"By making a conscious effort to integrate narrative into our work, we are better able to support creative learning, problem solving, and task completion by the people who use the things we build. At the very least, the experiences we create will be more engaging, both for the project team creating the experience and for the end users.

Seeing the narrative potential in interactive design is nothing new—it is well covered by a number of thinkers from Marshall McLuhan to Brenda Laurel to Mark Meadows. While academic ideas have tended to be realized in immersive user experiences (think gaming, edutainment, and pure design), there has been little exploration of narrative for mainstream (think commercial) interactions, the kind of projects we consultants spend most of our time designing.

Recently, we have started exploring using narrative as a model for the design and development in projects. The idea emerged when we noticed that the contemporary narrative model of rising/falling dramatic action leant itself well to the kinds of user experiences we were creating and helped us to convey those concepts to our clients and team members."

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Categorized: Media , Story/Narrative

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