In this class, we learnt about story telling and using narrative to bring people across a design.

Storytelling

As designers, we should not just be problem solvers, but instead we should engage with our users in a way that tells a story, and narrate them through a process. From a young age we read stories, and have stories read to us. As humans we love stories and we love to tell our past experiences more interesting and engaging. Most narrations use a 3-act structure, which can be seen below in Freytags Pyramid. We can see this structure in most movies, novels, and plays.

Hero’s Journey

With most stories, the hero of the story will go on a journey that can be displayed as an arc, and this shows how they start off in the ordinary world, go through the unknown world, and end up back in the ordinary world. In UX design, the user is the hero, and we take them through a journey in which their problem is solved and a task is completed. We use UX methods and use empathy to understand what they are struggling with, and what issues they are coming across. From there we can design a solution that will help them, while throughout we use storytelling methods to evoke the 3-act structure.

7 Basic Plot Points

Each narrative as one or several of these 7 basic plot points. Apps also use these plot points to describe and articulate their product, instead of just describing the functionality of it. This is because it emotionally engages the user more, and people remember things better if they were emotionally engaged. An example of an app that uses one of these is LinkedIn. LinkedIn uses the quest, where they walk us through and aid us in the journey of finding a job. The way LinkedIn is advertised and marketed is to help users find the job that they will love.

What Have I Learnt?

Todays lecture on narration and storytelling was very interesting. I didn’t realise quite how much storytelling there is that goes into brands, apps, and most of the products that we use on a day-to-day basis. This class has definitely been an eye opener for me, and from now on I will need to think of how I can use storytelling to make my designs more engaging.