Cindy Chastain, in Experiencing Themes for Boxes and Arrows. A good article for sure. Here was my comment:
You had my interest immediately when I realized that you were both a designer and screenwriter (I got my BFA in film/video at RISD, but now work in web development). I completely get the idea of making the “story” the unifying element that brings together each individual discipline represented in the development process.
We’ve been exploring the concept of personas, who, as characters in the overall “story,” represent the goals of a site as well as the challenges of succeeding at those goals. By creating specific personas for each project, we can anticipate some of the barriers to communication, as well as identify new ways to articulate messages through copy and design that are most appropriate to the end user.
I’m with @Giles- there is much to enjoy in your article. I’m going to have our Project Management team read this as part of our professional enrichment program.
In the case of user-centered design, we do well at coming up with the right technology and features that perform in a way that meets the needs or behaviors we observe in our users. But we often neglect to consider the story that’s told through the interactions people have with the things we make. For this story to be apparent to people, let alone meaningful, those involved with the design of a product should have a shared sense of the kind of experience they are trying to create. In the domain of digital products the story comes from asking the big questions: What’s the product or service about? What will it do for the customer? Where does it fit into their lives? In what ways might we create an emotional response the customer can walk away with?
How does a good story get built? With a theme, of course. Writers and filmmakers have been using themes to build stories for a very long time. They’re also not shy about designing explicitly for emotion and meaning. So why not designers? For us, a definition of the core value of experience can function as the theme that helps teams collectively build a more meaningful product. It’s the thing that can serve as a coordinating force behind the design. When the tangible elements of a product are all working together for the same purpose the product has a stronger story to tell. The theme is merely the thing that helps us deliver that story in the form of an experience.
|#