Music, Humor, Stories

I took my first improv class in Chicago because a guy I met at a meetup about emotions in games became a friend and told me to go see a show at iO Theater. I was captivated by what I saw, and how improvisation led to so much laughter and people paying close attention to whatever that bouncing ball of attention the actors held compelled them to.

I’d gotten my autism diagnosis a few months earlier. I was just starting to realize that my systems for socializing were miscalibrated. I wasn’t picking up on when people were disinterested, or reading other cues. Tone deaf in the social sense.

When I saw improv, I saw all those social instincts being called on in patterns that other improvisers picked up on, took in at full blast, and then acted and reacted on. To the audience it looked like magic, people making things up out of nothing. But improv is less about making things up and more about using your experience to act in the moment. And these performers were using it to tell stories and jokes and evoke the full spectrum of emotions.

I was captivated, and I needed to know what was actually happening.

Taking classes literally spelled it out. The rules, the patterns, the dynamics, and the kind of group mind that teams develop after working with each other long enough. Everything the audience experienced as spontaneous magic had structure underneath it.

Not metaphors. Tools.

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There are three ways to change how someone perceives something. I rank them by power: music, humor, and stories. This ranking comes from 15 years of applied work and it’s backed by converging research across music cognition, humor psychology, and narrative persuasion. But I want to be clear: the unified hierarchy is my practitioner synthesis. Each level is grounded independently in the literature. The combined ranking is how I use them, not a published model.

Music first.

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Music: Bypassing Rational Processing

When I say “music” I don’t mean put a soundtrack on your landing page. I mean the thing that music does to the brain, and how that same mechanism operates in visual design.

Music communicates emotion, momentum, and how to think and feel. And it does all of this by bypassing rational processing entirely. Koelsch showed in 2014 that music modulates subcortical emotion structures (amygdala, nucleus accumbens, hippocampus) rapidly and potentially before conscious evaluation even begins. Your brain responds to musical structure before you’ve decided to respond. The emotional hit lands before the analysis has time to form.

Juslin and Västfjäll (2008) identified six mechanisms for music-evoked emotion, and the majority of them, brainstem reflexes, evaluative conditioning, emotional contagion, bypass conscious processing entirely. Huron mapped this in 2006 as the ITPRA theory: Imagination, Tension, Prediction, Reaction, Appraisal. Of those five stages, only appraisal is fully conscious.

Four-fifths of the response happens before you know you’re responding. It’s not a metaphor for design, it IS design.

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There’s a video I send people when I’m trying to explain what I mean by the gap between technique and feeling. It’s Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, giving a talk about classical music and why most people think they don’t like it.

He starts by mocking a kid stuck in piano lessons, grinding through a Mozart sonata with no progress because the lessons are boring. Then he grabs someone from the audience, pretends they’re that kid, and tells them: “You’re a two-buttock player. You need to be a one-buttock player.” He sits down at the piano and shows the difference. A two-buttock player is planted, rigid, technically correct and emotionally dead. A one-buttock player leans into the music. The technique is invisible because it’s been internalized so deeply that conscious attention is free to focus entirely on how the music makes you feel.

He plays Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, Op. 28, No. 4, the one sometimes called the “Suffocation” prelude. He walks through what Chopin is doing: delaying resolution, using deceptive cadences, sustaining tension longer than your ear expects. At one point a man in the audience sighs audibly when the resolution finally lands, and Zander picks him out. That sigh is the point. The body responded before the mind caught up.

He does this thing where he sings down a scale and stops before the last note. The whole audience fills in the tonic without being asked. Nobody told them to. The pattern created an expectation so strong that completing it felt involuntary. That’s not education. That’s the nervous system responding to musical structure the same way it responds to gravity.

Then he plays the whole prelude and asks the audience to think of someone they’ve lost. Follow the delayed resolution, he says. Feel where Chopin holds the tension and where he finally lets it go. The room goes still.

“Classical music is for everyone,” he says. “They say 3% of the population likes classical music. I say everyone loves classical music. They just haven’t found out about it yet.” And then the line that stuck with me: “As a performer, ask yourself: who am I being, that my listeners’ eyes are not shining? It’s not about wealth and power. It’s about how many shining eyes are around me.”

Unconscious mastery and flow state. That’s what I’m watching in that video. Someone who has internalized decades of technique so completely that none of it is visible in the performance. All you see is the effect. When I sit down and focus these days, that’s what happens with this methodology. The layers, the diagnostics, the pattern library, the perception analysis. It runs automatically. I don’t think about how things are done. I think about how they land.

I’m not bragging. The point is that the goal for any practitioner learning this framework is to internalize it deeply enough that it becomes unconscious. The conscious version is slow and effortful. The unconscious version is responsive, adaptive, and present.

When the technique becomes invisible, the outcome becomes everything.

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Think about what typography rhythm does to a page. The spacing between headlines and body copy. The cadence of short paragraphs followed by a longer one. The visual flow that pulls your eye from hero to proof to CTA without you consciously tracking the movement. The timing of a scroll-triggered animation, whether it feels abrupt or inevitable.

The music of a page. It controls pacing and emotional state the same way a tempo change controls the energy in a room. Fast sections create urgency. Slow sections create gravity. Pauses create anticipation. And the transition between them, the moment where a dense technical section gives way to a single short sentence standing alone, that’s a key change. The reader feels it in their body before they process it consciously.

That scale Zander sang, stopping before the last note. The pattern demands completion. You don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to label it. The brain fills in the resolution because the expectation is so strong that completing it feels inevitable.

A well-designed page works the same way. Each section creates the expectation that naturally resolves in the next. The hero sets up the problem. The proof section confirms the authority. The testimonials provide social validation. And the CTA is the last note of the scale. By the time someone reaches it, clicking feels like completing a thought they were already having.

You don’t convince anyone to click a CTA. You design a sequence where clicking is the resolution of accumulated momentum. The button isn’t persuasion. It’s the final note that was always going to come.

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Humor: Controlling What People Notice

Music controls how people feel. Humor controls what they pay attention to.

Jokes change how people feel about something by pointing out absurdity and giving permission to think without rigidity. The structure of a joke is deceptively simple. The setup creates an expectation. The punch reveals a pattern. And what happens between setup and punch, the tiny gap where the brain is anticipating the resolution, that’s anxiety. Laughter is the anxiety being released.

It works the same way a prediction error works in the broader framework. The brain predicts what’s coming. The punchline either confirms the prediction in a surprising way (“I’d do that!”) or violates it in a way that reframes the setup (“I’d never do that!”). Either way, the surprise generates engagement. The brain leans in because something unexpected happened in a safe context.

In design, this shows up as pattern interrupts, unexpected delight, personality in copy, and moments where the experience subverts expectation in a satisfying way. Not literal jokes. Don’t put puns on your pricing page. Don’t get cute in your terms of service. Anywhere the user needs clarity, give them clarity. But the mechanism of humor, expectation, subversion, release, that’s a design tool. A loading animation that does something unexpected. A 404 page that makes you smile instead of sigh. A piece of copy that zigs when every competitor zags. These aren’t humor in the traditional sense, but they use the same cognitive machinery. Anticipation, surprise, delight.

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In improv, there’s something called the rule of eventually. It’s the technique of starting a word that sounds like it’s going one direction and landing somewhere else. “That’s horri-bly... good!” The audience’s brain hears “horri-” and braces for “horrible.” The anxiety of an insult builds. Then “good” lands and the relief creates a burst of energy. The joke isn’t the content. It’s the trajectory.

This is a micro-version of what great design does. Create an expectation, sustain it long enough for the brain to commit, then deliver something that resolves the tension in a way that’s better than what was predicted. Not confusing. Not random. Better.

Three comedy escalation patterns map directly to UX:

Linear repetition. Same intensity, building familiarity. This is consistent brand messaging. Every page, every touchpoint, same tone, same quality, same feel. The repetition doesn’t escalate but it accumulates. Trust builds through predictability. After the fifth time a brand delivers on its implicit promise, the sixth time feels like a relationship.

Sequential escalation. Building momentum toward a peak. This is the marketing funnel narrative. Each step in the journey is slightly more compelling than the last. The blog post is interesting. The email series goes deeper. The case study is specific and concrete. The discovery call feels inevitable. Each beat builds on the one before, creating a sense of forward motion.

Exponential escalation. Each beat dramatically amplifies the last. This is the hero section into social proof into testimonial into CTA pattern. The hero makes a bold claim. The logos beneath it silently say “these companies trusted that claim.” The testimonial says “and here’s a real person confirming it.” By the time the CTA appears, the accumulated proof has gone from assertion to evidence to human validation, and each layer multiplied the credibility of the one before.

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Stories: Shaping What People Believe

Music shapes how people feel. Humor shapes what they notice. Stories shape what they believe.

Stories are how we simulate experiences without having to live them. Green and Brock demonstrated this in 2000 with their research on narrative transportation, the phenomenon where absorption into a story produces belief changes consistent with the narrative. You read about someone’s experience, you get pulled into it, and when you emerge, your beliefs have shifted toward the story’s perspective. Through simulation, not argument.

Van Laer and colleagues confirmed this across 132 effect sizes in a 2014 meta-analysis. Braddock and Dillard found the same pattern in narrative persuasion studies. The mechanism holds up: stories change beliefs and attitudes. They do it reliably. They’ve been doing it for as long as humans have been communicating.

But most people miss the important part about stories. A story isn’t the events. It’s how someone changes from A to B. Lisa Cron nails this in Wired for Story: the brain is wired to track transformation, not sequence. “I went to the store and bought milk” is a sequence of events. “I was terrified of grocery stores until I realized the produce section was designed to make me feel calm” is a story. The difference is transformation.

This applies directly to how a website should work. The user is the protagonist. They arrive with a problem (point A) and the experience should transform their understanding (point B). The hero section is the inciting incident, the moment something disrupts their autopilot and activates engagement. The content is the rising action, building understanding and trust. The CTA is the climax, the moment of decision. Testimonials are supporting characters who’ve already completed the journey and came back to tell you it was worth it.

That makes the page a transformation arc. The user is the lead. The brand is supporting cast.

Most landing pages get this backwards. They tell the company’s story. Founded in 2003. Trusted by millions. Our mission is to blah blah blah. The company is the protagonist and the user is the audience. It takes a bit of perspicacity to flip that. To put yourself in your audience’s shoes and figure out what their actual mental flow is when they land on your page. What their goals are. What emotions they’re carrying. Most people skip this step because it means thinking about someone who isn’t you. Cast the user as the lead. Everything else is supporting cast.

And here’s where this gets practical. The typical homepage is a hero section with a value proposition and a call to action. “Buy now.” “Learn more.” “Schedule a demo.” All of those are asks. They take from the visitor. What if you gave something instead? What if the first thing someone encountered wasn’t a demand but an acknowledgment of why they’re here? Same intent, shaped for how it’s perceived.

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The Improv Rules That Became Design Tools

All of this came from improv class.

Not all at once. The notebook I kept from 2012 and 2013, a bound hardcover I carried to every class and show, was mostly notes about scene work and character exercises. But the principles I was writing down kept showing up in my design work, and eventually I stopped treating them as separate domains. The improv rules became operational design tools.

These are the ones I use constantly.

“Yes, and.” The foundational rule of improv, and the foundational rule of this methodology. You agree with what exists and add to it. In improv, this means taking whatever your scene partner gives you and building on it. In design, this means accepting the constraints (the client’s brand, the existing platform, the budget, the timeline) and building within them. Don’t throw everything out when something feels wrong. Brick by brick, not castle at a time. In stakeholder conversations, yes-and is how I tell clients they’re correct while disagreeing with them. I accept the validity of their concern (yes, that IS a reasonable worry), then redirect toward a better solution (and here’s how we address it without compromising the design). Nobody likes being told they’re wrong. Everyone likes being told their concern is valid and here’s what we do about it.

The fun thing about this rule, and all these rules, is that knowing them lets you bend them, break them, and get around them. You can agree to disagree. You can yes-and someone right into seeing why their own position doesn’t serve them. The rules aren’t constraints. They’re instruments. Once you know how they work, you can play them however the situation demands.

“Chicken or egg.” Playing with what comes before and what comes after in a sequence. Things need to make temporal and pattern sense. If your hero section talks about results but your proof section hasn’t established credibility yet, the sequence is wrong. The claim lands before the evidence, and the brain rejects it. Reorder the same content and suddenly it flows. The information didn’t change. The sequence did.

“Hold topics and return.” In improv, you introduce something early in a scene, let it breathe, develop other threads, then call back to it when the moment is right. The callback always gets a reaction because the audience has been holding the thread unconsciously. But sometimes you hear something worth returning to and you need to let it go in the moment. Not because it’s unimportant, but because if you’re focused on what you’re going to say next, you’re not listening. Hold it. Let it breathe. Return when it’s right. If the moment doesn’t come, let it go entirely. In design, this is progressive disclosure. Introduce a concept in the hero. Develop it in the body. Call it back at the CTA. The user’s brain has been holding the thread, and the return creates a sense of completion.

“Callbacks.” Some improv forms are built entirely around sourcing from an opening scene. The Harold, which came out of iO Theater, works like this: the ensemble does an opening, then every following scene is inspired by something from that introduction. Three rounds of scenes, each separated by a group interlude, and the whole thing coheres because every beat traces back to the same source material. It sounds formulaic on paper but it feels spontaneous, because the audience recognizes the pattern without being able to name it. This works within a single scene or interaction too. Someone drops something interesting, you let it pass, and when the opportunity arises you bring it back. The chord resolves. It feels satisfying because the pattern was set up and then completed. That’s exactly how a well-designed site should work. The hero introduces the core idea. Every section that follows calls back to it, develops it, reframes it. By the end, the whole experience feels like one coherent thought, not a collection of separate sections.

“(Listen) x (Act + React).” One of my improv teachers gave me this formula for being in the moment. Listen is the prerequisite. Act is what you do. React is the emotional response that drives the action. It makes total sense to me with most people being on autopilot and not being able to lead or control conversations, let alone their thoughts.

In design terms: Listen is what the user perceives in the first moment. Act is what they do in response (click, scroll, leave). React is the unconscious emotional response that determines the action. The formula is a multiplication, not an addition. And that matters enormously, because of what it means when one of the terms is zero.

“If this is true, what else is true?” One insight cascades. If this demographic responds to warmth and faces, what else follows? They probably respond to testimonials with photos. They probably trust video over text. The brand voice should probably be conversational, not clinical. In improv, this is how you build a world from a single detail. In design, it’s how a single user research finding generates an entire design direction.

“It’s not for you, it’s for them.” This is the one I repeat most often. To myself. To clients. To anyone who says “I don’t like that blue.” The design isn’t for you. It’s for the person you’re trying to reach. Yes-and them into it: if we go with the color you prefer, here’s what happens with your target audience. If we go with what the research says, here’s the likely result. Which outcome do you want to choose? Design for the target’s autopilot, not the stakeholder’s comfort.

“What’s familiar to you is novel to others.” This cuts both ways. You’ve looked at your product page 400 times. Your users haven’t. You know every feature by heart. They’re seeing it for the first time. But you can also be nose-deep in something and miss what’s obvious to a fresh pair of eyes. And you can explain things to someone that go completely over their head because you’ve forgotten what it’s like to not have your context. Design for their first encounter, not your hundredth. The curse of knowledge is real and persistent. I’ve watched teams spend weeks debating copy that a user will glance at for half a second. Designing for your own context is the most natural mistake in the world, and it takes active discipline to resist it.

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All of those improv rules, the one-buttock playing, and every theme running through this book operate under the same mechanism: how something is perceived matters more than what it contains. And that perception starts before anyone consciously evaluates anything.

Walk into a restaurant. Before you read the menu, before you talk to anyone, you’ve already decided something. How maintained and clean does it feel? How do the menus and the tables feel when you touch them, sticky, wobbly, or unnoticeable because everything’s fine? The lighting temperature. Whether there are plants. What the soundscape is doing. All of it feeds a single unconscious question: is this experience going to be worth my time and money? Prove me wrong or prove me right. That evaluation happens within a second of arriving and sitting down. Websites work the same way. So do product packages, movies, books, art. Everything you encounter uses this first impression mechanism, and you feel something because of it before you’ve consciously decided to.

Gray, Gray, and Wegner’s research (2007) identified two dimensions of mind perception: Agency (competence, the capacity to act) and Experience (empathy, the capacity to care). We judge entities, whether human or digital, on whether they seem capable and whether they seem like they care.

Think about the last time you met someone new and felt immediate interest. Why them? What was different? Now think about everyone else in that room you didn’t notice at all. Same space, same lighting, same context. Your brain was running the same evaluation on everyone and only flagging the ones that passed.

The red flags work the same way. A person who doesn’t take their appearance seriously signals low agency. A website with broken layouts and pixelated images signals the same thing. Someone who hedges every statement reads the same way a website with vague value propositions reads. A person who buries the point under walls of small talk triggers the same impatience as dense paragraphs and buried CTAs. A person who centers themselves with no empathy for what you need triggers the same rejection as a website that talks endlessly about its own history without addressing the user’s problem.

But perception goes both ways. Simons and Chabris demonstrated this in 1999: participants watching a video of basketball passes completely missed a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of the frame. Their attention was so directed at counting passes that the most obvious thing in the room was invisible to them. Inattentional blindness. You can design for attention, but attention directed at one thing means blindness to another. That’s another example of knowing the rules well enough to bend them. Once you understand how perception works, you can use it to surface what matters, and you can use it to keep what doesn’t serve the experience out of the way.

All of these evaluations operate at the same speed: unconsciously, in the first seconds, before deliberate analysis begins. How seriously a business takes its presentation is a direct indicator of how seriously they’ll take interacting with you.

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Everything Multiplies by Zero

This is where the improv formula becomes the most important insight in the entire methodology.

(Listen) x (Act + React).

It’s a multiplication. If any term is zero, the product is zero.

If Listen equals zero, if the user isn’t attending, if the first impression failed, if the activation point didn’t fire, then it doesn’t matter how good your content is, how compelling your offer is, or how beautiful your design is. Zero times anything is zero. The user is on autopilot. They’re gliding past you. Nothing lands.

This is the listen multiplier. It’s why first impressions aren’t just important. They’re multiplicative. Everything downstream, every piece of copy, every testimonial, every carefully designed CTA, all of it depends on the user being in a state of active attention. And active attention depends on the first impression successfully breaking autopilot.

When I was at the nightclub, I figured this out physically. If my greeting didn’t land, the rest of the interaction was dead. I could say the same words, give the same instructions, apply the same enforcement, but if the person wasn’t listening, none of it registered. They’d argue. They’d push back. They’d make the interaction ten times harder than it needed to be. Not because they were difficult people, but because I’d never activated their attention in the first place.

And what seemed to work at the time was saying “I hope you’re having a good night” instead of asking “how are you doing tonight?” Same thing communicated. One gives something. The other asks for something. The difference in how people responded was immediate and consistent. The greeting that gave something activated listening. The greeting that asked for something activated defense. Try it. Next conversation, next interaction. Give something in your opening instead of asking for something. Watch how the response changes.

In design, the hero section is the greeting. The rest of the page is the conversation that follows. If the greeting fails, the conversation never starts. And if the greeting asks (“Buy now,” “Sign up,” “Learn more”) instead of gives (“Here’s what I think is going on with your problem”), the visitor’s defense activates before attention does. The greeting activated everything. Without it, everything multiplies by zero.

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I learned all of this by accident. A kid with autism who couldn’t make eye contact, taking improv classes in Chicago because a friend from a meetup about emotions in games told me to go see a show at iO. I was captivated. The improv didn’t change my analytical nature. It gave the analysis something to operate on.

Writing notes in a bound notebook about scene work principles that turned out to be design principles. Breaking down comedy sets with friends at Second City on Saturday nights, trying to figure out why some things land and others don’t. Dissecting the frog, my best friends called it. The retro after every class, every show, every performance. What worked. Why it worked. Who it worked on. What the audience was actually responding to versus what the performer thought they were doing. That gap, between intent and reception, between what the performer was trying to do and what the audience actually experienced, that’s the same gap I’d been working with since the nightclub. The perception gap.

Turns out that’s how pages work. How brands work. How products, software, anything interactive or spectation-based works. The audience is always right. Not about what they say they want, but about what they actually respond to. The gap between those two things is where all of this lives.

So figure out when you have that bouncing ball of attention in your hands while you’re on stage, or while a viewer is on your site, or while someone is using your product. That’s when you’ve got eyes glued to you. Let’s actually design for that.

Music sets the emotional state. Humor creates the engagement. Stories provide the transformation. And the whole thing depends on listening, on the first moment of genuine attention, because without it, everything multiplies by zero.

It’s simpler than it sounds. Before you worry about what your page says, figure out what it feels like. Before you optimize the copy, check the rhythm. Before you A/B test the CTA, make sure the user is actually listening when they get there. And before any of that, ask the question that makes everything else possible: for whom?

The improv rule underneath all the other improv rules. Every principle in this chapter, the music, the humor, the stories, the relationship model, the listen multiplier, all of it comes back to the same question. Who is this for, and what are they actually experiencing? Not what you think they should experience. Not what the stakeholder wants them to experience. What they’re actually, physically, unconsciously experiencing in the first second they encounter your design.

Design the music first. Then write the lyrics.

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Next: The Oath, on why engineers of thoughts and emotions need a Hippocratic oath, and the time I turned down Fortune 500 money.