A promise.
Before you click it, its label and shape already tell you what future to expect.
HAAM / Interaction design / Storytelling
Every interface has a plot.
Storytelling and interaction design look like different disciplines until you look at what they actually do. Both structure an experience across time. Both create expectation, reveal information, turn actions into consequences, and move someone from one state to another.
Interaction design is storytelling where the audience gets to act inside the story.
StoryInteraction
CharacterUser
DesireGoal
ActionInteraction
ConsequenceFeedback
ChangeNew state
01 / The overlap
The vocabulary almost maps one to one.
A story gives us a person, a desire, a situation, choices and consequences. An interface gives us a user, a goal, a context, actions and feedback. The names change. The underlying cognitive structure barely does.
| Storytelling | Interaction design | Shared idea |
|---|---|---|
| Character | User | Someone experiences the system. |
| Desire | Goal | They want something. |
| Setting | Context | The situation changes what makes sense. |
| Action | Interaction | The person does something. |
| Conflict | Friction | Something prevents immediate success. |
| Choice | Control | The person decides what happens next. |
| Consequence | Feedback | The world responds to the action. |
| Causality | System logic | This happened because you did that. |
| Scene | State | A particular moment in the experience. |
| Plot | User flow | One state leads into another. |
| Pacing | Timing | When something happens changes how it feels. |
| Reveal | Progressive disclosure | Information arrives when it becomes useful. |
| Stakes | Consequences | The decision has meaning. |
| Payoff | Completion | An expectation is fulfilled. |
| Character arc | Journey | The person ends somewhere different. |
| Voice | Interface personality | The system has a way of speaking. |
02 / Causality
Both live or die by cause and effect.
A story stops feeling like a story when events are merely stacked beside each other. The same thing happens in a product when the connection between an action and its result becomes unclear.
In a story we ask, why did this happen? In an interface we ask, why did the system do that? It is the same cognitive problem.
I did Xthereforethe system did YthereforeZ is possible now
03 / Expectation
The experience starts before the action.
Storytellers make us predict what comes next. Interfaces do it constantly. A control makes a promise before it is touched. A loading state creates anticipation. A progress bar tells us there is a payoff ahead.
Good interaction design manages the gap between what I think will happen and what actually happens.
Anticipation.
The system says something is happening, so waiting becomes part of the experience rather than a void.
A coming payoff.
You can see that the current moment is leading somewhere, which changes how long waiting feels.
04 / Information
Do not tell everything at once.
Storytelling works by controlling what the audience knows now and what they discover later. Interfaces use the same move through progressive disclosure.
The question is not only what information exists? It is what does this person need to know at this exact moment?
Setup
Give enough context to understand the situation.
Development
Reveal the choices and information needed for the next move.
Revelation
Show the consequence of what just happened.
Resolution
Make the new state clear and show what can happen next.
05 / Friction
Friction is not automatically bad.
UX culture often treats every extra step as a defect. Storytelling knows better. Resistance can create meaning. The real design problem is separating accidental friction from productive friction.
A game with one button that immediately says you won is perfectly usable and completely dead.
Bad friction
- Confusing navigation
- Unexplained waiting
- Repeated data entry
- Accidental complexity
- Fear of making an irreversible mistake
Productive friction
- Commitment before a consequential choice
- Challenge that creates mastery
- Reflection before sending or deleting
- Discovery that rewards exploration
- Anticipation before a meaningful payoff
06 / Agency
This is where the disciplines split.
Traditional storytelling usually controls the sequence. Interaction design cannot. The person using the product participates in deciding what happens next.
Authors the events.
The audience experiences a sequence that has already been composed.
Authors the possibility space.
The designer creates the rules, choices, feedback and consequences from which the user creates a path.
The deeper idea
Storytelling designs a sequence of meaningful events. Interaction design designs a system capable of producing meaningful sequences of events.
Once you see products this way, user flows start looking like plots, states like scenes, interactions like actions, feedback like consequences, and product experiences like narratives the user partially authors themselves.