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We Are Hero Builders

Student Blog

Cute drawing/sketch of a stick figure with crown and sword fighting a lizard man. Text reads:
Cute drawing/sketch of a stick figure with crown and sword fighting a lizard man. Text reads:

It’s been 3 weeks since we are back for our last semester ever. And what busy 3 weeks it has been. We already had a job fair called Meet IXD, presented another iteration of thesis prototype and some of us already gotten job offers. It’s surreal to think that this is it. We only have < 100 days to go from the IxD program.

The semester was a great start with some very interesting classes. I feel there is a theme amongst all our classes and it is storytelling. We are learning to tell better stories about ourselves and about our thesis. I always thought that validating a product with research and testing would be it. Well, it’s not the case. Each product as a story to tell; There is a hero, a crisis, a resolution and then an end. Our instructor of Narrative and Interactivity, Donna Lichaw calls this a story line, an arc.

Donna mentions to have a successful product is to turn your customers into heroes. It means making them a hero while they are using your product. When the story arc is used to tell a story of a product, it looks something like this:

Graph showing action over time with regards to the timeline of a product used by the customer (hero). .
Graph showing action over time with regards to the timeline of a product used by the customer (hero). .

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