(Source: Boxesandarrows.com) User experience designer and screenwriter Cindy Chastain presents an in-depth storytelling method that she claims can "help help us build a better story about our product, unify teams, inspire design concepts and get us closer to evoking the pleasure, emotion and meaning of the experience we intend to deliver to users through the products and services we design." No small task. Great article. Excerpt below:
There’s an old adage among screenwriters that when a writer can sum up a story in a sentence or less, he has discovered what’s important about the story. He’ll know what the story is about and therefore have a strong sense of theme. And in knowing the theme, he’ll have a compass to use in the process of “designing” the damn thing (i.e. what to keep, what to lose, what actually happens at the end). The story will be all the better for it because it all hangs together with a central idea that will give it greater impact and meaning.
Now wouldn’t it be nice if we had something like that for user experience design?
This article is about a method drawn from storytelling that can help us build a better story about our product, unify teams, inspire design concepts and get us closer to evoking the pleasure, emotion and meaning of the experience we intend to deliver to users through the products and services we design.
So, What’s the Problem Anyway?
As designers, we spend a lot of time examining design solutions against an array of information–business goals, user needs, design principles, best practices, the results of usability tests–but less often (if at all) against a definition of the core experience we hope to deliver. If you’re not sure what I mean, think about this:
We had a big problem at our company. The problem was that the websites we were designing and building were coming together like potluck meals made by a loose confederation of team members and stakeholders who were all working out their dishes independently, and on their own terms.
