In both my day job as a UI Designer and UX consultant and my after-hours life as a novelist, I’ve come to see storytelling as more than a creative tool. It’s a design tool. A strategic one. One that can reshape how we approach digital experiences. Not just how they look and function, but how they feel, how they flow, and how they connect to something deeper in us.
I work with clients on everything from brand communication to full web platforms, and the common thread is always clarity. Clarity in communication, in interaction, in purpose. But clarity isn’t the same as clinical. Often, the most memorable experiences are those that tap into something emotive, something that resonates. That’s where storytelling comes in.
And it wasn’t until I started writing The Siren’s Code—a speculative thriller set in a near-future world where the brain can be upgraded but at the cost of emotion—that I began to realise just how vital narrative is to everything I do in design. I’m not a published author (yet), but writing fiction has sharpened how I understand human motivation, tension, pacing, consequence. All things that matter just as much in a user journey as they do in a plot.
From Stories to Systems
We tend to compartmentalise storytelling as something that belongs in books, films, advertising. In design, we rely on structure, logic, data. But users are people, and people make sense of the world through story. Whether they’re checking their fitness tracker or applying for a visa online, they’re experiencing it in context—not just of the screen in front of them, but of their emotional and mental state, their expectations, their fears, their goals.
Good design tells a story. Not a literal one, but a narrative arc embedded in the interaction:
There’s a beginning (onboarding, curiosity, problem to solve).
A middle (progress, obstacles, feedback).
An end (resolution, payoff, insight).
What we often forget is that users aren’t passive characters in this story. They’re the protagonist. Or at least, they should be.
User as Protagonist
In fiction, a protagonist drives the action. They have agency, desire, conflict. They make decisions that matter. In tech design, we often reduce the user to a persona or a statistic. But if we frame them as a protagonist, everything changes. We start asking:
What do they want?
What’s stopping them?
What do they risk by continuing, or by giving up?
What kind of transformation does this experience offer?
Suddenly, we’re not just designing steps in a process. We’re designing moments of meaning. Opportunities for change.
In The Siren’s Code, my protagonist Cassie isn’t a typical hero. She’s messy, emotional, impulsive. But that’s what makes her journey matter. She’s not just solving a mystery—she’s growing, doubting, resisting, making choices that reshape the world around her. In many ways, that’s exactly what a user is doing inside a good product. They’re navigating a system. They’re up against obstacles. They’re looking for a way through.
Tension Is Not a Bad Thing
One of the things you learn writing fiction is that tension drives engagement. Not conflict for the sake of drama, but friction that reveals stakes. If everything is too easy, too flat, too predictable, readers switch off. The same is true in UX.
Of course we want to reduce unnecessary frustration. But not all friction is bad. A confirmation screen before a big action. A pause that lets someone reflect. A well-timed moment of clarity in a complex flow. These are narrative beats. They matter.
Instead of asking how to remove all tension, we should ask: what kind of tension serves the story? What helps the user stay present, feel the stakes, and move forward with confidence?
Microcopy as Dialogue
In my design work, I spend a lot of time on microcopy. Not just button labels or error messages, but all the little bits of text that live between the lines of a UI. This is dialogue. It’s how the product speaks to the user. It should be consistent, human, responsive to context.
Good dialogue in fiction isn’t just functional. It reveals character, builds tone, shifts the mood. Good microcopy does the same. It can guide, reassure, challenge, even amuse. It’s where a product shows its personality—or its values.
When I write fiction, I often read dialogue out loud to hear its rhythm. I do the same with UI copy. It helps me check if it feels natural. If it builds trust. If it earns attention.
Design with Consequence
One of the most powerful things stories do is create a sense of consequence. If a character makes a choice, it should matter. That’s what makes the story satisfying. In UX, we can learn from this. If users make a choice and the system doesn’t respond meaningfully—or worse, it responds in a way that contradicts their intent—we lose them.
That’s why storytelling isn’t just a flourish. It’s a framework. It helps us design with cause and effect in mind. If someone abandons a flow, what happens next? If they complete it, what’s the emotional payoff? Are we giving them closure, or confusion?
The digital experiences that stand out are the ones that feel cohesive. Where each screen, each interaction, feels like a beat in a bigger story. Where the user doesn’t just reach the end, they feel something when they get there.
Emotional Credibility
This is a term I borrow from fiction editing, but it applies so well to design. Emotional credibility means that a user’s emotional journey matches the events around them. If a UI is cheerful when the context is stressful, it feels tone-deaf. If it’s too cold when something personal is at stake, it feels alienating.
Storytelling helps us tune that emotional arc. It reminds us to ask: what’s the user feeling at this point? Not what should they feel—but what are they likely to feel, and how do we meet them there?
It’s easy to fall into generic tone, especially in enterprise or B2B products. But even there, users are people. They respond to care, to nuance, to acknowledgment. Storytelling teaches us how to do that with precision.
Designing Futures
Speculative fiction is about asking what if. It takes the systems we know and pushes them further—into danger, into promise, into unfamiliar terrain. In writing my novel I asked what it would mean to live in a world where even memory and emotion could be edited, outsourced, upgraded.
That kind of storytelling forces you to reckon with design. With the systems behind the systems. And that lens has fed back into my UX practice. It’s made me more cautious. More curious. Less quick to assume that seamless is always good.
Tech design shapes the future, even in small ways. Storytelling reminds us to take that seriously. To imagine not just what the product does, but what kind of world it supports. Who it serves. Who it leaves out.
How to Bring Story into Your Design Practice
You don’t need to be a novelist to use narrative thinking in UX. Here are a few ways to start:
Map the emotional arc — Alongside your user journey maps, sketch what users might be feeling at each stage.
Name the turning points — Where is the user making a choice that really matters? Mark those as narrative beats.
Write the story first — Before wireframing, write out the experience like a short story: “A user needs X, but Y gets in the way...”
Tune the tone — Read your UI copy aloud. Does it match the mood of the moment?
Design consequences — Make sure every action has a clear, believable reaction.
Ask better questions — Not just "Is this usable?" but "Is this meaningful? Does this respect the user’s role in the story?"
Final Thoughts
We are not just building products. We are crafting experiences. And every experience is a kind of story—whether we design it that way or not.
Storytelling in tech isn’t about decoration. It’s about structure, intention, emotional integrity. It helps us move beyond conversion metrics and interface patterns into something more layered: engagement, trust, transformation.
For me, writing fiction has deepened my approach to UX. And designing for real people has made my fiction more grounded. The two aren’t so different. Both require empathy. Both reward attention. Both are, in the end, about understanding what it means to be human.
If we can design with that in mind, we might just build better stories—and better systems, too.