Storyboarding Interesting Moments

In a previous post, I discussed the idea of an Interaction Matrix. I described its purpose as documenting the event states that occur within drag and drop, inline editing and other types of interactions.

However, the term event states is a rather dry and sterile way to think about this really important concept. In fact the term comes from the programming world (which I lived happily in for many years.)

Recently, I was at a talk where Nate Koechley presented about the new vocabulary of user experience in the world of Rich Internet Applications. He used the term Interesting Moments (which was coined by Eric Miraglia) to describe the event states within an interaction that are points of user engagement or interest.

I really like that term. Wish I had thought of it first ;-)

Thinking of storyboarding interesting moments within an application, an interaction, or a widget simplifies our thinking.

It actually turns event states inside out and focuses them instead on the user. It asks the question, "What is interesting to our user?" and "What is needed to engage them (invitations) and aid them (feedback) through our story?"

Nate also pointed out that designers have the role of director. As such we have a cast of characters (our interface elements) and the timeline (interesting moments) on which to play out our interface.

Let me know what you think...

Tags: storyboarding interactiondesign prototyping article