Cindy Chastain (twitter) started an amazing conversation with her presentation at this years IA Summit in Memphis. It is common practice for authors and playwrights to use themes when creating a new story. Cindy, through real world practice, has discovered that this same concept can be applied to designing a user experience. The following are my tweets from this session:

Storytelling and be used as a communication tool that can lead to a design frame and used as a vehicle for engagement/response.

Comics, storyboards, scenarios, and concept narrative are the communication tools.

There was a missing component to their design process. They couldn’t nail down a final vision of what they are trying to do.

Even if we can’t tell a good story, we know if a story is good.

A theme is the subject-matter, topic, or idea on which a work of art or literature is based. It makes the story more memorable.

A theme impacts the writer and reader differently. It helps the writers with decisions, and the reader with connecting to the story.

For design a theme can put experience at the forefront of a concept, unify teams, lead to strategy, lead design solutions …

If Flickr had a theme it would be to define yourself with photos.

Mothra is the technology product, Godzilla is the user. Who do you think should win?

The yin and yang of UX are tangible and intangible. Tangible need to be expressed, intangible needs to be felt by the user.

Function, performance, ease of use + beauty, emotion, and meaning = the optimal user experience.

Unfortunately I was not able to capture the entire session via twitter due to a crummy wifi connection. This session was extremely interesting because it offers designers another tool to use in order to set a baseline for a project. Mission statements, project visions, and personas also attempt to do this, but by nature they are more analytical tools. Using a theme to drive a project design invokes creative thought and behavior. In theory, this allows designers to tackle complex problems and come up with truly amazing solutions. It will be interesting to see how other people use themes in the future, and their resulting work.

Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design

View more presentations from Cindy Chastain.