Storyline

Customer Insight That Actually Matters

Product Designer · UX Designer

Storyline helps organizations find the right problems before they invest in the wrong ones, grounding strategy in customer voice and frameworks like Narrative Architecture. That method already worked in the room. I designed the web and mobile workspace that took the production out of PowerPoint and kept the story usable after the walkthrough.

Website
Storyline mobile app screens for Voice of the Student: login, quotes, insights, and affinity chapters

Problem

The analog product was a facilitated walkthrough. Researchers recorded customer interviews in a podcast-style format, pulled quotes from the recording, tagged and categorized each one in PowerPoint, printed the deck, and cut the cards by hand. Clients then walked the wall together: chapters, headings, Facts and Feelings, pinned in columns.

The method produced real alignment, but it only worked while people were standing in front of the board. After the session there was no way to search a quote, share a finding, or come back to the story. Every engagement ended with the same question: where does this go now? Any update meant reprinting and recutting the whole set.

This is the product clients actually used: a live walkthrough of quote cards grouped into a narrative map. Discovery happened standing in front of the wall. The cards were the deliverable, which is why the insight could not leave the room with them, and why a photograph of the board was the closest thing to a takeaway.

Process

I sat with the researchers whose job was to turn interviews into that wall, and learned the pipeline end to end. Programs such as Voice of the Student, for partners like College for America and Southern New Hampshire University, already had a working method: chapters and headings, Facts and Feelings, participant context, and a story they would take back to leadership. They did not want a generic research tracker. They wanted the wall, minus the PowerPoint, print, and cut cycle, and a way to keep using the storyline after the client left.

I treated the live boards as the spec rather than a mood board. The columns, Feeling and Fact tags, and chapter structure already existed in the room. The design question was whether that same walk could survive on a screen after people left, instead of inventing a new research tool they would have to relearn.

Researchers recorded customer interviews in a podcast-style format, then identified quotes by listening back through the recording. Each quote was tagged and categorized in PowerPoint, laid out as its own slide with the participant portrait, demographic attributes, and a highlighted pull quote, then printed and cut by hand. This stack is that production step: hours of layout work before a single card reached the board, and any change meant doing it again.
A facilitated readout of the analog board, with early mobile storyboards beside it. The physical wall is the source of truth: same chapter columns, same Facts and Feelings grouping, same walkthrough sequence. The phone frames were a test of whether clients could continue that walk after the room cleared, instead of leaving with a photo of the whiteboard.

Solution

The platform encodes the analog method. Capture a quote once, with the participant and a Feeling or Fact tag, and the card formats itself. I structured the information architecture around how teams already moved from raw voice to structured themes: Diagram, Quotes, Participants, Demographics, and Insights.

Working surfaces stay dense and editorial, built for researchers curating large interview sets. Quote and persona surfaces flip the register: the pull quote and portrait are the hero, so a single voice can stand up in a leadership readout the way a printed card did on the table. Same data, two registers.

This replaces the PowerPoint step. A quote is captured with the participant, tagged Feeling or Fact, and stored in one list instead of a slide deck. Search, print, and row-level actions sit on the same surface, so production is no longer a separate formatting job. As interview sets grow, the library stays scannable instead of becoming another stack of slides to recut.
This is the card they used to lay out by hand. The product generates the portrait, demographic attributes, Feeling or Fact tags, pull quote, and print layout from the record, so formatting is no longer a craft project. Print still exists for the room, but the artifact is born from the data instead of from a slide that has to be rebuilt whenever the story changes.
This is the whiteboard. Chapters and headings hold Facts and Feelings the way cards were grouped on the wall, except the structure stays editable after the walkthrough. Moving a quote is no longer reprinting a column. The diagram is the same mental model researchers already used in the room, now as a living workspace instead of a one-day installation.
This is how a client continues the walkthrough after they leave. Sign-in, project pick, chapter navigation, quote cards, and insights follow the same mental model as the wall and the web app. The storyline can be searched, shared, and returned to when priorities shift, so discovery is not trapped in the room.

Outcomes

Card production moved into the product. Diagram structure, quote libraries, and persona storytelling stay connected, so customer voice is an operational layer teams can return to, not a one-off deck. Clients leave with a living storyline they can search, print, and share, not a photograph of a whiteboard.

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