Experience-First Story Design
Design the user's emotional sequence before perfecting the machinery
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 97%
Hillis learned at Disney to treat a designed environment as a story: a sequence in which people enter, orient themselves, form expectations, encounter uncertainty, reach a resolution, and know when the experience is over. This lens shifts attention from the machinery alone to the user's understandable emotional journey. He applied it to the 10,000 Year Clock by changing a passive clock into one that acknowledges visitors: it displays the previous visit, catches up when wound, and lets the visitor take a rubbing of the date. The mechanism is practical rather than decorative. A technically durable object lasts only if people care about it, while a compelling experience can motivate them to preserve and retell its story.
Origin
Hillis learned the approach while working as a Disney Fellow and vice president of Imagineering, then applied it to the 10,000 Year Clock.
Core principles
- 01People relate to an experience as a sequence and narrative
- 02A user should know where they are, what to expect, and when the experience is complete
- 03Emotional connection can matter more than technical elegance
- 04Technology should acknowledge and involve the person using it
- 05A correct experience story can survive fixable technical errors
How to run it
- 1
Choose the experiencing person
Define who encounters the product or place and what they bring into that encounter.
Pro tip Design for a concrete visit rather than an abstract audience.
Watch out Do not begin with a diagram of components alone.
- 2
Write the sequence
Map what the person sees and does from arrival through completion.
Pro tip Include transitions, not only headline moments.
Watch out A collection of impressive features is not yet a story.
- 3
Mark emotional beats
Identify where the person feels oriented, confused, frightened, curious, rewarded, or finished.
Pro tip Use emotional changes to reveal missing design cues.
Watch out Do not assume technical clarity creates emotional connection.
- 4
Make participation matter
Let the system visibly respond to the person's presence or action so the experience is not indifferent to them.
Pro tip Create a consequence that could exist only because the person participated.
Watch out A passive spectacle may be easier to forget or neglect.
- 5
Leave a story-bearing trace
Give the person a memory, artifact, or retellable event that extends the experience beyond the encounter.
Pro tip Simple personal artifacts can carry more meaning than elaborate merchandise.
Watch out A souvenir disconnected from the experience becomes promotion rather than story.
- 6
Reconcile story and mechanics
Return to the technical design and ensure it reliably supports every important beat in the experience.
Pro tip Treat story errors as seriously as engineering errors.
Watch out A strong narrative cannot excuse machinery that is unsafe or nonfunctional.
In the wild
Hillis changed the clock so it does not simply tick in a mountain while ignoring visitors. It shows when the previous person came, catches up to the current time when a new visitor winds it, and provides a place to make a rubbing of that visit's date.
→ The visitor becomes part of the clock's story and leaves with a unique physical trace of the experience.
Hillis initially focused on technical constraints and suggested selling the simulator when a custom chip could not meet Jobs's schedule. In retrospect, he concluded that Jobs's crucial strength was understanding how people would relate to the Macintosh, even while being wrong about technical details.
→ The correct relationship story mattered more than technical errors that could later be fixed.
Common mistakes
Starting with the block diagram
A component map explains machinery but may say nothing about what the user sees, feels, or understands.
Building an indifferent system
If the artifact does not respond to a visitor, the visitor has less reason to care whether it survives.
Treating story as decoration
In this method, story determines the sequence and interaction rather than being copy added after engineering.
Is it for you?
Best for
Designers of products, services, spaces, and artifacts where human experience determines adoption or preservation.
Not ideal for
Invisible infrastructure whose users never encounter a meaningful interaction sequence.
From the transcript
“when Disney like designs a theme park they don't think of it so much as a piece of architecture or a map they think of…”
“that way of thinking of things as a understandable emotional experience that connects with someone it's very different than sort of looking at right you…”
“if it's ticking away in a mountain some place and it doesn't care if you exist then why should you care if it exists”
From the episode
#782: Legendary Inventor Danny Hillis (Plus Kevin Kelly) — Unorthodox Lessons from 400+ Patents, Solving the Impossible, Real Al vs. “AI”, Hiring Richard Feynman, Working with Steve Jobs, Creating Parallel Computing, and Much More
Danny Hillis