Thinking Like a Story Teller - Cindy Chastain

This week I watched Cindy Chastain’s talk titled ‘Thinking Like a Story Teller’

Cindy Chastain-Thinking Like a Storyteller

⭐️ REFLECTION

Chastain begins the talk with a quote from prolific software designer Alan Cooper:

“Story telling and story understanding is probably the most important aspects of true interaction design.”

One may identify storytelling in design in more concrete ways such as user personas, scenarios, storyboarding, brand stories and so forth, all of which divides into two categories: communications tools and framework.

However, Chastian poses another aspect of storytelling in design which is often overlooked - user narrative.

User Narrative

This is the stream of self talk which occurs when a user interacts with a product. Two types of narrative emerges:

• Narrative of Use: The inner dialogue discussing the features and affordances of a product
• Personal Story Telling: The users internal conversation about what this product means in relation to them and how they can fit it into their life.

The question that Chastain poses is how can we as designers provide the cues that will deepen that narrative?

Learning from the Practice of Storytelling

Chastain went into great detail in this talk about the foundations of story telling. By covering theory of story composition, she can begin to draw links between the practice of story telling and the practice of interaction design.

IxD and storytelling have desire for engagement in common. Some academic commentary poses that user engagement is the pulse of IxD rather than designing interactions.

<aside> ⭐ REFLECTION: In my opinion, user engagement and designing user interactions are intertwined. Especially in a modern context, with the popularity of micro interactions which were not really discussed at the time of this talk, we design user interactions to increase user engagement.

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Aristotles theory of the shape of a story was discussed. Chastain poses that user journeying has a certain shape in a similar way, perhaps more complex due to the autonomy of our ‘agents’ (users) in an interactive threshold such as a website. It is about understanding this structure and framing it as a narrative, so we can facilitate this unfolding story as such and build these cues into user flows and interactions.

FOUR RELEVANT MECHANICS OF DRAMATIC NARRATION

By considering these mechanics alone in their own right, we can begin to build more coherent and positive user experiences: