CHAPTER 8
Rules of Thumb
“The true writer is one for whom technique has become, as it is for the pianist, second nature.”
—John Gardner,
The Art of Fiction
A few years ago, I stormed into a CEO’s office and proudly proclaimed my sudden epiphany: “We have no story. We need a story!” I continued. “So...what’s the story?” This was the start-up that I have fictionalized as FitCounter in this book. Luckily, the CEO still talks to me today. But at that moment, he turned bright red and asked me to leave his office. Stories are powerful tools. When used well, they make things better. But use them carefully.
As I learned that day, no one likes being told that his product and something he’s worked for years to build has no story. What people do like are products that are successful, customers who are happy, and metrics that help board members sleep at night.
Once you start working with story, you will weave it into your practice in many ways, shapes, and forms. You will wield story like a mighty sword as you break away and rebuild how you hope people will think about and experience your products. But remember—swords can hurt. What eventually worked for this CEO and most of my clients and teams ever since is not telling, but showing. If you’re fixing something that’s broken, use story not just to show what is, but also what can be. And if you’re building something from scratch, use story to make some magic.
Here are some rules of thumb to guide you on your journey.
Stories Are Character-Driven
Remember, in the case of the stories you build, whether they are visual, verbal, analog, or digital, your main character must be the person on the other end, i.e., the person experiencing the story. Everything you want that person to experience must drive the story forward. If it doesn’t, you cut it out. Also remember that the characters in your stories are not fictional or hypothetical dream customers who don’t exist in real life. They are based on real people, real goals, real behaviors, and real stories. If you don’t have access to real people or real data, you can make it up—as long as you validate it later.
Characters Are Goal-Driven
It is your job to drive your character’s story forward. It is also your job to help that person meet his or her goal. There is nothing worse than a story with no purpose, whether it is for people in an audience watching a movie or for the people using your product. When crafting your story, make sure to move your character forward and to help him (and your business) meet some kind of goal.
Goals Can Change
Humans are fickle. In romantic comedies, the protagonist often starts out with a simple goal: to end up with the guy who is no good for her. Over time, she will probably learn that what she really needs to do is be with the nice guy. That said, what you want and what you need aren’t always obvious in the moment and that’s OK.
In 2006, people said that they wanted an iPod that made phone calls. In 2007, instead they got a new way to communicate. If you think you know what a character’s goal is, consider asking “why” as many times as you can until you uncover the real goal at the core of your story. You want an iPod that makes phone calls? Why? Because it would be convenient. Why? Because you only want to carry one device. Why?...and so forth.
Also know that while goals can change, characters won’t always know what their goal is until you uncover it for them. I have yet to meet someone who tells me that his goal is to communicate with the world around him. But I’ve worked on enough products where that is undoubtedly the main character’s goal. Sometimes, it’s your job to remind people and get them on the right track.
Goals Are Measurable
Imagining stories that help people meet their goals isn’t simply an exercise in creativity. Goals in the stories you create can and should be measured, both for your characters and your business. You can do this by measuring qualitatively (in-person conversations and observational studies) and quantitatively (surveys and analytics)—or using a combination of the two. You can measure actions, and you can measure sentiment, ideally both. Doing so requires measuring what people think and do, both of which are essential for stories to move forward and help characters meet their goals. Observing stories in action and measuring goal completion is how you know you’re on the right track.
Conflict Is Key
Once upon a time, there was a wooden doll named Pinocchio. He wanted to become a real human boy. So he went out, bought some magic, and transformed into a boy. The end.
Easy, right?
Of course not.
Stories wouldn’t be stories without conflict. They would be a series of events—stuff happening. Just as stuff happening doesn’t make for good stories, it definitely doesn’t make for engaging experiences.
Every character and every goal in a story should always have some kind of force working in opposition to it. Conflict makes everything that happens in a story more suspenseful and ultimately rewarding, whether you experience a story by watching it from the outside or by participating in the story, as you do when you engage with products and services.
Designing stories for conflict helps you determine what should happen next as you strive for balance between a character trying to attain a goal (or set of goals) and running into obstacles along the way. When building products around stories, it is not your job to place obstacles in the way, but instead to consider them and plan around them as you help your protagonist jump hurdles, have a smooth ride, and ultimately meet his and your business goals.
Math Is Fun
Here’s a formula you didn’t learn in math class. I use it all the time to make things better.
A × B = C
A represents forward momentum, which is the force that a character exerts to meet his or her goal with your product or service. B is the force or forces that act against your character and get in the way of that person using your product to meet his goal. If you multiply the forces, you get C—and that’s what will ultimately help the climax or the way that the customer uses your product to resolve this conflict (see Figure 8.1).
FIGURE 8.1
Opposing forces collide to form a climax or a peak.
I use the iPhone as an example to illustrate this law because it’s so easy to refer to when I’m in meetings or too tired to think (which is often). If Force A is that you want a 2-in-1 device so that you can communicate better. And Force B is that you don’t want to buy a new device or are afraid that it will be difficult to use. Then C is what wins: a 3-in-1 device that works like magic and is easy to use. It’s so simple to use that Steve Jobs ordered 4,000 lattes from Starbucks at the tap of a screen around 3/4 of the way through his 2007 keynote presentation. He didn’t just say that it was a 3-in-1 device that worked like magic. He showed how 3-in1 was magic.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Storylines are linear. The products you build are not. They involve complex systems, decision points, branching paths, interactions, feedback loops, dependencies, and infinite permutations. One question I’m often asked is how and why you would use such a simple, linear framework like story to envision and plan interactive products and services that are anything but simple. Shouldn’t we plan for something that resembles more of a Choose Your Own Adventure novel that you might have read when you were young? Or a modern corollary—video games?
While complex products have much in common with complex entertainment media like novelty books and video games, defining complexity as branching rather than linear is taking a system-centric approach. If you want to engage someone using your product, you want to design for the human experience, not the system. Systems are complex. Human experiences are linear. That’s because experiences happen as a series of moments in time. Until flux capacitors and time-shifting Delorians are a reality, time is unfortunately linear.
Whether someone using your product chooses to sign up now or sign up later, visit this page or that page, perform this task or that task, and do so successfully or hit a roadblock or error, the constant for that person is time. As such, when using story to assess, envision, and plan for intended experiences of use, embrace complexity by thinking linearly, one story at a time. Each character, each use case, each scenario, the happy paths, the critical edge cases, they each get their own story. Different stories might intersect and have common features and plot points (see Figure 8.2). And seeing the intersections and commonalties can be valuable. But each story lives on its own and should be given due diligence. Something like a flow chart is wonderful for mapping out a system from a birds-eye view. Stories are a map of the human experience, from the human view. Yes, in reality, your users will choose their own adventures. And yes, you can and should plan ahead so that those adventures are as engaging as can be.
FIGURE 8.2
Different storymaps comingle in an ecosystem of stories, each unique to a different character user type.
Make Things Go Boom!
Story structure works the way it does because humans need a little something near the end of an experience to help them pay attention, remember, learn from, and see value in what they just sat through or did. Or maybe humans evolved to need this something because of millennia of communicating through story.
No matter why, the fact remains: If you want to have maximum impact and help people and businesses meet their goals, make things go boom!
This boom can be as seemingly insignificant as a little animation on a tiny screen or as big as a voucher for a free flight because someone sat on the tarmac on your company’s airplane for three hours and complained to your customer service team via Twitter. As long as that little something is significant, delightful, or impactful, the experience will be memorable and the story repeatable…maybe even never-ending.