designers collaborated under a central guiding narrative to show how it might work.

The solution

The Signet concept replaces stamps, addresses and trips to the post office with a single, beautiful laser-etched seal and app. This enables a service that moves the entire informational part of shipping online, making a package as easy to send as a text message. Featured in WIRED, Fast Company and MSNBC.

The challenge

International development efforts that educate and empower girls consistently give better outcomes than those that don’t—the numbers back it up. But to convince NGOs and government agencies in developing countries, our client—an international humanitarian organization—needed more than just data. Starting with donor and stakeholder interviews, we developed narratives to pinpoint their varied goals and perceptions, and plotted a path for bringing them into alignment.

The solution

A “workshop in a box”, that the organization can use wherever potential partners are. It contains everything needed to run a one- to two-day event that gets the right people discussing and collaborating. Besides building trust, the workshops also give participants the opportunity to learn firsthand about the value of girls’ empowerment, from program veterans who’ve benefited from it directly.

The challenge

“Digital Whiteboard.” It sounds shiny and futuristic, but would it actually work in a real classroom? That’s the question our client, a Fortune 100 tech company, needed to answer for a wide range of internal stakeholders and potential partners. They had the technology, and early prototypes, but not much in the way of use cases. We responded with an intensive storytelling project, combining live action video, animation, and dozens of prototype interactions.

The solution

A series of two- to five-minute video prototypes, showing how a real teacher might use this technology to teach math and science, and how students could benefit from its unique interactive learning patterns. Supplementary stories also explained in vivid terms the future potential of the technology, and why it’s worth long-term investment.