Storytelling is a powerful tool for any UX designer. It helps create a product and understand the people who use it. In this article, Marli Mesibov takes a real-life example of an app she helped to build in 2017 and explains five steps you can use to help you build a story into your user experience.
Read more…
We’re taught to communicate with words. We write essays, prepare speeches, and take written notes. But words aren’t always the best option for conveying information and ideas. Sometimes the best way to tell stories is through thoughtfully crafted visuals, not long paragraphs of text. Visual storytelling is the process of conveying ideas using things you can see. In this article, Elizabeth Lin will explore visual principles, highlight why visual storytelling is a valuable skill for everyone to learn, and demonstrate how you can improve your visual storytelling through play.
Read more…
Want to build a website or PWA that attracts a large audience and then converts as much of that audience into paying customers as possible? If that’s the case, what you need to do is use storytelling in your design — and there are a bunch of ways to do this. The key is to pair your client’s story, brand image, and goals with the style of story you decide to tell. There’s a ton of variation in how a story can be told. There is one thing they all need to have in common though: They need to somehow draw the reader into the narrative.
Read more…
When someone reads a story, they have certain expectations about how that story will unfold whether they know how to articulate them or not. The same is true about users coming to our websites. We can pull principles from storytelling to help us meet and, hopefully, exceed those user expectations. Today, John Rhea will pull out and discuss just a few examples of how thinking about your users’ stories can increase user engagement and satisfaction. He’ll look at audience expectations and how your site is meeting those expectations or not.
Read more…
Story structure can be the lens through which we view websites. It helps us step into the user’s shoes and understand where and how users interact with our websites. The user finds themselves on a journey through your website on the way to their goal. If you can see this journey from their perspective, you can better understand what they need at each step, and align your goals with theirs. We, web professionals and site owners, are characters in their story and it’s about time we acted like it.
Read more…
As technologies improve and design techniques evolve, improvements in digital design are inevitable. What is truly impressive, however, is how we are now able to use design to tell a story. As attention spans shorten and visitors just want to get to the good stuff on a website, designers have to get more creative in how they communicate their website’s “story.” In this article, Suzanne Scacca suggests techniques that can be used in web design.
Read more…
This is an experiment in a slightly different format for Smashing Magazine — using a storytelling approach to convey the same lessons learned that a traditional article would have provided. In this article, Lyndon Cerejo will take you through the story of Noah, the “UX guy” for the corporate office of a regional fast food restaurant, that was in the process of creating a mobile app to allow patrons to customize their meals, place orders and earn rewards.
Read more…
In this article, we will discuss several recent such experiments, with special focus on new forms of storytelling, as well as new business models for publishers — a fascinating recent trend called “subcompact publishing” will be our main reference.
Read more…
We have conceptualized different uses of multiple screens to tell stories. All of us, from every corner of the globe, have intensely rich cultures filled with stories and fables. Using them to create interactive narratives is another way to explore the power of the Web, to wow people, and to record our cultural history.
Read more…
