Working With Story Arcs

Story Arcs, Story Structure, and Creating Characters

Marcus Thomas

Dec 22, 2024

Emotional Shapes for three of my favorite stories

3-Act Story Spline of one of my "What if..." scenarios last week

Response to From user to character – an investigation into user-descriptions in scenarios by Lene Nielsen

Some designers use scenarios during the whole design process and return to them again and again. Others use them only as an  offset for the creative process, never to  return to them again.

This quote made me think about my own design process, specifically how I tend to only look at scenarios as a reference, but not as a driving force. When I’m creating a product and imagining the who/what/where/why’s of a users actions, I like to think of the persona creation & storyboarding parts of my process as my true north, but after reading this quote I began to wonder...”If I’m confronted by this specific scenario, maybe I should utilize some storytelling skills and create a new scenario with this in mind for my imagined user as well.” Bearing this in mind, I’m pretty inspired to keep in mind and execute this tactic for my next design!

In the film script, the character has to be established on the first page of the script, s/he has to grasp the reader’s attention immediately so the reader will be encouraged to read on and be interested in what  happens to the character.

In my high school English classes, I was lucky enough to have teachers that were VERY adamant about writing good hooks, and pointing out the stakes of a scenario. Regarding storyboards that I’ve made for design, I now recognize that that’s something I’ve completely forgotten about unfortunately. After reading this quote I reflected on how I tend to ramp up the action in a scenario, rather than starting with a strong hook. Yes, the stakes are there, but I need to work harder at making sure that the first scene really grasps both me and whoever else needs/wants to know about how I got from problem to solution.

Looking at the person’s physiology, sociology and psychology provides an under standing of the motivations that lie behind  his actions. ‘If we understand that these three dimensions can provide the reason for every  phase of human conduct, it will be easy for us to write about any character and trace his motivation to its source.’

I hate flat characters. In movies, tv shows, games, hell, even musicians painting a picture with characters in it. So why shouldn’t design persona’s be treated with the same scrutiny? I think that creating flat characters in creating user scenarios is a pitfall that myself and many other designers might not even realize has been there all along. People don’t just have goals and desired outcomes- they have hopes & fears, hobbies, handicaps, talents, etc. I tend to get a little lost in the weeds when world building, but being more aware of directing that attention to characters first is incredibly important for future designs (obviously not to the extent of making fake biography novels of course!).

Working With Story Arcs

Story Arcs, Story Structure, and Creating Characters

Marcus Thomas

Dec 22, 2024

Emotional Shapes for three of my favorite stories

3-Act Story Spline of one of my "What if..." scenarios last week

Response to From user to character – an investigation into user-descriptions in scenarios by Lene Nielsen

Some designers use scenarios during the whole design process and return to them again and again. Others use them only as an  offset for the creative process, never to  return to them again.

This quote made me think about my own design process, specifically how I tend to only look at scenarios as a reference, but not as a driving force. When I’m creating a product and imagining the who/what/where/why’s of a users actions, I like to think of the persona creation & storyboarding parts of my process as my true north, but after reading this quote I began to wonder...”If I’m confronted by this specific scenario, maybe I should utilize some storytelling skills and create a new scenario with this in mind for my imagined user as well.” Bearing this in mind, I’m pretty inspired to keep in mind and execute this tactic for my next design!

In the film script, the character has to be established on the first page of the script, s/he has to grasp the reader’s attention immediately so the reader will be encouraged to read on and be interested in what  happens to the character.

In my high school English classes, I was lucky enough to have teachers that were VERY adamant about writing good hooks, and pointing out the stakes of a scenario. Regarding storyboards that I’ve made for design, I now recognize that that’s something I’ve completely forgotten about unfortunately. After reading this quote I reflected on how I tend to ramp up the action in a scenario, rather than starting with a strong hook. Yes, the stakes are there, but I need to work harder at making sure that the first scene really grasps both me and whoever else needs/wants to know about how I got from problem to solution.

Looking at the person’s physiology, sociology and psychology provides an under standing of the motivations that lie behind  his actions. ‘If we understand that these three dimensions can provide the reason for every  phase of human conduct, it will be easy for us to write about any character and trace his motivation to its source.’

I hate flat characters. In movies, tv shows, games, hell, even musicians painting a picture with characters in it. So why shouldn’t design persona’s be treated with the same scrutiny? I think that creating flat characters in creating user scenarios is a pitfall that myself and many other designers might not even realize has been there all along. People don’t just have goals and desired outcomes- they have hopes & fears, hobbies, handicaps, talents, etc. I tend to get a little lost in the weeds when world building, but being more aware of directing that attention to characters first is incredibly important for future designs (obviously not to the extent of making fake biography novels of course!).

Early Draft

After sharing the first version of my Outlook redesign, I got some great feedback that’s helping me rethink a few key areas. One of the biggest notes was to cut back on overlapping panels—they were crowding the interface and taking away from the clean, focused experience I was aiming for. People also pointed out some redundant information popping up in multiple places, which added to the clutter instead of reducing it. The most exciting piece of feedback, though, was the push to reimagine how relationships between groups are displayed. There’s a real opportunity to move past the usual lists and folders and come up with something more visual and meaningful. It was all great fuel for the next round of design updates.

Final Version

Future Considerations//
Reflections

In the final round of feedback, a lot of the earlier critiques were addressed—I successfully reduced overlapping panels and cut out redundant information wherever it crept in. The new approach to showing groups was also really well received, and I think dropping the old-school ‘VIP’ concept helped make the whole system feel more inclusive and context-aware. One piece of feedback that really stuck with me, though, was a suggestion to reimagine the Focus Mode as something closer to a social media-style feed. The idea is to surface important emails from key groups or favorited contacts in a way that feels more natural and scrollable—something familiar, but tailored for productivity. It’s a direction I hadn’t fully considered before, but it opens up a lot of exciting possibilities for how users might intuitively engage with what matters most.

All things considered, this was a much more enjoyable process than I initially thought it would be. Don't get me wrong, the project interested me from the start, but it wasn't until the push to go further and unshackle myself a bit from UX conventions that I felt like this was something special. This project was a great reminder that even though us designers aren't often seen as people that consider self-expression first when creating, it's great exercise to give ourselves the opportunity to become the client. By just focusing on working out our creativity outside of what's trending, on 'this thing is so ubiquitus it's almost weird that we haven't revisited this', we're opening ourselves up to new ways of lateral thinking.

Working With Story Arcs

Story Arcs, Story Structure, and Creating Characters

Marcus Thomas

Dec 22, 2024

Emotional Shapes for three of my favorite stories

3-Act Story Spline of one of my "What if..." scenarios last week

Response to From user to character – an investigation into user-descriptions in scenarios by Lene Nielsen

Some designers use scenarios during the whole design process and return to them again and again. Others use them only as an  offset for the creative process, never to  return to them again.

This quote made me think about my own design process, specifically how I tend to only look at scenarios as a reference, but not as a driving force. When I’m creating a product and imagining the who/what/where/why’s of a users actions, I like to think of the persona creation & storyboarding parts of my process as my true north, but after reading this quote I began to wonder...”If I’m confronted by this specific scenario, maybe I should utilize some storytelling skills and create a new scenario with this in mind for my imagined user as well.” Bearing this in mind, I’m pretty inspired to keep in mind and execute this tactic for my next design!

In the film script, the character has to be established on the first page of the script, s/he has to grasp the reader’s attention immediately so the reader will be encouraged to read on and be interested in what  happens to the character.

In my high school English classes, I was lucky enough to have teachers that were VERY adamant about writing good hooks, and pointing out the stakes of a scenario. Regarding storyboards that I’ve made for design, I now recognize that that’s something I’ve completely forgotten about unfortunately. After reading this quote I reflected on how I tend to ramp up the action in a scenario, rather than starting with a strong hook. Yes, the stakes are there, but I need to work harder at making sure that the first scene really grasps both me and whoever else needs/wants to know about how I got from problem to solution.

Looking at the person’s physiology, sociology and psychology provides an under standing of the motivations that lie behind  his actions. ‘If we understand that these three dimensions can provide the reason for every  phase of human conduct, it will be easy for us to write about any character and trace his motivation to its source.’

I hate flat characters. In movies, tv shows, games, hell, even musicians painting a picture with characters in it. So why shouldn’t design persona’s be treated with the same scrutiny? I think that creating flat characters in creating user scenarios is a pitfall that myself and many other designers might not even realize has been there all along. People don’t just have goals and desired outcomes- they have hopes & fears, hobbies, handicaps, talents, etc. I tend to get a little lost in the weeds when world building, but being more aware of directing that attention to characters first is incredibly important for future designs (obviously not to the extent of making fake biography novels of course!).