notes

reflections and thoughts

Storytelling and understanding is said to be one of the most important parts of interaction design, surviving in a collaborative world involves understanding intent. Storytelling is said to give us this. This is highly disputed, some saying that it is a small component, only required for customer interactions or displaying scenarios. This is something Cindy Chastain explored in her talk, discussing storytelling's value and place in practice.

Storytelling often gets categorised into the main key words used to explain, but do we know what they mean. We use stories when describing users, scenarios, products, brands, storyboarding - we use storytelling as communication and framework tools.

We also can look at the users story as they use a product, from their perspective, narrative of use or personal story telling - how the product fits into their lives. As designers, we need to provide cues that will deepen this narrative in all aspects. How do we build cues into our products?

Storytelling increases engagement, as designers we always strive for this cognitively and emotionally - offering many emotions such as happiness, sadness when they end, or satisfaction. Storytelling can give products a meaningful purpose which is something we need to consider while creating products that walk a user through our story. One great emotion to display when story telling is surprise, and we can design the layout of our stories to build anticipation and offer this.

As a young designer, if I had a better understanding of crafting stories, I would have an understanding of how to craft deeper and better engagement in products we create, such as the upcoming Sherlock publication in which engagement will be key.

Theory [construction and deconstruction of a narrative]

All stories are (at the beginning) modes of representation through 3 main areas, objects (person) / medium (computer screen) / manner (stylistics to tell story).

There are parallels between dramatic story telling and interaction design,

• dramatic storytelling is whole actions with multiple agents who possess qualities both of the character and the plot.
  • stories have a shape, start simple - end simple - complexity builds to climax in the centre.
  • six elements of drama, plot (events) - character (agents) - thoughts (ideas/theme) - diction (language) - song (pattern) - spectacle (the visual)

How does this relate to ixd? Users are our characters, going through a series of actions which take them through events. User is an agent in a collaborative story, or a task flow. Every decision our user makes, decides what happens next - has a knock on effect. Our user makes decisions and our systems respond, the user makes another decision and so on until they reach the end point or conclusion. This is a really interesting way to look at a flow through a product, a product having a start middle and end point and how the users decisions decide how they move through our product. It isn't as linear as we cannot cover every path but there are similarities between characters building to an end point and users building to a conclusion.

We also can look at narrative flow as a rough layout for our products, such as the introduction (what is the product), explanation/background (what the product is for/purpose), action (user action), after effects/events (the outcome of the action, which may lead to more), outcome (result of action/actions), ending (required result/end of product).