Persuasive Storytelling Rule 1: Adapt Your Vocabulary
Top tasks analysis, UX design process, user research methods, heuristic evaluation, stakeholder alignment
“You have a brilliant UX solution. But your stakeholders don’t get it. Your team pushes back. Your client looks confused.
The problem isn’t your idea – it’s your story. Storytelling is how we share ideas and experiences, and in UX, it’s the skill that separates designs that ship from designs that die.
In this article, I’ll share six rules for persuasive storytelling – starting with the most important one: adapting your vocabulary to match your audience.”
Storytelling for UX: 6 Rules to Persuade Stakeholders and Teams
Storytelling is how we share ideas and experiences. We use this skill to help sell ideas and help our teams and stakeholders understand our users.
Here are six rules for persuasive storytelling.
Rule #1: Adapt Your Vocabulary to Match Your Audience
Your audience can be anyone – multidisciplinary team members, stakeholders, clients, or third‑party vendors. Our goal as storytellers is to have our stories resonate. But that’s difficult when we don’t speak their language.
When you’re working on an unfamiliar project:
Talk to clients or stakeholders – ask about their daily work, pain points, and goals.
Participate in usability studies – absorb everything you can about how users and clients talk.
Write down any words, phrases, or acronyms you’re not sure about. Look them up.
Now you’ll know more about this industry or project’s terms. You’ll feel more confident going into future discussions with clients and users. When you’re more confident about your knowledge of their work, you can feel better about approaching them with new ideas to solve their problems.
Why this builds trust
Aligning vocabulary is crucial for telling a story that builds trust among clients and stakeholders.
When they hear you using words they’re familiar with, they know you’ve done your research to understand what they do and the problems they encounter daily. And you’ll have an easier time building buy‑in for your ideas.
“Download our ‘UX Stakeholder Presentation Template’ – a fill‑in‑the‑blanks framework for telling persuasive stories to executives.”