Narrative

Examples:

User's guide to a software package
News article
Movie or TV show
Voice-mail message
Weather forecast
Traffic report

Context: There is a need to convey information to the user; the information is closely interrelated, but of diverse kinds, and there may be some subjectivity involved.

Problem: In what form should the information be displayed to the user?

Forces:

Many kinds of information are easier to absorb and remember when they are conveyed via natural language than when they are presented as raw data.
The artifact's or author's point of view should sometimes be explicitly acknowledged, such as when credibility is an issue; narrative does this well, whereas other forms of data presentation are more anonymous.
Many people find narrative to be more pleasant than raw data or symbolic representations.
Natural language can convey subjectivity -- values, interpretations, and opinions -- in a way that no other information presentation can.
Natural language is difficult for computers to generate and parse, but easy for humans.
Natural language presented as "straight text" has to be read or skimmed linearly to find specific information.

Solution: Convey the information via natural language. Use all you learned in high-school English class about good writing. If users might be skimming the text to find specific data items, use color, fonts, and white space to set off items of interest; for readability in some situations, try using "senselining."

Notes: [ Unfinished. I think this is a very important pattern to understand, but I don't understand it yet. Natural language has wonderful, subtle gradations of meaning and emphasis that raw data can't have. How do we decide it's best to, say, give a weather report in a narrative form, rather than as a table? I suspect that some factors are: memorability, subjectivity and biased interpretation (which is not always a bad thing), effort required to absorb and understand the information. ...Maybe we should turn the question around, and ask when we should NOT use narrative, since narrative is the default way that we humans communicate. ]

Random other notes...

Storytelling is a huge part of this pattern, but it's really outside the scope of this pattern language

Narrative is declarative, where Step-by-Step Instructions is imperative; both use natural language

Brenda Laurel's quote on the use of narrative in an interactive artifact: "Narrative includes both the story being told (content) and the conditions of its telling (structure and context). ... Within that [narrative] framework, interface designers can adopt strategies from narrative theory, such as including multiple representations of events and information, or using characters as a means of representing material with an explicitly acknowledged point of view." (pg. 182 in my copy)

Give two examples: an image from The Weather Channel's daily weather report (tabular data and icons), and a cut-and-paste from the Mass. weather site (narrative).

Howard Wainer talks about senselining. Strunk & White talks about good writing. Nielsen talks about writing for Web pages. Who talks about colors and fonts and whitespace?...

Comments to: jtidwell@alum.mit.edu
Last modified May 17, 1999