For the last three months I’ve been reading and exploring the field of design interactions as an elective class in the MCDM program. As I usually do I have a hard time studying things in isolation and I’m always looking for the connection points across experiences.

In this case it struck me that one can combine storytelling + interaction design.

The quest is: how do we tell a ’story’ through the interaction with service or product. According to Seth

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Godin’s book, All marketers are Liars, we do. We tell a story with typography, colors, space, etc because all these visual clues construct an environment (virtual or real) that we experience and we associate with certain worldviews we have. This is the part that I find most fascinating about design:

The best designers have a deep knowledge of how to manipulate symbols and signifiers to communicate a feeling.

It’s the power of the metaphor. And in design interaction, the colors and space and typography are only the beginning, it truly is about building the experience a person has with an object or a screen or a space to

accomplish a task (Form and Function).  In exploring how experiences get built, I take away these factors as key:

• clear identity: best designs/experiences take a stand and have a clear personality rather than to please everyone
• feedback: let people know where they are, acknowledge, confirm, remind
• sociability: let them connect, share
• recognition: reward for progress or completion
• simplicity/complexity: balance  the two
• consistency: no matter what.

Now, telling stories with the design doesn’t quite follow the typical story arc that we’ve explored in depth in some of my other classes, but I think that the key is that if we have a clear story associated with our brand, or our product. For many years I’ve developed creative briefs trying to boil down to “key messages” or “key promise”, but I think I’m going to throw that out and in my next creative brief I will try to come up with the story I want to tell.

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