Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Use of Narrative in Interactive Design

by Nancy Broden and  Marisa Gallagher and  Jonathan Woytek on 2004/10/28 | [10 Comments]

Can narrative play a role in creating meaningful experiences online—not just for users but for design teams as well? Beyond the conceptual, there are practical applications of narrative in web design that many of us already use in our practice. Even large, business-focused projects can be approached within a holistic narrative framework, benefiting both the usability and design process.

Introduction

As long-time consultants working in interactive agencies, we have experienced the cyclical corporate urge to “define our process.” By and large, this means submitting to a waterfall approach that can create artificial boundaries between the disciplines. This makes it easier for a project manager to build a schedule, but what is the impact on the creative chemistry of the project team?

Consider what is lost by “widgetifying” the creative process (or what the creative process should be). We take shortcuts, reusing our thinking, and work from one project to another without examining the problem as critically as we should. We start on the slippery slope from doing our best work to doing work that is just good enough. We stop investing our work with ourselves.

Don’t get us wrong, there is value (mental as well as financial) in not reinventing the wheel with every project. There will, and should always be, a tension between order and chaos, between standardization and creativity.

So how do we invest creativity in our process? How do we re-invest ourselves into our work without starting from scratch every time? Well, it just so happens we have a story about how to do just that.

Why use narrative?

By making a conscious effort to integrate narrative into our work, we are better able to support creative learning, problem solving, and task completion by the people who use the things we build. At the very least, the experiences we create will be more engaging, both for the project team creating the experience and for the end users.

Seeing the narrative potential in interactive design is nothing new—it is well covered by a number of thinkers from Marshall McLuhan to Brenda Laurel to Mark Meadows. While academic ideas have tended to be realized in immersive user experiences (think gaming, edutainment, and pure design), there has been little exploration of narrative for mainstream (think commercial) interactions, the kind of projects we consultants spend most of our time designing.

Recently, we have started exploring using narrative as a model for the design and development in projects. The idea emerged when we noticed that the contemporary narrative model of rising/falling dramatic action leant itself well to the kinds of user experiences we were creating and helped us to convey those concepts to our clients and team members.

Narrative in the design process

We started by asking ourselves what impact the narrative model might have on our design process. Would our deliverables change? Would our roles be affected?

Memory and Narrative Form Studies in cognitive development suggest that we tend to remember things in narrative form, particularly disorganized or ambiguous events, to aid their retrieval when the need arises. In fact, the urge to create narrative is so strong that we will fill in missing information and see causal relationships where there are none. For example, when asked to recount a story that had been relayed with contradictory narrative characteristics children tend re-order those characteristics to be in line with what they had been cognitively expecting. Nezworski, R., Stein, N. L., & Trabasso, T.

We found it useful to think in terms of a film production crew. On a film production everyone is inter-dependent: the actors need the screenwriter’s words; the cinematographer relies on the skill of the lighting technician; the editor depends on the script supervisor’s continuity notes. Through it all, the crew relies on one item: the script. The script provides the underlying structure for all of the production’s activities, guiding everything from shot composition to sound design.

We found the idea of writing a “script” for our projects very powerful. Similar to a conceptual model or creative brief, the script not only captures the business and user requirements it also synthesizes them into the project’s “story.” Story in hand, everyone on a project has a clearer understanding of what they are working toward and can speak about it using the same language.

What’s more, the script can illuminate weaknesses or potential problems in a project. Unsure whether a “must-have” feature is really needed? Review it against your characters’ motivators.

Does it move the plot along or is it a distracting tangent that should end up on the cutting-room floor? Does the content seem at odds with the visual design? Measure the tone of the copy and the mood of the visuals against the story. Do they all jive or are they at odds?

The real beauty of the project script is that it facilitates decision-making on a micro and macro scale, in a way that is easy for everyone—from client to coder—to understand. What follows is one recent example of showing how narrative is changing our work.

The impact of narrative on persona and scenario development

Given our wide variety of clients, we are looking at ways to best approach this scripting process. The easiest fit, and the first place we tried it, is as a natural extension of scenario and persona development.

On an existing engagement with a Fortune 500 financial services company, we approached the project team with a narrative-driven design philosophy shortly after the completion of a strategy phase that included the development of user personas. We assembled the user researcher, information architect, and content strategist prior to the design phase and asked them to participate in a discussion of how the team could integrate elements of narrative-focused design. Because of the long relationship with our client, it was determined that it was the right time to step outside of our standard process and push the boundaries of our approach. The make-up of the team was also extremely conducive to the creative nature of narrative-driven design.

At first there was dead silence as we drew a parallel between user interaction and the rising and falling of dramatic action. After all we were asking the team, all of whom were seasoned veterans in their respective fields, to step outside of our standard process and reframe their thinking. But the underwhelming response soon turned into a round-table discussion on what impact narrative might have, where it made sense to use it, and how we could implement it midstream in our process. We had piqued the team’s interest and over the next month were quite successful at including narrative into our workflow.

Using the model of rising/falling dramatic action, the user researcher revised the user scenario deliverable. His aim was to present a holistic view by capturing not only the personas’ demographic and psychographic information, but also their task-level interaction with the system and the system response, and the narrative arc that occurs as they encounter and try to overcome barriers in the process. What was initially a static page of prose became an elegant, information-rich diagram that conveyed the scenario in much greater detail, serving as a springboard for use case development.

Click to enlarge

The content strategy team in turn looked to the personas themselves. How could narrative help the team paint a clearer picture of them?

Childhood and Mental Models Take the example of the persona representing a 35-year-old man, married with two teenage children, who used a website to help his small business be more successful. Based on his age, profession, demographic, and ethnographic information, we had previously determined that he was a sports fan—baseball in particular. As a fan, we decided, he most likely grew up looking at the backs of baseball cards and box scores in the sports section. This affinity suggested that this persona’s mental model includes the statistical consumption of information, suggesting that the interaction designer should employ tables to present critical information that would not only draw the user’s attention to them but present the information in a way familiar to that user.

Asked to determine how each persona may have in the past or currently “consumed” information, each member of the project team was assigned a persona and tasked with bringing him or her to life.

Each member started by finding artifacts representative of their persona with which to fill up post-boards in the project war-room. Next we asked each member to act out their persona. Each member presented two of the revamped user scenarios developed by the user researcher. Some even went so far as to dress like their persona. Afterward each member of the team was presented with a set of baseball cards representing the critical information for each persona in order to the site’s users top of mind.

We had thought this would most benefit the graphic designers, sparking their imagination and helping them design from the mindset of the personas rather than to the creative brief and brand guidelines alone, but the exercise was a rousing success for everyone on the project team. Not only were we able to communicate critical information, but it was fun. It had such an impact that the account manager requested an encore for all account managers on that account, even those not involved on the engagement. The persona baseball cards were so well received by the client that they asked us to create sets for every agency with which they work.

After this initial success, the team’s great challenge was continuing to tell the story throughout the course of the project. People rolled off the project. Team members soon found themselves buried in deliverables and up against an aggressive schedule. Our narrative approach was soon as understated as a Raymond Carver short story, making it difficult to discern a linear progression. It became evident that we were going to wrap up our deliverables just as we have always done. In the end, there was just too much to do and not enough time.

Much like you would be in film production, you’re tied to a budget and schedule. Some filmmakers are very adept at transferring their vision to the screen on a small budget in a short period of time. The challenge is in developing a narrative-focused design methodology that’s flexible enough to work relative to the budget, schedule, and available resources.

Conclusion

So, has narrative really improved our work? Yes, but at present it’s hard to quantify to what extent. What we’ve found is that—if nothing else—narrative is a helpful tool to discuss users and their use of the site with team members and clients. Oh, and it’s fun.

Sometimes this translates into a more energized and dynamic site design. One that speaks to the user and guides them through a story like the one we created for them. Sometimes this simply translates into more interesting and engaging client meetings-ones where we are able to hear each other better (sometimes only after the laughter dies down).

As we continue to explore the concept of storytelling in commercial web development—we hope exploring with many of you—we will learn more. We will analyze narrative. We will quantify it. We will slice it and dice it. And we hope to find ways to better use it to serve our protagonists and our own need for creativity, innovation, and change.