StoryVerse
Designing a world-building tool to help novelists with scaffolding their creativity.
For our Master's Capstone Project, my team explored the writing process for novelists and developed a design response that focuses on supporting writers with their world-building process.
Role
Product Designer
UW MHCID
Capstone Project
Timeline
Feb - Aug 2023
Team
Me, Suryaa, Nat, Carver
Novelists often face writer’s block and the daunting task of world-building, struggling to organize and retrieve the intricate details that make their stories cohesive. While AI writing tools can feel intrusive to the creative process, analog methods and scattered digital notes fail to support consistency, inspiration, or scalability across a novel’s development.
Informed by our generative research, we designed StoryVerse to combine notecards, maps, timelines, and an AI-powered Librarian into a cohesive world-building tool. The concept was well received by faculty and industry advisors, who appreciated its thoughtful feature set and support for the creative process—highlighting its potential as a distinctive co-pilot for writers.
Preview
Map mode affords flexible ways to create a digital map of a setting. Draw, upload, and scan, or build it in StoryVerse.
Notecards can be placed into the map so you can see where details live in a geographical context.
Surface the details of your Notecards through natural language with the AI Librarian and see them visualized in your map
Whiteboard mode helps you further define the relationships between notecards to create diagrams in a creative canvas.
A familiar writing environment, supercharged with the ability to create and access information as you write
Writing a novel is an arduous process that can be hindered by writer's block. We saw a unique opportunity to assist novelists in navigating these creative barriers.
Could AI serve as a supportive tool for fiction writers navigating creative barriers?
Writer’s block—defined as the inability to produce new material—can be mentally taxing and arise at various stages of the writing process. We set out to better understand where writers struggle most, in hopes of identifying pain points where thoughtful support—possibly even AI—could make a difference.
And how do novelists feel about the role of AI in creative writing?
Given the intense debate that generative AI has sparked in the writing community, we wanted to also understand novelists' actual perspectives to inform our design approach, rather than making assumptions about the technology's utility.
User Research
Findings
We spoke to 7 writers and 2 SMEs across genres—romance, mystery, sci-fi—including both AI skeptics and power users like a self-described AI prompt engineer.
Key questions from our generative research
Writers don’t need help writing—they need help around writing
Interviews revealed that writers—even those heavily experimenting with AI—don't see a need for help with the actual writing, but a clear opportunity emerged for tangential support.
Pivoting from writer’s block to world-building tools
Our research revealed a deeper need: rather than writer’s block, writers struggled more with sustaining their world-building, where current tools were patchwork solutions that didn’t fully support their process.
Define
Writers need intuitive design solutions that support world-building as a dedicated creative workflow, enabling richer, more coherent fictional worlds without disrupting their writing process.
Guiding Design Principles
To ensure a design that truly supports writers, we established four key principles that prioritize their needs and workflows. These principles served as a north star for our design decisions.
Storyboarding a writer’s journey with StoryVerse
Writing is a chaotic, non-linear process of weaving together disparate thoughts and ideas. Instead of forcing a rigid structure like other tools, StoryVerse is built to adapt to the writer's natural rhythm, embracing the chaos of creativity.
Structuring a Universe: Defining the Information Architecture
At the heart of StoryVerse are five interconnected elements: Notecards, Maps, Timeline, Manuscript, and The Librarian, which harmonize to support writers' non-linear creative workflows.
Writing a novel is an arduous process that can be hindered by writer's block. We saw a unique opportunity to assist novelists in navigating these creative barriers.
Establishing the core interaction model
To facilitate fluid transition between features without disrupting a writer's focus, I experimented with various low-fi sketch approaches, including re-sizable panels and collapsible sidebars, to optimize the user experience across different modes. This exploration allowed me to identify the most intuitive and flexible solutions.
Mid-fidelity wireframes
Moving to mid-fidelity wireframes, I explored each mode's screens in detail while mapping the holistic interaction flow between them. The wireflows below revealed potential usability issues—key elements shifted positions between modes, creating a disorienting experience that would confuse users navigating the interface.
Crafting StoryVerse’s Moodboard: Blending Editorial Elegance with Playful Authenticity
Our visual direction uses a classic editorial foundation to feel credible, yet remains modern and neutral to ensure content is the hero. Moments of injected quirkiness honor the writer's individual voice, creating an environment that's both professional and personal.
Evolving the UI Theme
Building upon the first version of our UI screen that Nat designed, I refined our UI further and implemented a new global navigation as shown in version 2. Working together, we then fine-tuned it into version 3 with our new project home structure.
Final Experience
StoryVerse is a flexible workspace that supports the creative process from spark to final draft. It lets creators map out ideas on a freeform canvas, then organize them into a structured narrative, transforming chaotic thoughts into a cohesive story.
StoryVerse Overview
StoryVerse is a world-building tool for writers that offers dynamic exploration of story elements through maps, timelines, and more. Its general layout is as follows:
Notecards facilitate a writers’ note creation and management process in a flexible way, allowing for convenient organization.
They can represent any kind of story element or research, and are accessible to reference and manipulate throughout the story development process.
Map mode affords flexible ways to create a digital map of a setting. Draw, upload, and scan, or build it in StoryVerse.
We found that some writers create these visual aids to account for spatial details, sometimes employing the help of other artists.
Notecards can be placed into the map so you can see where details live in a geographical context.
Writers often need to visualize these geographic details to aid with consistency and track details like character paths.
Surface the details of your Notecards through natural language with the AI Librarian and see them visualized in your map
Certain authors must spatially monitor their main characters' paths for consistency, including factors like journey duration and terrain encountered.
Whiteboard mode helps you further define the relationships between notecards to create diagrams in a creative canvas.
We found many writers using analog techniques to map out relationship details, with some expressing that many current tools weren’t designed with their needs in mind.
With the aid of widgets, templates, and more, it’s easy to create diagrams like character webs and timelines.
Many fiction writers utilize analog techniques to diagrammatically visualize their world, plots, and character details.
A familiar writing environment, supercharged with the ability to create and access information as you write
The AI Librarian offers dynamic ways of surfacing Notecards and other details from everything you add while the Tabs and right-click menus offer many opportunities for writers to stay in their writing flow state while also making and referencing notes.