On User Experience Design… and Screenwriting.

I love movies. Obviously, that’s not a distinguishing characteristic – lots of people love movies, and many are far more rabid and knowledgeable about cinema than I am. But it’s part of my personal DNA – I sometimes randomly quote The Godfather, or Goldfinger, and I’ll defend my hero Orson Welles’ body of work to my dying breath… It makes me, well, me.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have always been especially interested in the screenplay – the art of writing it, the style of it. I read stuff like Robert Towne’s fantastic script for Chinatown, and clearly see why it is STILL being studied 35 years later. And I’ve read several books on screenwriting, on how the good writers have a through-line for their characters, how they write a backstory that is usually never seen on screen, how they build their motivations and how the best screenplays are written around character actions and goals, not stilted dialogue…

Well, today, I looked at my desk and I saw two books, sitting side-by-side. The first, Syd Field’s Screenwriter’s Workbook, is a classic reference to what to do to write an affective screenplay. The second, Kim Goodwin’s Designing for the Digital Age, has become my new ready reference when it comes to all things User Experience.

And then the obvious point slapped me square in my (metaphorical) face.

To a great extent, all of us in the user experience design domain – we are all screenwriters. All the ideas on how to create affective designs and support the best possible user experience – research the domain, understand users needs and motivations, create representative personas and detail user stories… all of this is what our best screenwriters do as well.

Obviously, there are differences in the two disciplines – the tools we use, the documentation we create to tell our stories… but there are enough similarities that I think it provides us an opportunity to look at our craft as designers in a different light. And, honestly, it’s such an obvious thing I’m sure someone else has written about this before (if so, please forward a link and I’ll add it here as an update to this piece).

So,what are ways we can use some of the approaches of screenwriting in design? Here’s some ideas:

Know your characters. If you have any questions or doubts about your users needs or motivations, go talk to some of them. Do the necessary leg work to understand your users (preaching to the choir for many, but still important to note). Create personas to represent your users based on this research. The writer the recent movie The Wrestler spent days meeting with and talking with retired wrestlers to understand who these men were and what the life in the ring was costing them in their lives today. It worked – his screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

It’s not about the plot. Too many movies focus on pushing the ball down the field, moving from point A to point B to Point C because the writer (or, sometimes, the producer of the movie) has these GREAT IDEAS on scenes A, B and C. That fails more often than not, because it’s not “organic” – It’s not driven by the characters, and the writer sometimes has to make the characters do stupid things to make these bid scenes happen. So, the next time a great new feature just HAS to be in a product you are designing, ask yourself – is it true to your characters (your users, or the appropriate personas)? Will they get any benefit from it?

Write action, not dialogue. Lots of movies are based on plays and in the majority of cases these films are very very heavy on dialogue and light on action. This sometimes works (Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple), sometimes doesn’t (Deathtrap, Hair). Movies are about action, about visuals – “moving” pictures. Dialogue is obviously important, but they should be driven by character and not replace the action. I’m not talking about action movies, I’m talking about using visuals to extend and supplement the story being told. If you watch Bonnie and Clyde, pay close attention to the use of mirrors and lighting, especially in the early scenes – these visuals (as well as how scenes flow together) adds flavor and help tell the story visually.

So, the applicable lesson in UI and experience design? Don’t rely on text to communicate how to use and work with your design, use visual cues and interactivity, when appropriate, to help the user along – to help them understand the story you are trying to tell.

Finally, go read books on screenwriting. Just as some painters sometimes read up on architectural theory to give them a better sense of how to accurately represent weight and gravity in their work, we should reach outside our discipline to see what lessons we can learn from other craftsman. Screenwriting is, to me, just the most obvious example of such an opportunity. At the very least, it gives us a way to look at what we do from a different perspective.

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