TELL ME ANOTHER ONE

So what of our caveman friend? If he was facing a predator, did he run or did he hide? He knew the last guy who tried to hide from this predator was killed, but then, some who ran were eaten. Hide or run, which was safer? It was obvious. To decide what to do he simply created a mental model of future events based on past experience and then varied elements within that model to generate possible outcomes. In other words, he told himself some stories. The story that ended without him getting killed was the one he acted out, and with luck, that saved his storytelling genes for future generations.
Stories are our way of anticipating the future, near term and long. We take predictive internal storytelling for granted because we are always doing it. The Storyteller inside us loves to spin yarns, and it takes very little information to seed a story. This impulse of ours is a necessary part of living. If we couldn’t tell ourselves stories about the next few seconds, hours or years, we would be unable to plan before acting, we would be paralyzed in the now. Sometimes we get our stories wrong, but when we do, our mistakes can help us tell better stories in the future – if we’re smart.

The down side for developers is that when looking at a new application, users tend to be quite conservative when choosing alternative outcomes, and I don’t blame them -- many hours of their lives could be at stake. If a new user encounters initial difficulty with a new application, they are likely to believe the story that ends "...and I spent the rest of my life trying to make the damn thing work." Few users, unless they have no choice, go with the ending "...and after a short but painful learning experience, I loved the application and was productive ever after." But here is where you can make good use of The Storyteller: If you provide users with multiple options and multiple ways to perform tasks, you are providing a multiplicity of stories, some with happy endings. You can see this at work in applications that offer the user alternative methods and degrees of power for performing the same tasks -- a multiplicity of happy endings.