Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Clément Hamon

Creating a tool to tell and listen to the stories that makes our lives

Photo by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash

Our world is built on stories, and every day, throughout everything we do, we live and make new ones. They might be banal or extraordinary, only take their importance later on, but those stories make us who we are.

My belief is that we all carry interesting tales, without especially sharing them. Because we don’t dare to, have nobody to tell them to or just never reflected on them. If those stories were out, it could allow others to relate, reflect, contrast their experience or just enjoy a good piece of storytelling.
That’s what this project is about, sharing stories, allowing anyone to record their’s and listen to the ones told by others.

This idea had been occupying the back of my mind for a while. It was nurtured by the realisation that there is a world of incredible stories that we may not know from the people we are close to, and even more from strangers. It was also influenced by storytelling such as the incredible documentary Life in a Day or the initiative “The Moth”.

Doing it

I am a trained UX designer with a background in software development, and I will approach this with those skills. This side project is a way to both expunge the idea from my mind, by actually making it, and practice my designs skills. I’m approaching it as an Interaction/UX design problem first, and will later translate it into code.

I will be documenting the process along the way, practising at the same time my writing. I want to talk about are the process, the choices made along the way and hopefully some of the learnings I gather from it.

If you have any feedback or opinion, about the project, the writing or anything else don’t hesitate to reach out either here or by mail, which you can find on my portfolio http://clementhamon.com (shameless plug).

In this first part I’ll get into the details of how I first approached the project and the guiding principles that were set at the beginning.

Let’s get this going

The first step I took to approaching this project was to lay all of my existing feelings about what it should be like on paper, what we could pretentiously call a “vision”. Because I had already carried the idea for some time, opinions of what it should look like were already here. Putting all of that on paper allowed for the first confrontation with reality. The simple act of listing all of the assumptions about the product and the experience made me realized some of the challenges ahead and questions I will have to answer.

If you are an avid design thinker, you will have noticed that this approach has the flaw of not being based on the experience of potential users or on any tangible data. I acknowledge that it not be best practices but I wanted to challenge the concept I had in mind and see where this could go. It’s also made possible by the fact that this is a side project, no millions of dollars are invested in it so I can go down that road and see where it leads. At this stage I’m thinking of developing the idea to the point of having a functional prototype, at which point I will start gathering user feedback.

Words as catalyst

Once I started deconstructing the idea., the first thing that pop up was to use a list of words to elicit storytelling. The users would pick a word form a list and tell a story around it. It could be what is their personal interpretation of it, a specific memory or anything else. For instance with the word “Sea”, I could tell a story about how It was growing up by the ocean, taking it for granted and then missing it later on. At the same time somebody could have a completely different story, like going to the sea for the first time as a teen during summer camp.

The idea is that seeing a word might make the user remember something linked to it, as opposed to standing in front of a blank space and having to come up with something on your own.

This list of words would have to be generic enough that they can speak to a wide audience, but also not to vague to help retrieve a certain memory. For instance, “World Cup 98” might have a lot of meanings for Frenchs but it isn’t especially global, as opposed to something like “Home”, “Choices” or “Nature”.

Use your voice

The second guiding principle was to use voice to share those stories. The motivation was to get somehow closer to the simplicity of telling stories to one another. There is a world of subtleties that come with using the voices and it’s intonation, silences, pitching and much more. It felt like a more natural ways of telling stories. It is also a more natural way of storytelling, writing encourages to go back and forth, to change bits, add and deleting some. In the way I envision it, it should as simple as pressing a record button and going back to your memories, carrying the listener with you.

There are limitations that come with the use of voice. Some technical, like requiring a higher bandwidth or a device with a microphone and a correct recording environment, and some behavioural, it might be harder to record voices if you have people around for instance. But by taking into account both benefits and limitations into the design, I think it’s worth giving this approach a shot and further testing might refine it.

Anonymous storytelling

Finally, I envision this platform to have the possibility of anonymous submissions. There is a tradition of anonymous storytelling online, everything from Postsecret to FML or the Secret app. It does have challenges, like hurtful content, or fake submissions, but this anonymity is also key to provide a safe environment for honest sharing. Letting go of this vulnerability can be a key factor to decide someone to tell the story of an old love if they are currently married for instance.

There can be a conflict between anonymous storytelling and the use of voice, it is one of the questions that are being raised. How can somebody use there, potentially identifiable, voice to tell a story anonymously? I don’t have the answer just yet but has the project develops there might be solutions, or simply embracing the compromise.

This is just the beginning

That’s it for now! This was the introduction of the project and the guiding principles behind it. Namely, letting users record stories, prompted by words and choosing to do so anonymously or not.

In the next article, I’ll talk about my approach to translating this concepts int sketches of UI elements and Information architecture, as well as making design choices based on the product values.

I hope you enjoyed this article! This format is a first for me so don’t hesitate to leave feedback in the comments and see you in Part II.

Thanks for reading! Clap it if you liked it 👏👏👏

I’m currently looking for a UX/Product design position, see more of my work on my portfolio http://clementhamon.com

Designing for Storytelling, Part I: Laying the foundations was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Designing for Storytelling, Part I: Laying the foundations

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