Let me start with a confession.

For most of my career, I designed products around one question:

How can we help users do something?

Open the app. Complete an action. Get a result. I spent years shaving taps off flows and words off forms.

Good work. Worth doing.

But somewhere along the way I started asking a second question — and it changed everything:

How can we help users become someone?

That's what I want to talk about today.

UX is more than usability

When we say "storytelling" in product design, we usually mean the marketing team.

Brand videos. Launch copy. A clever empty state.

I want to argue for something deeper.

Storytelling can be the structure through which users interpret every interaction with your product.

Not decoration. Not gamification. Meaning.

Because here's the thing every product already does, whether you designed it or not:

• A budgeting app teaches people they're managing numbers.

• A to-do app teaches people they're completing tasks.

• A fitness app teaches people they're closing rings.

These mental models go invisible fast. And once they're invisible, they quietly run your users' motivation.

The problem with transactional products

Most productivity apps accidentally frame every interaction as a transaction.

Run that loop enough times and users start asking one question:

"What's the reward?"

External motivation works.

Until it doesn't.

Once the novelty fades, you need bigger and bigger incentives just to hold engagement steady. Behavioral psychology has shown this for decades: extrinsic rewards are great at starting a behavior. They're weak at sustaining an identity.

The Hero's Journey isn't about heroes

This is where I went looking for a framework and ended up reading Joseph Campbell.

The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Campbell, 1949).

I wasn't after fantasy. I was after structure.

And the structure is startling — almost every enduring story moves the same way:

• An ordinary world

• A call toward something greater

• Small early wins

• Rising challenges

• Transformation

• Returning as someone changed

That's not just how stories work.

That's how people grow.

Designing a world instead of an interface

A few months ago I was stuck on what should have been a trivial naming decision.

Tasks? Chores? Activities?

None of them fit.

Because none of them described what we were actually helping children do. We weren't building a better task manager. We were designing something to help kids become more responsible, more confident, eventually more financially independent.

So I stopped reading productivity blogs and started reading Homer.

One question reframed the whole product:

What if users weren't completing tasks inside an app?

What if they were progressing through a world?

Watch what that shift does:

• Tasks became quests.

• Parents became mentors.

• Points became experience.

• Saving money became building a future.

Not one line of functionality changed.

The interpretation changed completely.

Language isn't cosmetic. Language defines the world users believe they're standing in.

Storytelling creates identity

Here's one of the biggest mistakes in gamification: we reward actions.

Great games rarely do that. Great games reward identity.

Compare:

"You completed 10 chores."

with

"You're becoming someone people can rely on."

The first celebrates an event.

The second reinforces a self-image.

And people work hard to stay consistent with who they believe they are. That's why habits stick. Nobody runs every morning because they love suffering. They run because at some point they started thinking:

"I'm a runner."

Identity outlasts motivation.

Every screen should answer one question

So now, when I design, I've swapped the question I ask.

Not:

"What should happen next?"

Instead:

"What story is the user telling themselves right now?"

Because every screen either reinforces that story or weakens it.

If onboarding says "Complete your profile," you're asking for data.

If it says "Begin your journey," you're inviting participation.

Same interaction.

Completely different meaning.

Designing progress beyond numbers

Most products measure progress with numbers. XP. Coins. Levels. Streaks.

Metrics matter. But numbers rarely become memories.

Stories do.

That's why I now design progress around meaningful milestones instead of endless accumulation.

Instead of another badge that reads:

"30 Tasks Completed"

imagine telling someone:

"You didn't give up when it got hard."

One measures activity. The other interprets growth.

Users remember the interpretation. Not the statistic.

Worldbuilding is a UX responsibility

When designers hear "worldbuilding," they picture games.

I think every product builds a world.

The question was never whether your product has one. It's whether you built it on purpose.

Your terminology. Your progression. Your feedback. Your visual language. Even your empty states.

Together they tell users what world they've walked into — and who they can become inside it.

Every product is quietly answering two questions at all times:

Where am I?

Who am I becoming?

The best products answer both, consistently.

Storytelling is not about fantasy

You don't need dragons. You don't need magic. You don't even need a game.

Storytelling as a UX framework isn't about fiction. It's about giving users a meaningful lens for their own progress.

The best products don't just help people accomplish things.

They help people reinterpret themselves.

That shift — from designing interactions to designing transformation — is where storytelling stops being a narrative device and becomes a design system.

And I think it's one of the most overlooked responsibilities we have.

We're not just designing interfaces.

We're inviting people into a world. And if we do it well, they leave a little different than when they arrived.

References

Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1–62). Academic Press.

Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1–21.

Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behaviour. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

Homer. (1996). The Odyssey (R. Fagles, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published ca. 8th century BCE)

McAdams, D. P. (1993). The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. William Morrow.

Norman, D. A. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. Basic Books.

Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychological Review, 114(4), 843–863.