This week I was asked to watch a talk by Cindy Chastain called “Thinking Like a storyteller and write a reflection on it.
Reflection
When telling a story, it’s important to keep your audience engaged and interested. When designing having a story with a clear narrative that interests the audience and make the users emotionally and cognitive attached.
In this video Cindy Chastain talks about different narrative techniques which can help us become better designers. She’s talks about her own personal experiences and what she has discovered.
Communication tools such as User Stories, Personas, scenarios, storyboards, comics, framework, brand stories and product stories can help us tell stories. As well as this another type of story is the user’s narrative. This will help user’s process information. How as designers can we provide cues that will Deepen that narrative connection. This is something I need to consider when designing my product for my end user to interact with,
Storytelling and interaction design have one big thing common which is engagement whether it be cognitive or emotional to allow products to have a purpose. Stories often provide us with meaning, they engage the user, they can surprise us as well giving us a sense of satisfaction at the end.
So by telling a story, the product we create will be more successful.
The ultimate question we need to consider is: What can we learn from the discipline of storytelling that will help us design for more meaningful and engaging product.
Narrative Techniques
Slow Disclosure which leads to a surprise.
“If we, as designers, had a better understanding of how stories are crafted, we would have a better understanding of how to craft deeper kinds of engagement”
Story’s can broken down into 3 parts:
- Objects
- Medium
- Manner
Two Manners are the Narrative/Telling and the Dramatic/Showing.
A typical story normally follows a structure. Starting from beginning, including a middle and most importantly an ending.
four relevant techniques of dramatic narration are:
- communicate potential
- express causality
- reinforce probability
- facilitate completion
Things to consider:
- Be clear in your approach to storytelling
- focus on the audience you are designing for
- making it as engaging as possible
- Understand the craft of storytelling
- Consider how you develop narrative craft for design.
I thought this talk was very interesting and give me a better understanding of our topic for the unit which is narrative and storytelling. I feel there is alot of interesting points I could take away from this. Creating a story in interaction design is very important as a designer to help engage users. I will ensure I try to make a clear narrative and tell the story of product in order to get my point across.
