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Interaction Design is Story Telling - 26 July 2006
by Windy Jiang
Read this article in Chinese (English version proofread by Nam Loc)
When I was young, someone told me this old Chinese story, “Long long ago, there was a mountain, in the mountain, there was a temple, in the temple, there was an old monk, he was telling story to a little monk, he said: long long ago, there was a mountain…”
It is a simple story, and not one that is very colorful and intriguing, but it left an everlasting impression on me, an impression I can not forget. What do you think of this story?
Lets look at another story:
Vivi is a young and vivacious girl who loves shopping for beautiful clothes. She wants to introduce beautiful clothes to other young boys and girls, so she built an e-shop on Rayli-Fashion (Author’s note: Rayli-fashion is the biggest magazine on fashionable dress for women in China) style clothes. It was very hard work at the beginning with very little orders, but Vivi never gave up, she insisted on providing an excellent customer service, selling a large range of frequently updated lines of beautiful and fashionable clothes to shoppers on a timely manner. Through her hard work, she now has an established consumer base with each costumer bringing with them new businesses. Vivi’s business has improved and as a result, she is now much busier than ever before.
Every day in the morning, Vivi will check the order record from the bank. After that, she needs to work out which paid order belongs to which customer, and then to prepare the package for mailing. If there is something that is not very clear (because there are only 3 fields in the payment record; paying time, paying account number, and paid amount), she will contact the customers via mobile/email/QQ/MSN. This requires a lot of time for her to check orders everyday and to contacting customers if needed to, and it is becoming more difficult as more and more orders come in. To save time (and money), and to provide a better service, Vivi posted a message on the website asking customers to pay several cents more to differentiate their orders and inform her as soon as they have completed the order.
Have you heard this kind of stories before? It is happening all around us, we always hear similar stories from e-shop owners in China.
Language is a unique communication system and fundamental to the survival of human beings. Story telling is a very old method to describe the facts, to spread knowledge, to share our experiences and feelings. A good story can be accepted and stored by our brain instantly, and leaving a long term effect on us. At the same time, it is also easy for people to understand and accept new facts and imagine similar scenarios as they happen in their own lives. In the following paragraph, let’s examine why Interaction Design is story telling.
A story is made up of two components, scenes and a protagonist. A protagonist, such as, the old monk, Vivi, a young man buying books on the web, a blogger, Snow White etc. The stories are organized around these people and there are many scenes for the protagonist to develop her/his image, to reveal the great things happening to her/him, to create unique experiences from other stories.
There are two important interaction design techniques, Personas and Scenarios. They are very well fitted in the two features of a story, so it is to say, we are using the Persona (protagonist) and Scenario (scene) to tell the stories about how the user is interacting with our product/system/application. As an Interaction Designer, what we need to do is to create these wonderful stories for design.
Having said that, shall we all change our careers and become a writer?
No, I’m not saying that you need to be a professional writer as Interaction Design is not solely about writing a story. What we should do is to use stories to describe how the users can interact with products, and then to design towards it. As oppose to just creating a purely fictional, creative story. The biggest difference between a writer and an interaction designer is that, when a writer is writing a story, he/she can just use their imagination without limits, apply artistic processing, and apply all kinds of literary techniques. An Interaction designer can not do that, they are telling the stories of real users and product/systems. These users will eventually live in the reality of using the products/system in the same way as described in the stories. Therefore these stories need to be realistic to reflex reality, instead of just being an expression of a writer’s imagination.
Interaction Design is still a strict discipline. Before designing work commences, we should conduct user research to accumulate knowledge and understanding of human behaviors. From this it will form the basis where we can write realistic stories to help us to design.
If the stories are from real life/work/user research, they will make the users feel very close to them, they will be released and think about real questions, their true needs and expectations. Furthermore, the stories can be easily understood by the users and stakeholders who may know only a little about design techniques, and so they can offer better feed back according to the stories (even if there is no a physical product or even prototypes). They can also easily establish a mutual understanding with the development team members, and help them think from the prospective of the user, e.g. “Vivi wants…”, They will remember the user in the developing process and won’t forget them at all.
One more thing, interaction design stories should be happy and optimistic stories, The stories should describe a much better and smoother scenario over a problem or a difficult situations. In this way, the story will evoke the passion from both the users and development team to work out solutions to design great product/system/applications.
Lets look at our new story now:
Vivi is a young and vivacious girl who loves shopping for beautiful clothes. She wants to introduce beautiful clothes to other young boys and girls, so she built an e-shop on Rayli-Fashion style clothes. It was very hard work at the beginning with very little orders, but Vivi never gave up, she insisted on providing an excellent customer service, selling a large range of frequently updated lines of beautiful and fashionable clothes to shoppers on a timely manner. Through her hard work, she now has an established consumer base with each costumer bringing with them new businesses. Vivi’s business has improved and as a result, she is now much busier than ever before.
Every day in the morning, Vivi will check the order record from the bank. From the payment records, she can see the customer’s user name, their contact information, and a short message on their order. The supplementary information provided by the bank, made it easier and quicker for Vivi to identify the completed customer orders and to prepare it for mailing. If there is something that is not very clear, she will contact the customer via mobile/email/QQ/MSN. However, it is obvious that the time spent on order checking and contacting customers is significantly reduced, and so Vivi can now spend more time on searching for new attractive clothing’s for sale. Vivi believes the new service provided by the bank is really helpful, as now there is a lot more online business. By providing a little more information has really made all our lives easier.
As a reader, just think to yourself: If interaction design is just about telling stories, then where do these “true” stories come from? I leave this question for you to think about.
Windy has been heavily involved in the Interaction Design Community for more than two years as a pioneer in HCI application field in China, she has built and published the Website of ‘De Dream’ (http://www.dedream.com), the first professional Interaction Design technical website in China.
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Shuan Lo
Hi Windy. Thanks for the nice and simple article.
I agree with you that our current interaction design techniques (personas and usage scenarios) are like story-telling. These techniques help us to analyze and synthesize how the users will interact with the design artifact; help us to think about the design and think in greater detail.
Sometimes I conceptualize it this way: We are writing a Chinese swordfighting novel. So we need to describe our hero (the persona), the fighting scene (the usage scenario), and the hero’s personal weapon (the design artifact). Maybe I’m being too childish here. ;)
In human factors terms, the operator, environment/task, and tool.