Week 1

Storytelling in UX

Assignment:
For the next week please read Chapter 13 from Storytelling from User Experience.
‍Pick out 3 quotes from the text and write one paragraph of response for each quote.
Pick out the things that do and do not make sense to you, things you do - or do not agree with.
Find the main takeaway form the article for you personally.
Post the resulting text to your design blog and link the URL here. Reach out if you have questions.

• “When you choose the perspective for a story, you are choosing a subset of all of the experiential possibilities. The perspective (or perspectives) you choose limits what the people in the story see and experience. This determines the information you give the audience—and, more important, what you don’t—and therefore changes their experience of the story.” (p. 329)
  ‍
  I really appreciate that perspective was the first ingredient mentioned in this chapter. As a designer, it can be really easy to have tunnel vision and think there is only one solution, pathway, or story. In reality, there are multiple ways of looking at a certain problem or situation. And in many cases, those different views are all just smaller pieces to the bigger picture. This quote emphasizes that as designers, one must consider different perspectives because these different pieces of information can lead to different experiences.
• “In a user experience story, you might use a character’s dictio to show how an early objection can be overcome by a better experience or changing conditions.” (p.351-352)
  ‍
  I found this quote to be interesting and unsure whether or not I agree with the statement.  On one hand, there is an optimistic view of using a character’s dictio. By using dictio, the author seems to convey “a change in heart” message.  From my interpretation, using dictio can be a way to display a character’s unknown necessity (i.e. grandfather need for a phone). On the contrary, I find dictio a hard character to include in a story because many people are creatures of habit; and usually if a person does stray too far from their initial characteristics. For example, if the grandfather in their example did not see a need for the phone all those years, he will most likely continue to not see a need for a phone. Hence the saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”
• Memory context acts like a type of glue, connecting one part of a story to another, forcing an audience to view new story material through a remembered context.” (p.361)
  
  ‍This quote opened a new method of storytelling for myself. I never thought to use memories as a way to piece different stories together, but this is a great context to use to better engage the audience. They used the great example of Saving Private Ryan where they take the intro to intrigue the audience, then continue most of the movie as a flashback to slowly unravel the rest of the story. Another example is the Finding Dory series where we finally get more context about Dory’s condition as she recalls when she was younger. Memory context is captivating by forcing the audience to remember two segmented pieces of the story. Only when the memory is fully narrated is when those pieces are bonded together.
• Main Takeaway:
  
  Storytelling is composed of many components or ingredients. Each ingredient can be modified, regardless of how big of a modification, that newly modified ingredient can completely change the direction and structure of a story. With that being said, a story can be told in countless ways depending on what the designer wants to achieve from its audience.