Designing engaging experiences like writing a thriller
I wanted to start reading books, and the best way to start was by reading thrillers. As thrillers are engaging, evoke excitement and suspense in the readers, it’s hard to put the book down. This excited me to explore what are the elements of writing a gripping thriller.
James Scott Bell, author of best-selling thrillers writes about key elements of writing a thriller. Let’s map these elements with elements of designing experiences.
Source: https://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/the-5-cs-of-writing-a-great-thriller-novel
- Complex characterisation
The first place to fortify a thriller is its cast of characters. These cast have layers and conflict of interest.
In real scenario, with billions of footprint in digital landscape, there is more complexity in understanding user patterns. If you are part of product team, you are dealing with users with complex behaviour and expectations. You need to learn how to understand and use this data as insights.
Designing experiences: Understand the complex user patterns.
Knowing who your customers are is great, but knowing how they behave is even better.
— Jon Miller
2. Confrontation/Situation
In a thriller, there is a backstory to even the antagonist. What hopes and dreams did he have? How were they dashed? What life-altering hurt did he suffer? Who betrayed him? How did all of this affect him over the course of his life?
Mapping user journey while designing experiences helps us understand the users situation, their pain-points and identify the takeaways.
Designing experiences: Empathise user’s situation.
3. Twist
A story with a twist is the fun part of reading. When readers think a story is going in one way, they are taken completely by surprise. For example ‘A woman runs in screaming’, ‘The lights go out’.
While designing solutions, map this plot twist to framing assumptions as hypothesis, which help you to prove or disprove it. The way readers have different perception of the twist in a story, product team mates work with different perceptions and ideas, while predicting the impact it will have on the user.
Designing experiences: Develop various hypothesis and validate it.
4. Connecting to heart
The best thrillers connect to the heart, throughout. They do it by getting readers to experience the emotions of the scenes.
Designing for emotions via personalisation and adding human elements help us connect to the users.
Designing experiences: Not to forget that users are humans.
5. Communication
And the last part, while keeping the reader engaged with all the surprises, thrillers want to communicate something more — give life lessons or some messages. The characters learn how to fight, survive, bringing people together and act courageously.
As a product team member, we need to focus on communicating the right business problem to solve, which is the messaging of the product. As a product designer, one of the key challenges is to decide which problem to solve. As we dive deeper, new pain points come up, which we would want to solve and the challenge lies in staying focused and communicate the right problem statement.
Designing experiences: Stay focused on the right intent.
A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all
— Don Norman
Here we explored how elements of thriller stories are similar to crafting experiences. As we see, we can look for inspiration all around .. even in thriller books… and now I am heading out to grab a book!!
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Thanks for reading. This is my attempt to share, learn and unlearn. I’d love to read your comments!
