The importance of storytelling for Product Design — and for everything else.
Lately I've been consuming a lot of articles and videos (and books, and podcasts…) about how to give a talk, how to stand up and present ideas or data in front of an audience. According to Chris Anderson, the boss of TED Talks, in his book TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, you have to have an idea, a point; relevant highlights that support this idea; and last and most important, the connection with the audience through a story.
Not so long ago, my biggest task was to rebuild my Design portfolio, to make it interesting and memorable to recruiters. The key is a portfolio that includes a strong narrative about who you are as designer, to tell a story — and not consist of only a series of high-resolution images.
Same approach at job interviews: storytelling tactics can be easily applied to make a remarkable one. Instead of presenting everything as equal, spice up your presentation with emphasis on key learnings or challenges, help your interviewers relate to your experience.
The Bible and other religious books that have been around for thousands of years validate that as well — no one retains how many sheep they have to offer to their God that is specifically written, but instead retain content that appeals to their confirmation bias. Ancient myths and oral history traditions used stories like myths, legends and folklore to convey lessons that were critical for a culture’s survival.
And furthermore, that’s why we have a President named Trump. And Brexit. But let's not get politic.
Enough context, I think I already got to the point:
Storytelling is the basis for almost everything in our society.
Including Design
Going a little bit beyond Crafting a good user experience is like telling a good story. The product, or the service, is not the only touch point with your user, and cannot be a story itself, but as an element inside a narrative. The experience always starts before and ends after use a product or a service, that means that every story (and experience) has a shape with two axes: the time axis, whose actions take place over time; and the axis of tension, on how each action influences the user’s emotions.
Here's a regular user journey:
And that's Freytag’s Pyramid on a novel’s plots (Gustav Freytag, a 19th-century German novelist):
Freytag’s Pyramid reveals the structure of many stories, could be the base for any Disney movie.
Similar frameworks, right? Actually, both are the same. Memorable experiences and stories have the same structure. Using storytelling techniques help your product and the UX process in many aspects. Creating personas, mapping user journey, writing user stories, telling and selling your story right helps to bring in your stakeholders.
Stories are how we remember. We tend to forget bullet points (Robert McKee on HBR).
Remember of Don Norman's Emotional Design book and the three levels of design? He says that remarkable products and services appeal to us on a visceral, a behavioural and a reflective level. While the visceral level deals with the visual appeal; the behavioural level deals with use and usability; and the reflective level determines whether and how we process and remember and share an experience. It shouldn’t be surprising to see that the concept of a visual narrative found a natural home in the rich world of UX Design.
When we think about a service like Uber, which peaks impact us the most? The fact that the car is good (or not) and that you don't even need to touch your wallet when the ride is finished.
And what about the Cinderela story? She loses her crystal shoe and, in the end, lives happily ever after.
We basically remember the worst or the best moment (the most intense moment) and the end, for every story or service. People judge the product/service experience by it's peaks and how the journey ended, so if the product, the tangible part, is the only peack of our story, we can have problems. As experience designers, our goal shouldn’t only be to seek out and fix moments of frustration. That’s not only impossible, it’s also narrow-minded. If we think about the peak-end rule and the narrative charts we’ve been looking at, we can illustrate the value that peak moments have in insulating our designs from negative moments.
If we take a mobile app, for example, it probably makes sense to think about the main purpose at first and what problem it should solve. So the question about the why, the conflict you might solve and the user you serving. Applying a storytelling framework might help us to develop an overarching user journey starting with on-boarding, the main use of your app and a potential off-boarding. Being aware of the entire journey, mapping it out every potential touch-point might help to visualise the entire experience and present it in a comprehendible way.
Adding storytelling to our visual style and our content helps to create something that makes your users’ life delightful. The true beauty of a great design is not on the outside, it lies within the solution that your product provides.
