Todays class was a guest lecture from Big Motive which is a design and innovative company that create digital products and services that improve peoples lives.

What is Storytelling in Design?

How we communicate with our audience to get insight into users, build empathy and reach them emotionally. Designers create personas to represent target users and add conflict to stories that reflect their user journeys and problems. Crafting stories, designers can better understand what users want from a solution.

Stories are how we communicate with others and often use them to relay information as it makes everything more interesting and easy to understand.

What makes a great story?

Aristotle’s 7 elements of storytelling

1.Plot

-Storyboarding and user journeys.

Use storyboarding and user journeys to think about your personas and get all your ideas on one page. It allows us as designers to understand the overall project and think about potential issues and how we would fix it.

Tell the Right Plot: Checklist of Questions to Ask Yourself

• What plot do you want to tell? What’s your story—from a career perspective?
• Do your UX case studies tell the same story about yourself, or do they contradict one another? If they contradict one another, then angle them so they don’t or delete the case studies which send mixed signals.
• Which past projects should you choose to tell the plot you want your recruiters to see?

2.Character

– Personas, mindsets, and empathy maps.

Write the Right Characters: Checklist of Questions to Ask Yourself

• What role do you play in the design process? In other words, are you a UX generalist who covers the entire design process, or a specialist such as a UI designer?
• Do you play the same role in all your UX case studies? If not, which case studies can you tweak or remove so that you play a consistent role?
• How does your “character” interact and work with other “characters”? Is there conflict or harmony?
• Who else should you include in your case study? Who are the important co-contributors (or even leaders) you should acknowledge?

3.Dialogue

-Language and tone of voice

what will your design say to users? how will your design say it?

The language and tone of voice you use throughout your designs depends on the intended audience. It is important to make sure your designs feel relevant to them and language is a great way to do that.

 

4.Decor

-Visual Identity

Your design’s appearance is just as important as functionality. People have emotional connections with branding and visual identities. They tend to gravitate towards something that they think looks good and relevant to them.

 

5.Melody

creating a positive emotional response for your users. The goal is to ensure that your product plays a positive role in the story.