This week we had a guest lecture from Big Motive on the topic of “Storytelling in Design” which I found really helpful as it connected the dots between UX design and storytelling. They first of all asked us to brainstorm ideas on “what is storytelling in design” something which I would define as creating a narrative which engages users and evokes their emotions. I also learned that a storytelling narrative should have a star, middle and end and that it helps users to gain insight and have a more meaningful and memorable experience.
Rachel and Laura taught us about Aristotle's 7 elements of storytelling and how we can apply the first 5 elements of it to our storytelling in UX design. This was really interesting as despite doing this module I had never thought that deeply about how much storytelling can really impact UX design and how much of a prominent role it plays. The elements are:
They finished the presentation by showing us some of their work in which they used storyboarding to create. Each product or service was very different from one another as one was an app which was to help assist pain management and it visually told the story of pain while another was a service design which used storytelling to get a story and point across easily. Finally they told us about their project “Our Place In Space”, a 3D sculpture trail they created alongside Oliver Jeffers. I was actually able to experience this trail myself along the Coastal Path so it was really interesting to hear about how they used storytelling to tell the story of them and us through an interactive app and a scaled down solar system trail.
<aside> 💭 My main takeaway from this was how vital storytelling is in UX design no matter if you are creating a product or a service and no matter what the context of the design is. It really helps us to further understand users, their problems and ways in which we can strive to solve it. However it also highlighted the point that storytelling can tell us if there is a need or want for a product as there is no point in creating something that is only not needed or something that only you want as you have no thought about the user. Afterwards I was also able to show off my project work so far for both modules which was really helpful as they were able to give me pointers and ideas on what to change and Laura really helped me determine a style for the website portion of my project. It was also really good just to have a general chat as we could talk about the move into industry as well as how what we learn at university is really what is used in the industry too.
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