Suspenseful design: Engaging emotionally with complex applications through compelling narratives

Although story is a critical component of many games, stories and storytelling techniques are rarely used in other kinds of applications. In this paper, we introduce a framework for constructing suspenseful, narrative-based software applications. While many interface designs aim to reduce confusion and complexity, we introduce an alternative for inherently complex software by engaging people through narrative. We describe a framework for incorporating suspenseful elements into an interface and apply it to a proto-type of a suspenseful tutorial. We conducted a controlled experiment that compared this suspenseful tutorial to two more traditional tutorial designs. Participants who used the narrative-based tutorial reported greater feelings of hopeful suspense, which previous studies have found to be correlated with enjoyment and interest.