Designing for the user experience of Halloped.fi through storytelling

Abstract

Halloped.fi, named according to the Finnish translation of “student representative”, is a web-based information system (website) of Student Representatives in Administration. Project Halloped aims to improve the non-intuitive user experience (UX) and redesign the obsolete user interface (UI) of Halloped.fi. According to a great deal of literature, storytelling, as an effective means, especially reveals potential to be applied to the process of user experience design.

Following the UCD (User-Centred Design) process, the thesis aims to investigate the feasibility of applying storytelling to UX design and propose the design solution for the new Halloped.fi. Therefore, the main research question of this thesis is how to design for user experience through storytelling, particularly in the context of UX design for a website.

The thesis analyses the essential components of user experience, discusses the interrelation between user experience and storytelling and summarises the storytelling approaches through a literature review. Based on the literature review, the thesis builds the theoretical framework for implementing Project Halloped. Leveraging the theoretical framework, the project identified the pain points of the user experience, proposed the design concept and evaluated the design solutions through various kinds of storytelling approaches. The overall project preliminarily validated that storytelling is a practical and efficient method for the UX design of a website. In practice, UX design through storytelling should follow three principles: 1. Following the UCD process. This is the basis of UX design through storytelling. 2. Utilising the narrative framework of user experience. This principle supports the designer to capture and create the holistic picture of a user experience. 3. Applying storytelling approaches to collect and share information, which considers the function of storytelling in terms of analysing the detailed elements of a user experience.