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This week we had a guess lecture from Rachel Orr and Pearse O’Neill of Big Motive. Big Motive are a design company. During the lecture they explained what storytelling design is and how can use it to communicate and the importance of using it in interactive design projects.

Defintion: Storytelling is how we communicate with our users.

Orgins: Storytelling has been told from early cave paintings.

The 7 main elements of storytelling from Aristole’s is:

1. Character
2. Plot
3. Dialogue
4. Decor
5. Melody
6. Theme
7. Spectacle

I was curious to find out more. We went into more depth into each one and how they relate to design.

Character: This is the designers equivalant to User Persona’s, Mindsets and empathy Maps. This is where you carry out user research to try cater to their needs.

Plot: This is the designers equivalent to storyboarding and user journerys. During this stage you think about the path the users may take while using this product. From here you can make changes. Example of a company that creates a good user journey is “AirBnb.” Storyboarding is good in animated and digital design.

Dialogue: This is where the designer should consider the tone of voice or language used. Think about accessibility of your users and make it’s clear for them to understand.

Decor: This is the designers equivalent to visual identity. People have emotional connections with specific brands and visuals. Therefore if a product looks good and is realiable they will have better user experience.

Melody: Designer designs a product which flows well. When creating products we must make sure it has a postive emotion. The goal is to ensure the products play a postive role and leaves a lastly effect.

Projects Big motive worked on are:

• CCS Service Storyboard
• ICO
• Patterns
• Resilco

There two major projects they recently worked on are:

Project 1: Aflo which stands for Air Flow. This is app which reminds users to breath. The aim is they want the keep the users relaxed.

Project 2: Our Place in space by Oliver Jeffers. They worked with Oliver Jeffers to tell the story of us and them. Users can use to app to walk in trails across Derry, Belfast, North Down and Cambridge. This is an educational App to take user’s on the Journey through our Solar system. This allows users to discover 3D Assets and AR APP.

Reflection

I thought this lecture from Rachel Orr and Pearse O’Neill was really interesting. I thought this was good to learn about the different elements of storytelling . I enjoyed viewing the projects of Big Motive and give my good inspriation. I thought by listening to this today it can help me enchance my storytelling ability through design.

Lasting thoughts to consider:

• Think of the story
• Create empathy maps and user personas
• Carry our user research
• Design visual identity/Branding

Amplifying Data

Data gives us opportunties to create stories which will engage the users. Data is very important part of the design process. It’s essential to try and include data in our designs. Many websites and social media platforms collect data on their users when they frist sign up or use the site. Data is used everywhere. Data can be used to advertise products based on interests.

Migrating figues, referenda, election campigans and pays scales. e.g the national minmuim wages are examples were data is used.

A good example of a visual data is the recent covid 19 which keeps on track the daily cases.

Kyle says we could consider using data to present the Apollo project.

Sanctions Tracker by Enigma

This website tracks the USA Sanctions from 1994-2019. This allows you to visualise the sanctions on a country and theme. It tracker is used to present data clearly to the user. This site uses dots and colours which is a good way of presenting the data.

Practice what your preach

Another Two Examples were:

Lightyear

Business simulation.com

Using colour, layout, shapes are excellent ways of presenting data.

Trailblazers or Inspriations

David McCandless– A designer and data- journalist who works for local newspaper. He is great at visualising data in an interesting way. He does alot of charts/diagrams for the newspaper.

Manuel Lima- A designer and aunthor of 3 best selling book. He trains creative designers and companys on creating digital user experiences.

Giorgia Lupi– An information Designer. who works with data and storytelling were creates innovated designs in a unique way. She created a hand drawn visual data poster about the Pandemic and her life at home before and after lockdown. This was posted in the New York Times.

Brendan Dawes- A uk based Artist and designer. His works involves data, machine learning and alogrithms to create interactive experiences, data visulaisations and posters for users both online and print.

Article: The Moon Miracle by the Telepgraph (“50 reasons why the Mission should never have happened”) This article shows data visually. They clearly wanted to put the data of the moon landing into everyday context.

Article by Guardian “Lies, damn lies and Steve Jobs Keynotes”

Apple clearly make the slice of the pie appear bigger which is a good sales techique.

User Interview– The stat of user research in 2022

Book: A practical guide to design with data.

Six Key principles of Chart Design:

1. Be Honest
2. Lend a helping hand
3. Delight users
4. give clarity of focus
5. embrace scale
6. provide structure

Tools and Libraries can be used to create charts. A good website to hep create a chart which can be used in webflow is chart.js.

The most important things to remember:

• Keep data truthful
• incorrupt data in your design
• visualise data
• bring these together

This week:

• Carry out research.
• Work on website on webflow
• make changes to my prototype

Reflection

Overall I enjoyed the lecture. The examples shown were really interesting and I would like to look further at different designers and how they respresent data clearly in their work. I’ll gone to try include the use some of the point I learned and work I was shown to visualise data in my website which will interest my users in clear and understandable way.

Liz Danzico is a part designer, educator, editor from New York is the chairperson of the MFA in interaction design at the school of visual Arts. She is also a good speaker and done a ted talk recently on “the Power of the pause”. I thought it was very interesting.

Summary

Many people may consider a pause as awkward. As Ux designer pauses are very important part of design, we value whitespace, as they can be used to fill a gap. For example, this can be in the form of animations or visual effects to make it visually appealing to the user. By creating an effect can make the transition smooth and less awkward.

In the right moment Pause’s can create an impact such as in film, it can be used effectively to create suspense, making the easy feel uneasy waiting for the jump.

Famous speakers such as Edison and underhill used pauses efficiently when giving their speeches.  We can learn so much from pauses. They can be very powerful.

I read an article called “Tomorrow’s Narrative.”

The tomorrow’s narrative is a technique commonly used when brainstorming ideas for a specific project. When using this technique, it’s important to think outside the box and be as creative and innovative as possible in writing.

Tomorrow’s narrative is based on the idea of writing fictional articles that replicate the moment in which a product or service will be launched in the market. Consider how this service will be introduced to potential users. What values and features will be highlighted? Who is going to talk about it?

Writing and sharing articles with the project team during the ideation phase can help you explore different possibilities.

This article here can be replaced with a video or any everything to help communicate the project in the moment to the potential users.

Reflection

I feel this is an interesting technique I can use when during the early stages of my project. I may consider using this.

I was recommended to read an article called “How Apple’s Aspirational Storytelling Created Decades of Growth?” which Written in 2019 by Matt Clement.

This article explained how Apple used their brand storytelling succesfully throughout the decades.

Apple’s campaign “Think Different”. This came about in late-90’s. Steve Jobs helped Apple to restore it’s past by seeing what made them successful.

Apple uses their brand story successfully to advertise their products.

Importance of Brand Storytelling

Research Shows that “Humans Thrive on storytelling.” Marketers and brands should focus on their storytelling ability. Not many have used this with as little as 10 % of brands are actively engaging their audiences through storytelling content.

Storytelling helps make the audience engaged with specific products through building an emotional connection with them. When it comes to storytelling Apple and its team have successfully understood the concept.

Throughout the years apple have engagement their audience through the impact of powerful storytelling as far back as their early commercials in 1984 to their Think Different campaign today.

Reflection

Apple famously use the technique of storytelling to engage with their audience and playing on their emotions. They make their products both innovated and interesting. Users can have a better connection between themselves and mobile devices. Their approach has successfully paid off. I learned that by telling a brand story it can be important and go along way to order for the design to have an impact of your audience.

From this article I understand how important Apple value their customers and what makes them successful.

Today’s class was through zoom. We were joined today by David Henderson of DHD company. He give us a brief lecture on the Art of Storytelling. I thought he spoke well and there were a lot points to learn from.

From his own personal experience and explained about the use of Music and Animations which can contribute to creating an effective and magical story that emotionally attaches the users. Brand stories, social media platforms have a good way of capturing the attention of the audience by making the story memorable. Users can be drawn into using your product effectively.

““90% of our decisions are made on an emotional basis. The other 10% are our rational minds used to justify those decisions.”

I thought this statement was very interesting and true.

How storytelling affects the Brain?

This image above explains different ways in which storytelling affects the brain. This is important to know as it can impact our thinking behind our design.

Storytelling examples

Case Study 1: Brand identify

Case Study 2: Film. Example: Slient Valley Story, Landscapes, View, etc.

Case Study 3: UX/UL Desiign. Example: Halfstack online 3- Javascripts

Designer- Lucy Cook

We then had an opportunity at the end of class to ask David any questions we had on design, storytelling or anything. I thought it was interesting what we had to say in response to the questions.

For this week Kyle asked us to update our Blogs which I will continue to work on.

Reflection

I think once you understand the users and have a structure to your story this can improve your design. By creating an emotional connection it will make the story memorable. If you can have an effective impact on the audience, they therefore will likely access your application or website in the future.

These empathy map were designed to get a better understanding of my users in what they think, does, sees and feels when using an app. By doing this I can tailor my product to suit the users needs. This App will benefit the patients and carers in order to help them provide better health care.

I now know what the user may be feeling when using a product before using my app and how I can ease their worries. I will make sure their process is easy and user friendly.

I hope by doing this I can make a app that reaches everyone’s needs.

PDF Empathy Maps:

Lorraine- Empathy Map

May- Empathy map

These empathy map were designed to get a better understanding what each user says, thinks, does, sees and thinks when using a website. By doing this I can tailor my product to suit the users needs. This website will very important to teach them about the Apollo Mission.

I now know what the user may be feeling when using a product before using my website and how I can ease their worries. I will make sure their process is easy and user friendly.

I hope by doing this I can make a website for both teachers and pupils to use efficently.

PDF Of empathy maps

David

Mrs McCann Empathy Map

Storyboards

On Friday during class, we were asked to complete a workshop on storyboarding. Kyle give us between 30 to 40 minutes in class to draw the storyboard process of our website. We could be creative as possible and use images and text. I looked at my prototype from the previous week, to help me create my storyboard which showed the potential steps users will take when going through my website.

When doing this, we had to ask ourselves the following 4 questions:

1. Does it make sense?
2. What could be improved?
3. What isn’t needed?
4. What’s missing?

What is storyboarding?

A Storyboard is a visual respresentation of what your project will like look on completion. Weather it be a film, animation, book, or website they all follow a simple storyboard layout. Storyboarding normally happens at they very start of any project during the preproduction stage. This is normally done with a pencil and piece of paper. A storyboard is mainly images of each screen on your website and possibly a short description explaining each one. When designing anything it’s important to make sketches.

My storyboard

I started to redrew my prototype images as this is what my site will roughly look like on screen.

I begun sketching out the opening screen which will transition to the moon expanding. Next will be the rocket and mission, followed by the 3 astronauts and the story of the Apollo 11.

I think trying to add animations to my website will create a visual impact on my audience.

I thought it would be better doing it all in black and white before adding colour.

At the moment this is what it looks like but it subjected to change.

Reflection 

Overall, I felt this was helpful excercise. I demostrated the steps the users would take to get from one section to another. By doing this it allows for better interaction between user and website. It also opened my eyes to more things I could improve on my website. I may not be the best drawer but I tried to show as clear as possible the different screens the user may potentially follow on my website.

Today I gathered 3 different user persona’s from the information they told me. I asked them to tell me little about them selfs, their interests, influences, goals, motivations, needs/wants and pain points/furstations. It’s important this information so I can cater my website to meet theirs needs/expections.

1. P2 Teacher

User persona- P2 Teacher

Mrs McCann wants a website for primary 2 pupils which shows images and videos of the moon landing and neil armstrong.

2. David- P7 Pupil

David P7

David wants a bright, coloruful website with alot of images, very little text which is easy to understand and has relevant information.

3. John-P4

John P4

John wants a website which he can navigate around with no issues and tells him about neil armstrong and apollo 11 mission. Possibly big clear images and content and plenty of colour.

Reflection

I feel by doing this research will help me understand the needs and goals of my users so I can try create a website that would be presentable but also meeting expectations so this would be enjoyable site for them to use.