How to Tell the User’s Story

In How to Tell the User’s Story Christopher Butler makes a simple but astute point about technologists who want to focus solely on software:

Without user knowledge, we tend toward analytical approaches to information architecture planning and user interface design — structures that make sense to us and the way we think about the information we want to convey, but that don’t always make sense to our audience.

He also provides a solid solution:

To balance out that analytic thinking, we need to introduce narratives to our planning procedures. Specifically, we need to be thinking through every design decision based upon a need > experience > outcome narrative.
What does the user need?
What kind of experience does our solution create?
Does our solution work?