Here’s why you should script a Tarantino movie when designing interactions

Luan Ralid
5 min readFeb 2, 2022

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Any decision made by a designer plays a significant role in the whole interaction between user and product, and this goes way further than you might think.

Probably the company you work or want to work for has a super edgy design team that unfortunately doesn’t have enough visual sense to feel the lousy interface or even notice the big problems on the whole user experience of their designs.

Au contraire of the absolute precision in the amount of emojis in each LinkedIn post where someone asks which user interface you prefer; number one or two…

It feels that hardly anyone out there has the gut to pursue more extraordinary feelings in their interactions no more.

Yet you feel the worst usability pain of them all, the feeling that no one gives a shit about the fucking experience.

Fine, so go Tarantino on it.

Create incredibly prolonged and nonsense audiovisual interactions that somehow create an immersive and high-quality ambient.

The user journey should be a fantastic movie that impresses the user’s eyes and grabs his attention with fluidness, exploring different senses and creating a mix of feelings that rents a modern duplex house in the user’s head.

Yes, “different senses.” The human ability to interact with reality goes far beyond just seeing and touching a screen; as you might have noticed so far, it’s impossible to deactivate the ability to hear or feel or any other sense you have.

Ok, maybe with a ton of meditation or the use of some organic substance, you can do it.

But we don’t need to go into that. By the way, it’s possible to learn how to meditate with many apps you can find on the App Store, but absolutely no one beats the high-grade interaction that Calm creates.

As a hypocritical designer and yet as an avid user of the app, I must say that Calm is the only app that I like to use — besides the native iOS Compass app.

It is just a meditation, sleep, and relaxation app, available on App Store and Google Play. The app uses narrators and storytelling to immerse you in a calm journey. They say their dedication introduces you to the excellent benefits of mindfulness.

The app’s landing page is the part that has impressed me the most. And motivated the writing of this you, dear sir or madam are reading.

It shows his geniuses by its visuals and function; it can fit any user’s needs during the screens that he navigates, independent of the lack of ability to use the product, yet it’s majestically beautiful.

Someway is in the line of a movie; it brings actual video sequences blended into the interface that dictates the pace of the immersive audio, the color palette, and the gradients.

Ok, so let us quickly analyze at least the beginning of the script:

1. The primordial thought; I imagine something like the user looking up and saying, “oh yes, I want to get calmer.”

2. The action; searches for “Calm” an selects it (excellent branding tho).

3. The suggestion; “take a deep breath” is what the splash screen says, so you just do it

4. First scene; feels the literary meaning of the word “calm” converted in specific vibrations that the sound of the landscape video on the header produces throughout the preferably metal but sometimes plastic build of the phone that holds in hands.

5. Act two; selects the content and maybe listens to the actually calmful intro “Welcome to the Daily Calm” or any other video or program that the app offers.

The narrative involves calming objectives and probably reaches the goal.

Getting calmer has all about lowering your frequencies, and I do mean in a hippie way but also in a technical way.

Besides that, some may prefer deeper sounds and lower frequencies to feel calmer, and others may pick higher frequencies. The application sometimes offers different narrators with different vibes and voice tones for the same guided session.

The app also supports the user’s ability to customize the entire interface by changing the background scene around which the app is all involved.

Whatever suits you, it can go from a hollow golden landscape view to a grayish heavy thunderstorm.

Every scene has its vibrant sound in a different frequency; each one has a different impact on your session as it induces other brainwave states.

In conclusion;

Yeah, I liked the app’s visuals and would be happy to see more high-class design experiences on products like this one. I know it takes a lot to put something like this into practice, but come on, it’s possible.

We should start betting more on immersive design; so that’s why you should watch more Tarantino films and script a movie when designing interactions.

But that’s my view, what is yours on this one?

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Luan Ralid