The User's Journey
Page 7
We went not just story-first, but story-crazy. In the best possible way.
And for good reason: it worked. Building story-first helped us figure out what we were as a concept and how we fit into our users’ lives upon first contact. Not only could we better understand what the product was, but we also knew what the story of someone discovering and seeing potential in using a product could be.
But as we knew would happen, without a fully fleshed out product behind the front door of the home page (or any of the other back doors), our origin story was incomplete. In other words, we finally validated that people would sign up to use a training platform. But once they signed up and tried the product, they didn’t complete their journey.
Instead of getting fit or giving the product a test run and seeing that they could potentially get fit if they kept on using it, they struggled to use the product. Behind the front door, the product was still a platform for getting up-to-the-minute news on fitness and training. We solved our first crisis and resulting cliffhanger of people not signing up, but we now had a new one to solve: how to build an online training platform that let people get fit or train others and help them get fit. For that, we moved onto usage stories.
CHAPTER 5
Usage Stories
What Is a Usage Story?
How Usage Stories Work
Case Study: Twitter
Mapping the Usage Story
How Big Should Your Story Be?
Case Study: FitCounter
“The same core features appear in the rules of narratives and in the memories of colonoscopies, vacations, and films.”
—Daniel Kahneman,
Thinking Fast And Slow
In the 1970s, researchers conducted a series of experiments on how humans experience pain. Their subjects were patients who underwent colonoscopies. While the technology and overall procedure is now less painful than it used to be, back then it was not just unpleasant, but extremely painful. What the researchers wanted to know was if the duration of a procedure affected the overall experience. In other words, if a painful procedure was twice as long, did a patient consider it to be twice as painful? Or if it was half as long, was it half as painful? The researchers learned that while duration plays a slight role, other factors play a bigger role in shaping experience: peaks and ends.
The researchers used self-reporting mechanisms to record how patients felt both during and after the procedure. Test subjects were asked to rate their pain level on a scale from 1 to 10 on regular intervals, 1 being the least and 10 being the most painful. After the procedure, they were then asked how it was overall and how likely they were to choose to have the procedure again in the future. Researchers assumed that the more painful and longer the procedure, the less likely a subject would want to repeat it.
It turns out, however, that if two patients rated their pain level as consistently high throughout the procedure, the patient with the shorter procedure was no more or less likely to rate it differently than the other patient. Both rated it as awful and were not likely to want to repeat it. If a patient experienced extreme pain for three quarters of the way through the experience and then felt that pain gradually ease until the procedure ended without pain, the results were drastically different. That particular patient was more likely to rate the overall pain level as being lower than the other patients. And these patients were also more likely to say that they would have this procedure in the future.
What researchers extrapolated from this and other studies like it is that humans remember, not duration, but rather the peak of an experience and whatever happened closest to the end. This phenomenon is called the peak-end rule (see Figure 5.1). A peak can be painful, as in the case of a colonoscopy, or it can be enjoyable as with a vacation, a film, or—gasp—the experience you have using a website, app, product, or service. Everything—even the experience you have when you use billpay through your bank’s website or app—is a story. It’s up to you as someone who designs or builds things to determine if that story is going to be a good one or not.
FIGURE 5.1
The peak-end rule not at all coincidentally mirrors the structure of a narrative arc.
As Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who worked on this study, points out, there is a reason why our brains have evolved to give shape to how we comprehend and communicate experiences. There is no such thing as an actual experience. All you have are moments in time. A moment ago? It’s already gone. The moment you took to read this sentence is already gone by the time you reach the end of the sentence. Time is fleeting. All you have is the memory of events that happened in time and the ability to stitch together and parse meaning from those data-points into a coherent narrative.
This real-time processing is what sets apart humans from other animals. The foundation of this cognitive function is story. And story has structure. Story is how you make sense of the world around you—before, during, and after an experience. When you consume a story, whether it involves listening to a story or parsing life as a story in real time, your brain is activated. If what you just experienced maps out to a narrative structure, with a beginning, hook, middle, peak, and end, it maps out to how your brain is pre-programmed to understand the experience. When you experience something like a story, it affects comprehension, utility, perception of usability, memory, and choice. In other words, you’re more likely to understand something, see it as useful, find it easier to comprehend or use, remember what you just experienced, and want to repeat the experience again. Even painful medical procedures. Or sign-up flows.
What Is a Usage Story?
Usage stories are exactly what they sound like: the story of someone using your product or service—step by step. It’s the actual steps that make up the story for your user, plot point by plot point. The steps in a usage story can involve screens, if you’re working on a screen-based website, app, or software. Or the steps can be things that happen outside of the screen if you’re working on something that is entirely non-screen-based, such as an experience strategy for a university welcome center.
More than likely, anything you build a usage story for will be a combination of screen and non-screen-based steps. For example, that university welcome center might have screen-based kiosks that help visitors find what they’re looking for, as well as signage and other affordances—oh, and humans who might hang out at a service desk. That app you’re building might have a user flow with steps that take place outside of the screen, such as when a customer calls customer service for help. It is essential to consider usage stories within their broader context of who, what, when, where, and why someone is doing something. And, of course, it is essential to consider, assess, and plan for the intended story of use. Plot point by plot point.
How Usage Stories Work
You can employ usage stories to figure out how to structure journeys, long and short. A usage story can take place over a period of seconds, minutes, days, weeks, or years. They help you figure not what a customer should think about your product or how they find your product, but how and why he will use, experience value in using, and continue to use your product in one sitting or over time.
Just as with concept and origin stories, your usage stories can be based on real data or sketched out as a hypothesis. For example, if you are troubleshooting a checkout flow and want to figure out why people add items to their cart but rarely check out, you can use real data. You might get that data from your web analytics, in-person user interviews, usability testing, or all of the above. If you’re inventing a product from scratch and figuring out how a key flow works for the very first time, you might base it on data gathered from market or user research or use stories as a way to think outside the box and get creative with how you envision your product working. Or both.
Here is how they operate (see Figure 5.2).
• Exposition—current state of things (same as your concept and origin stories)
• Inciting Incident/Problem—event, trigger, or c
all to action (CTA)
• Rising Action—a series of steps
• Crisis—potential hurdle or hurdles
• Climax/Resolution—the high point when value is experienced
• Falling Action—then what? Final step in the flow
• End—the end…for now
FIGURE 5.2
The model for a usage story.
Exposition
Exposition represents the beginning of the story. There is a main character with a broad goal (which is the same as your concept and origin stories). Where are they at the beginning of the story? Are they using an app, website, in-person service, or all of the above? If you are working on a journey for a business that employs all three as part of their customer service strategy, you might keep your story high level and consider how it works for all three at the same time. For example, the high-level story for someone who is thinking about applying to college is the same whether she is working with a guidance counselor at her high school or doing online research alone. Your character is someone, and she wants something. Does she want to find the right school so she can become a veterinarian someday? Or does she want to find a school that will let her explore career opportunities? Or does she not care about career opportunities and want to study with like-minded people? Does she want to learn more about your school or apply to school? Each exposition is the beginning of a very different story.
Inciting Incident/Problem
The inciting incident is an incentive, trigger, or call to action—something to kick-start this journey. This step should map out onto the problem you outlined in your concept story. If your character is on your home page and her goal is to find a school that will let her explore her interests, how will you kickstart her journey? First, you want to remind yourself what her problem is. Why can’t she meet her goal? Because she doesn’t know where to start and is overwhelmed by the post-secondary educational landscape, options and opportunities? This is the point where you need to get her to look, listen, and take action. How will you do that? Or if her goal is to apply for the next calendar year, how will you kickstart that journey? As you can start to see, there are many journeys that your user will go on throughout their lifetime of engaging with your product or brand. Each gets its own story as you figure out how to help people meet their goals.
Rising Action
The rising action represents a series of steps or actions the person must take to meet his goal. Each step should build the user’s interest and become more interesting or relevant than the last step. This is where the Y-axis of a structurally sound story is especially important. Things don’t get good or bad for your user. They get better and better. Just like a good movie, your user should want to continue onto the next step, screen by screen. Action rises and tension rises as your user gets more and more engaged as he tries to meet his goal.
Crisis
The crisis is the impediment that must be overcome for the user to get to the high point of this experience. Impediments can include things like the following:
• Requiring sign-up
• Requiring payment or sensitive billing information
• Mental hurdles, such as boredom, unmatched mental models, or a lack of value
• Poor usability
• Other mysteries—sometimes analytics show a drop-off in funnel completion, and it’s necessary to do some research and storymapping to figure out why people are dropping off
Climax/Resolution
The problem is solved, and the crisis averted. What matters most for a usage story is not just that the problem is solved, but how it is solved. This is where the user experiences value or just feels good about what he is doing. It’s the high point of this flow. If just solving a problem is awesome enough, the story will flow well, yet be anti-climactic. Sometimes, however, you need an extra flourish to raise the action level of this plot point to make it more memorable. This “raising of the bar” can be something as simple as an animation for a digital flow, amazing customer service, or a gift for a non-digital service flow.
Falling Action
Falling action occurs when the user finishes the flow. The flow can’t just end on a high point—it has to go somewhere and take the user with it. In the case of a sign-up flow, for example, imagine if it ended with a Thank You page. What then? Ask yourself that question every time you build a usage flow and be sure to figure out how it should end.
End
In the end, just like with a concept and origin story, the user’s goal is met. The flow is over, and the user should be in a better place than when he started. If you intend for this story to continue at this point, you can consider this stage to be where the goal is met…for now. Just because the hero saves the village doesn’t mean that he won’t have to undertake a new journey in the next episode. Additionally, in a good story, the main character never just ends up at home after a journey, he should have learned something, found something, or generally grown as a character so that when he arrives back home, he is changed forever and is closer to meeting his big goal or goals.
Case Study: Twitter
One of my favorite examples of a usage story is Twitter’s former sign-up flow. While they have since updated this flow, I like using this illustration because it is an excellent example of story structure supporting a flow of screens and interactions. Additionally, this sign-up flow was responsible for not just activating hundreds of millions of new users, but also users who were more valuable and likely to stay engaged with the service over time. While it was not explicitly engineered as such, this on-boarding flow reads (and functions) like a good story.
NOTE TWITTER: ORIGIN OR USAGE STORY?
A few of my workshop attendees always ask why this Twitter case study isn’t an example of an origin story. I categorize it as a user story because while an origin story would help you figure out how someone goes from thinking about your product to using it, this flow simply illustrates how someone uses it. For the very first time. As such, this usage story is the falling action of someone’s origin story with Twitter.
The Problem: Low Repeat Engagement
Several years ago, Twitter had a problem: it was starting to grow its user base at a steady clip. But unfortunately, Twitter acquired many new users who tried the service once and then never returned. Twitter’s research team talked to users who did return to find out why and what mattered to them.
The answer: people were more likely to log in and engage with the service if they followed others on Twitter who were in their social and professional circles or related to their hobbies and interests. While Twitter’s previous sign-up flow was simple, fast, and friction-less—it was only three steps—it didn’t do enough to help new users see the value in the service so that they would return.
The Solution: First-Time Use as a Story
Often, there is a rule of thumb that you want to design frictionless experiences so that people get through a flow or process more easily. The easier something is to do or use, the more quickly people will get through it and the more delightful (or less painful) the experience will be, this line of reasoning goes. Make it easy to use! is the phrase that your client or stakeholder might outline as a requirement for that flow in the app that you’re building anew or redesigning for better conversion. If you think about a usage flow as a story, however, you can see that friction is a good thing. If you think about scientific studies on painful medical procedures, you can also see that shorter isn’t necessarily better. What the sign-up flow that Twitter eventually came up with shows is that making something more difficult and longer can be better as long as it reads like a story. Here’s how the longer, more complex sign-up flow breaks down as a story:
Exposition
You’re visiting the Twitter homepage, which means that you want to know what this Twitter thing is all about (see Figure 5.3). Twitter as a business has the flipside of that goal: it wants to show you what Twitter is all about. It also has a more specific goal: to get you to follo
w relevant accounts so that you are more likely to return in the future.
FIGURE 5.3
The first screen in the flow sets up an exposition: it reminds you why you came here and then incites you to act with a call to action.
Inciting Incident
You see that Twitter is a way to “Start a conversation, explore your interests, and be in the know.” Cool, those are all things that you’d like to do. You sign up.
Rising Action
First, you are introduced to the concept of a “tweet,” as seen in Figure 5.4. You are on a screen that looks much like what the Twitter app will look like when you are finished. Only there are instructions on the left sidebar and a not-yet-populated area on the right. Someone named the “Twitter Teacher” explains that what you’re looking at is a “tweet.” You can also see that there are many more tweets awaiting you. You click on the “next” button.
FIGURE 5.4
The first step in the rising action of Twitter’s sign-up flow is to learn about a tweet.
Next, you are introduced to the idea of your “timeline” (see Figure 5.5), which you can “build.” If you click on a person on the left, you can see one of his tweets show up in the timeline on the right. Click on another, same thing happens. This is how Twitter works—you follow people, and their tweets show up in your timeline. But Twitter doesn’t just tell you all of this; you have to actually do it a few times before you can go on to the next step.
FIGURE 5.5
In the second step of Twitter’s sign-up flow, you learn about a timeline.
Now Twitter invites you to “see who’s here,” as shown in Figure 5.6. While it asks you to “find and follow well-known people,” what it is also illustrating is that there are different types of people to follow, depending on your interests. Even though the previous step let you follow celebrities, now you can have a little more control over who those celebrities are—basketball players, for example. The more you follow, the more your now empty timeline fills up again.