Nobody knows how old the art of storytelling is; before writing and hieroglyphics, stories were passed down orally. One thing people do know is that the need for stories, both telling them and hearing them, is as primal as the need to communicate. Before novels, plays, podcasts, movies, radio shows and epics, storytelling itself was a means to help people understand themselves and each other.
Storytelling online has evolved beyond the blog. It has become essential to the everyday digital experience. Especially with the rise of social media and easy access to the World Wide Web, our personal lives, experiences, and thoughts have become part of a larger storytelling paradigm.
Being able to tell a good story and charming the audience with content is now a valuable marketable skill to have. To no one’s surprise, there are apps available to help people hear, listen or read others’ stories or experiences as well as tell their own. This list describes a few apps that specifically honor and enable the craft of storytelling.
1. Super
This social media slash storytelling app has a simple premise: Tell your story by putting words on a picture. Users can use multiple pictures to write “strips” or just use one picture and a few words. This is good for people developing the skill of storytelling by saying a lot with few words.
2. The Moth
This audio storytelling app is great for hearing recordings of people telling stories live at different gatherings held by The Moth storytelling collective. The Moth has chapters in most large cities of the US where it hosts events for people to gather and hear or share stories. With the app, you can be a one-man audience as you listen to someone telling their story, making it feel personal and convenient as you listen from the comforts of your home via your mobile device.
3. Cowbird
Cowbird is a public library of human experiences and a platform that offers a simple set of storytelling tools for anyone to share snippets of their lives. The content has a mixed focus on images, audio, video and text. The most beautiful and elegant part about Cowbird is that it works, in some way, as a portal into the little moments of people’s lives. Moments important enough for them to share it with the world and moments from which we can learn to appreciate humanity as raw as it comes.
4. PhotoBlender
A picture tells a thousand words and as the gurus of storytelling have come to understand, there are certain emotions that only a picture alone can evoke in the audience. PhotoBlender is an app that helps users tell visual stories through edited photography. It is more than just a photo editing app. It is a great tool to enhance the visual experience of storytelling. The app lets users blend different images, superimpose photos or manipulate pictures so they tell a beautiful, unique story through images.
5. The Atavist
The Atavist Magazine produces one blockbuster nonfiction story per month and the experience of every story is as exciting as watching a film in the cinema. With years of acquired expertise in journalism and writing, no one else has captured the art of storytelling quite as well as these guys have. Atavist also offers a software platform with powerful tools to support custom design and multimedia so that anyone can create their own elegant online magazine.
6. Steller
This visual storytelling app lets users read and tell stories laid out in a style that allows for photos, text, and video to be included. Users can organize their words and visuals in a variety of ways, and the end result looks like a picture book complete with pages that turn. Not to mention, Steller has worked directly with Facebook to offer users the possibility to build and share stories as Facebook “Instant Articles”, the latest favorite tool of publishers and content marketers.
The success of a digital product depends a lot on the type of stories you tell with it. Creating great user experiences with an app is nothing but a storytelling challenge to guide your users to where they want to be, exactly when they want to be there. With high fidelity interactive prototypes made with Proto.io, you can test the journey your users will take when they interact with your app. Intrigued? Sign up today for a free 15-day trial.
