Interim UX and UI designer (paternity cover) for a stealth-mode startup building an interactive story creation platform. The role required rapidly understanding a complex underlying technical framework and meaningfully advancing the usability of the MVP creator tool.
The challenge
Significantly progress the usability of the MVP creator tool with respect to the underlying technical framework — within an interim engagement and with limited onboarding time.
Design process
Trialling many interaction paradigms to find the most flexible, useful and powerful approach for the story canvas. The core challenge was reconciling the expressive freedom the platform needed with the structured data model underneath it. Iterative prototyping — some discarded after a day, some developed further — drove toward a solution that felt natural to storytellers while remaining technically robust.
The story canvas view organises narrative beats spatially, with a simulation mode that steps through the story timeline day by day. The event panel surfaces actions and activities that can be interacted with at each point.
Impact
Significantly developed the core creator tool user flows and UI through iterative and experimental product design development of key functionality.