by Donna Lichaw
Without this falling action, the story is either not complete enough or the target market isn’t right for the product. As with all plot points, if you use real data to build your story, it will be that much more powerful. If you posit this falling action as a hypothesis, you should test it with real people. For example, if you think that people would want this device, but aren’t sure, test your story out by talking to or surveying your customers or testing a prototype in the wild (more on story validation in Chapter 7).
NOTE DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT PERSONAS?
If you find that the concept stories for different personas are drastically different from one another, you can draft them each separately. Likely, you’ll be able to draft them together and note the differences. Those differences will come in handy as you move into drafting origin and usage stories (discussed in Chapters 4, “Origin Stories,” and 5, “Usage Stories”).
End
Simply put, at the end, your customers can see themselves meeting their goal. At this point, your high-level business goal or mission must also resonate with the story. For example, if your business’s mission is to help people find love, and your user’s goal is to find love, great. The story works for both your user and the business. Even if your business’s goal is to sell ad space, and your user’s goal is to learn something, your story works for both. All of the plot points that lead to this moment make sure that it all comes together.
With the iPhone, the character knows that she can get her music and phone all in one place and communicate with the world around her (see Figure 3.4). And at the very highest level, Apple helps people communicate better. This mission is lofty, which is good. In the following chapters, we’ll discuss how to get people to start using your product.
FIGURE 3.4
The concept story model for the first iPhone.
Avoiding the Anticlimactic
Six months before the iPhone 1 announcement, Apple filed a patent for a different kind of device—one that looked and would function drastically differently than what they would eventually launch.1 The patent drawings for what could have been the first iPhone were a logical solution to a known problem. The device was essentially an iPod that made phone calls (see Figure 3.5).
FIGURE 3.5
A diagram from Apple’s patent application for what could have been the first iPhone.
If you lay it out like a story, you can see that the prototype illustrated in the patent specifications is anticlimactic (see Figure 3.6). Literally, it lacks a climax:
• Exposition: I love my iPod; I love my mobile phone.
• Inciting Incident/Problem: I don’t love carrying two devices, and I wish I could have my iPod and phone all in one.
• Rising Action: iPhone to the rescue!
• End: I now have a way to have my iPod and phone in one device.
This story lacks gravitas or dignity. It has a structure, but when you visually assess the story as a diagram, you can see that the structure isn’t very tall. Both the diagram and the concept for what could have been the first iPhone lack two key plot points that give stories their height: crisis and climax. The story is so flat that Steve Jobs mocked the prototype by jokingly announcing a product that looked very similar to the prototype before unveiling the actual iPhone during the 2007 keynote.
Our brains don’t like flat. Our brains need structure in order to get excited about things before, during, and after experiencing something, whether the experience involves thinking about or actually using the thing.
FIGURE 3.6
The anticlimactic concept story for what could have been the first iPhone.
Contrasting what could have been with what actually became the first iPhone helps you see how concept stories aren’t just ideas, but rather stories embodied in the things you build.
A simple solution, an iPhone that made phone calls, was flat.
A climactic solution, an iPhone that did everything, worked like “magic.”
One was a 2-in-1 device, the other 3-in-1. One helped you play music and make phone calls, the other was a communication powerhouse.
Supporting the Story
“It’s easy to come up with something pointless. But in any good storytelling, every scene has a function and a purpose and a point. If it doesn’t, you cut it out.”
—Vince Gilligan,
Creator: Breaking Bad
The conceptual story of the first iPhone bolstered the entire keynote presentation that Steve Jobs delivered. But the story wasn’t just a marketing pitch or shiny packaging—it drove everything from what the product requirements were to how the iPhone worked.
And more importantly: concept stories don’t just help you figure out how to talk about a product, but how to build the product.
There was a good reason why the iPhone launched with fancy animation but no cut-and-paste functionality. Its concept story necessitated an advanced presentation in order to embody the device’s value proposition, like communication-enabling apps and a touchscreen. And in order for the touchscreen to be user-friendly (which Palm Treo touchscreens were not), Apple’s strategy was to employ animation and cutting-edge technology that enabled people to tap, rather than to interact with their device using a stylus.
Animation supported the story. Cut-and-paste did not.
All of the marketing in the world cannot grow a business or a product line that doesn’t deliver on the story that using the device promises.
NOTE THE EARLY TOUCHSCREENS FLOPPED
If you ever used a Palm Pilot or Treo phone, you’ll recall how difficult it was to use a touchscreen without a stylus. It was hard to tap the right touch target on a screen, and there was a delay in the system giving you feedback that you just pressed something. It was easy to get lost from screen to screen and equally difficult to navigate around the system. Palm Pilots and touchscreen smartphones were a novel idea, but they didn’t have a huge market, nor were they in high demand. They simply weren’t easy to use, and that wasn’t a very good story.
Mapping a Concept Story
There are a few different times you might want to map out a concept story for your product. For example, let’s say you are working on a brand new product or feature. You could map out a concept story in order to brainstorm or define your product from scratch. Or you could map the story out in order to assess whether or not an existing idea was any good or could possibly engage your target audience.
Let’s say you’re not working on an entirely new product, but are instead working on a marketing strategy, user flow, app, or website for an existing product (more in Chapters 4 and 5). In that case, before you got deep in the weeds, you would first map out a concept story so that you and your team fully understood what your product was, as well as its core value proposition. Doing so would help you ensure that those elements were incorporated and communicated in each and every story you mapped out thereafter.
In order to map out your concept story, you must answer these questions by plotting them onto your narrative arc.
• Exposition: The current state of things:
• Who is your target customer?
• What’s good in her world as it relates to your product or service?
• What is her big goal as it relates to your product or service?
• Inciting Incident/Problem:
• What is her problem or pain point?
• Rising Action: The name of the product
• What is the name of your product?
• What type of product is it?
• Crisis: The competition
• What does the competition look like?
• What mental hurdles might keep her from adopting your solution?
• Climax/Resolution: The value
• What will help her resolve her problem and overcome a crisis moment or resistance?
• What’s your product’s primary value proposition or differentiator?
• Falling Action: The takeaway
• W
hat do you want people to think, feel, or envision after learning about your product?
• End:
• What happens when the user meets her goal?
• This is where the business meets a high-level goal or fulfills its mission, too. What’s the business goal? How will you know you’re on the right path?
As you can see with the Slack concept story, much like with the first iPhone, there is always a simple solution to every story, which can look like a straight line. People want to communicate and collaborate? So give them a better communication and collaboration tool. However, while you might want to design solutions that are simply better than whatever else is out there, “better” isn’t always enough. Having a product be “simple” isn’t always the most compelling or motivating story.
With Slack, you see something that maps out well within a structurally sound story. The company could have built an online messaging platform instead that was “easier to use” than email, for example. Often, clients and stakeholders on projects ask—what’s our requirement? Make it “easy to use!” Or what’s the problem? “Oh, our product is difficult to use.” But “easy to use” is a pretty boring story when difficulty isn’t really the problem.
An Example: Slack
Here’s how you would map out the concept story for the online collaboration tool, Slack (see Figure 3.7). The answers to the questions are in italics.
• Exposition: The current state of things
• Who is your target customer? Busy professionals
• What’s good in their world as it relates to your product or service? Communication and collaboration at work is easier and happening more than ever before. They’ve got more tools to get their job done—i.e., email, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, instant messaging, video chat, online project management software with built-in messaging—a plethora of ways to get in touch, stay in touch, communicate, share, and collaborate with their team.
• What is their general goal as it relates to your product or service? To communicate and collaborate with a group of people.
• Inciting Incident/Problem:
• What is their problem or pain point? Communication and collaboration is a pain. While it’s easier and more accessible than ever, it’s still difficult to keep track of everything or keep it all in one place. This means that what should be easier ends up being harder, wasting their time and money.
• Rising Action: The name of the product
• What is the name of your product? Slack.
• What type of a product is it? An online collaboration tool.
• Crisis: The competition
• What does the competition look like? Free online services like Gmail or IM. Existing services that people might already pay for like Basecamp. There’s a very long list here.
• What mental hurdles might keep them from adopting your solution? What, sign up for another online service? Ack. No.
• Climax/Resolution: The value
• What will help them solve their problem and overcome a crisis moment or resistance? What’s your product’s primary value proposition or differentiator? Unlike the competition, Slack is a one-stop solution. Have your communication in one place. And the best part: they can access it all anywhere, anytime, from their desktop, web browser, phone, or tablet.
• Falling Action: The takeaway
• What do you want people to think, feel, or envision after learning about your product? They imagine themselves using Slack with their teammates…and maybe never using email again. That would be cool.
• End:
• This is where the users meet their goal. To communicate and collaborate with a group of people.
• Oh, and it’s where the business meets its high-level goal, too. What’s the business goal? Broadly, to help people better communicate and collaborate with a group.
FIGURE 3.7
The concept story for Slack. This is both the story that people hear when they hear about Slack through newspaper articles or word of mouth, as well as the story they remember once they start using the product and experience its value.
In fact, plenty of products aren’t easy to use, but they have such a solid concept story behind them that customers love them. When you build a concept story using this framework, it requires you to meticulously assess and identify the root of a user or potential customer’s problem so that you can effectively design a solution that not only gets people excited, but also maps out how their brains see the world.
Finding the Concept Story at FitCounter
NOTE FICTION THY NAME IS FITCOUNTER
“The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”2
Although FitCounter is based on my own experiences with real companies and clients, it is solely a product of my imagination. It is not a real company, nor a real product. However, as a case study throughout the book, I will write it as if FitCounter were a real company, using details and facts that might make it seem real.
When I first started working with FitCounter,3 a health and fitness start-up, it had a really great idea and a noble, if not vague, mission: to help people get up-to-the-minute information and news about fitness, sports, and training. Initially, it started out as a Web and mobile-based fitness and workout tracker to help customers track their runs and workouts, but unfortunately it didn’t have much success in an already saturated market. FitCounter did, however, produce these great, little, timely exercise, fitness, and health-related videos that people loved. Anytime there was a new trend in fitness, they were on it.
The year before I started working with the company, it decided to realign its tracking tool and revenue model around a new approach: FitCounter would become a content provider, and hopefully, people would sign up and pay for access to its content. Some people signed up, but very few people paid. Things were not looking good.
The problem was that while the free videos got lots of traffic and views, very few website visitors signed up to become members, and even fewer of the members paid for premium access. Although many video content providers, such as YouTube or CNN, use advertising to build revenue from free content, advertising was not an option in this case. The board and investors did not want the business to get into advertising. Software as a service—that’s what we were asked to build, not an ad-driven content platform.
If you’re at all confused about this business model, imagine how confused website and app store visitors were. They didn’t understand what the product was, why they should sign up, and what paying for a service would get them. The business was pursuing a freemium software as a service revenue model, where you try a product out for free at first, love it so much that you use it a lot, and then either pay to be able to use it more frequently or to unlock premium features or services.
But while the business saw a product that people could use, visitors just saw content. And visitors expected this content to be free, like the content they could find on YouTube. Why pay for access when there was probably a decent alternative out there that was free? We had to figure out how to engage users so that they would not only use the product, but also see the value in it and eventually upgrade. If we couldn’t figure this out, the business would fail.
What we needed, we eventually learned, was a story—to drive the business, the team, and our potential customers. Actually, we needed a concept story.
The story of FitCounter is a perfect example of making the story fit the users. While FitCounter had a hard time acquiring new users, it did have a core group of devoted, paying customers—we called them “superfans.” They loved the product. But, in all honesty, we didn’t understand why they loved the product. These superfans logged in to the Web and mobile apps several times per week and spent lots of time using them. We hoped we could—at the risk of sounding completely megalomaniacal and creepy—engineer more superfans like them.
But in order to do so, we needed to fully understand who they were, what their pain po
ints were, what they did with the product, how it solved their problems, and why they loved it. We knew that talking to customers was the first step toward solving this puzzle.
However, what we found when talking to these customers surprised us.
After listening to our customers, testing hypotheses, and drafting and redrafting stories, we eventually realized that FitCounter’s concept story looked something like this (see Figure 3.8).
• Exposition: The main characters are active, tech-savvy self-starters. Their general goals are to get or stay fit, and they are visual learners who like to use training plans to do so. They love video for fitness training because they can see how to do something and follow along as they try out different exercises.
• Inciting Incident/Problem: It’s hard to find good video training plans because many of them are cookie-cutter applications and not applicable to what customers need to learn or their level. Sometimes, customers come up with their own training plans or work with a trainer to write one, but those plans aren’t visual. They often find how-to or training videos on YouTube and make training playlists that way, but the quality is low and the effort is high.
• Rising Action: FitCounter is an online training platform that people can use to find good-looking, high-quality fitness videos and playlists, package this content into their own training plans, and share them with others.