AI Storytelling: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design (Usability Heuristic 8)

Summary: A storybook that metaphorically explains minimalist design through pictures and a story. Storytelling is more memorable and persuasive than presenting facts directly.

Since the Dawn of Man, storytelling has been a primary way to communicate and persuade. Stories are more memorable than recitations of facts and numbers. (That’s one of the many reasons I recommend relying more on qualitative user research than on quantitative methods.)

The human brain evolved over millions of years to process narrative information as a survival mechanism. Our ancestors who could remember and share stories about where predators lurked, which plants were poisonous, or how to navigate to water sources had a distinct evolutionary advantage. This created neural pathways optimized for narrative processing rather than abstract data handling. Some evolutionary scientists even believe that pre-language hominins like Homo erectus had mimetic capabilities and could process narrative information without words, just like we can do today in media forms from silent movies to caption-less cartoons.

Some evolutionary scientists believe that Homo erectus could communicate narratives, even though that species likely didn’t have language. Just like this wordless cartoon can tell us a small story about a day in the life of our remote ancestors. (GPT Image-1)

When we encounter information wrapped in a story structure, our brains automatically engage multiple regions simultaneously: the language processing areas, the sensory cortex that simulates experiences, and the emotional centers that attach significance to events. This multi-system activation creates what psychologists call “elaborative encoding,” forming richer memory traces than isolated facts ever could. A statistic about workplace accidents might slip from memory within hours, but a vivid story about a specific worker’s injury will persist for years.

Stories exploit our brain’s fundamental architecture by providing context, causality, and emotional anchoring that raw data lacks. Research consistently demonstrates that people recall much more information when it’s delivered via narrative rather than as disconnected facts. (In one study, only 27% of the persuasive impact of statistical data persisted after a day, whereas 67% of the persuasive impact of stories survived the day.) This isn’t a design flaw of our wetware brains; it’s an optimization for real-world decision-making where understanding relationships, motivations, and consequences matters more than memorizing discrete data points.

The narrative format also triggers mental transportation (as opposed to real, physical transportation), where listeners mentally simulate being inside the story, activating mirror neurons and creating quasi-personal experiences. This psychological immersion explains why case studies and user scenarios prove infinitely more persuasive in design discussions than spreadsheets full of user metrics. Our brains simply aren’t wired to find meaning in abstract numbers; they’re wired to extract patterns from experiences, even vicarious ones.

Narrative stories are highly memorable due to human evolution. (GPT Image-1)

When you force users to process raw facts and numbers, you are ignoring this reality and imposing a severe cognitive load. This is inefficient communication, forcing the user to do the heavy lifting of synthesis and interpretation, which increases error rates and task abandonment.

Stories offer superior usability for the human mind. A recitation of facts has a high interaction cost; the user must expend valuable mental resources to build their own mental model and make the data meaningful. A story, conversely, provides a pre-structured framework, embedding the data within a relatable, sequential context. This drastically reduces processing effort and significantly increases retention. We remember scenarios, not specifications. This cognitive efficiency is also why narrative is the primary driver of persuasion. Users are not persuaded by data they immediately forget; they are persuaded by outcomes they can easily internalize and mentally simulate.

Google recently released a new feature called Gemini Storybook that’s optimized for creating stories in one specific format: a 10-page illustrated mini-book. Here’s the online version of one I created. (You can see the screenshots of this book below, so the only reason to click the link is to experience the page-turning feature and the model’s read-aloud capability that comes in handy if using it with small kids.)

The main target use case for Google’s new Storybook product is probably family storytelling, as visualized in the left panel. (Try it with your kids! Assign agency to the child and have him or her come up with a story idea, and see it brought to life with Storybook.) I also think Storybook has great potential for professional business use, as visualized in the right panel. (GPT Image-1)

Heuristic 8: The Storybook Version

I used Gemini Storybook to create a story about usability heuristic 8, Aesthetic and Minimalist Design. (See the full list of my 10 usability heuristics if you’re rusty on the concept of usability heuristics.)

Coincidentally, this week I also created a non-standard explanation of another of my heuristics: Flexibility and Efficiency of Use: Jakob Nielsen's Usability Heuristic 7 as a music video (YouTube, 4 min.)

The story itself is a pretty good way of thinking about the minimalist design heuristic. The illustrations are also good. They do suffer from the lack of character consistency that’s typical of current AI image generation: the young designer’s hair changes a bit, and the “Jakob” character has grown a full head of hair on page 3. Still, Gemini Storybook has more persistent character design than what you get from most current AI.

The above pages about Usability Heuristic 8 were created with Gemini Storybook.

Storytelling needs no technology beyond our imagination (left panel), but AI storytellers can also utilize multimedia capabilities, such as the emerging real-time creation of navigable world models, for even more immersive stories (right panel). (GPT Image-1)

Another example of using storytelling in a new medium to explain the usability heuristics is my video Error Prevention Explained by Vikings (about Usability Heuristic 5; YouTube, 2 min.) Even though this video was created as a series of distinct clips in Veo3, I arranged them to tell a narrative arc of a Viking raid on England. As you watch, your mind automatically connects the disparate episodes even though they feature different characters due to the current lack of persistent characters in Veo 3. (Though as a friend noted, “most Vikings look pretty much the same anyway.”)

On a Viking raid, much could be lost in case of errors. (GPT Image-1)