This week’s lecture focused on the role of graphic design in storytelling in the world of print and film, we looked at several examples of both mediums and how potentially overlooked aspects can play a huge part in telling the story. We looked at the importance of pauses in storytelling and how a pause can increase tension or anticipation. We looked at the art of set design and how this can immerse viewers in a world and add a sense of reality to the world of the film (real world or fictional). Lastly, we looked at how stories are structured either through a classic three-act structure, the hero's journey or dramaturgy. It is these rules of storytelling I want to dive deeper into this week and see how they might be applied to my designs.
Sometimes it can be a challenge to link the creative and artistic process of storytelling with the logical and research-based process of UX design, it is something I have been working on gaining a better understanding of throughout this semester.
I decided to read this article (https://uxdesign.cc/6-storytelling-principles-to-improve-your-ux-737f0fc34261) by Dan Nessler to try and strengthen my understanding of the link and power of storytelling in UX.
The reason to interweave stories within a UX is to appeal to the third of Don Norman’s three levels of design, the reflective level. This level is where we remember and share our experiences, good or bad and a strong story can help our experience to be memorable. Stories are up to 22 times more memorable than straight facts or bullet points, I’m sure we can all remember a schoolteacher who had a rhyme or story to help us remember some formula or rule. It is a simple fact that human memory creates a story and people will find it easier to remember.
Of course, creating stories is an obvious part of certain aspects of the design process, user personas, empathy maps and journey maps are all tools used in the design process that rely on stories for their purpose, a user persona without a background story simply doesn’t work, it’s the story that contains the power of the persona and makes them such a useful design tool.
However, I want to concentrate on weaving a story into my experiences and what ways I can look to achieve this, the first is quite simple providing a reason as to why you have created the product in the first place, why have you chosen to tackle that particular issue, in commercial terms this story would be covered under the brand, and it would be told by the tone of voice, the colour palette, even the brand values. For me these change from project to project, however each project I do always has a reason as to why I chose to do it or why I chose to tackle it in the way I did. It's these stories that I need to communicate in my final products.
Another common theme in stories is that they often have a hero, sometimes this may not be obvious, but generally, it would be rare to have a story which does not have a hero (and a villain). Who is the hero in a user experience? Is it our product solving a user's need? Or is it us the designer showing our skills in creating this product? Unfortunately for our ego, it is neither in fact for a successful design we need to make our user the hero with our product their faithful sidekick in defeating the problem they are having, just like Jarvis in Iron Man.
Good stories also contain conflict and what is that conflict in UX, the conflict between good (our user) and evil (their problem). This is a story we can only tell if we have researched to find our user’s pain points then we can design a product that is ready to take down evil or remind our users they have a dentist’s appointment.
Stories are powerful and as much as designing a UX can sometimes feel far from storytelling in truth if we frame the problem in the right way and challenge ourselves to build a story users connect with, we can enhance and improve the experience.
There is no doubt about the power of stories, in helping us remember or just bringing us joy and bringing this quality to my UX designs will improve the designs and make for better user experiences for everyone that uses them.