Make your audience care; Tell a story in the design pitch
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a designer trying to pitch a new landing page design to the company’s marketing department.
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Designer: As you can see here, with this incredibly well thought out information flow and slick interaction, our new page design will be loved by all of our customers and-
Marketing Department: Where can I show the fifty banner ads I have ready?
Designer: Excuse me?
Marketing Department: I need space for my fifty banner ads.
Designer: That is ludicrous, that amount of information can’t possibly be digested by our customers, it will take up the entire web page and-
Marketing Department: Can we just put them all in the carousel?
Designer : *inhales*
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In many cases, a lot of designers have failed to convey the main message and idea of their design solutions. Was the newly proposed feature inadequate? Were the interactions in the prototype not cool enough? Perhaps the user scenario just wasn’t convincing?
More often than not, the reason why a presentation fails boils down to one very simple reason. Coincidentally for this article, it’s the same reason as why a movie or story can fail to capture their audience; your audience simply didn’t care. Or at very least, they weren’t able to relate to your story; In a room full of marketing associates whose performance rating is based on the number of customers leads they can muster, a prototype of a fancy page scroll interaction might not be enough to make them engaged.
Storytelling as a tool
As designers, it’s imperative for us to know that the many departments we interact with in the workplace care about very different things from one another. When one talks to an engineer, he or she might be more concerned about how newly proposed features might affect an existing system as to the CEO would be more concerned about the ROI of it to the company’s business. Different departments have different KPIs so its only natural that they care about matters that are specific to them. However, if we as designers can tell a very human story that highlights our customer's problems in a real life scenario, we can engage with anyone from any department. Because after all, we are all people with empathy for our fellow humans.
“In the long term, there is never any misalignment between customer interest and stakeholder interest” -Jeff Bezos
The basic elements that make a story consists of three things: Character, Scene, and Plot. What makes a good story is a story with purpose, the underlying belief and reason why we wanted to write the story in the first place. As designers we sometimes tend to go too much into the solution we’ve mustered up that we completely forget to with the same passion, share about the problem we wanted to solve in the first place.
Character
The character in our story serves as our protagonist; he is the driving force of the entire scenario and he is also the figure that you want your audience to root for. In this case the character of our story would be the person your product is supposed to help. It could be the customer with cerebral palsy who has trouble scrolling through mobile apps or the business owner who is trying to have a better structured inventory flow. The more realistic your character is, the easier it will be for your audience to empathize with them.
Plot
The plot explains the whole context of how the entire story starts and unfolds for our character. In a product story the plot is the problem that you are trying to solve for your customers; a very important element to effectively share to your audience members. As mentioned earlier, sometimes as designers we tend to jump into the solutions too early without giving enough context of the problem in the beginning. Once you and your audience members continue to only delve deeper into solutions, a good chance is that you will end up solving the wrong problem. By being able to tell the plot of the story and how it affects the customers compellingly at a relatable human level, we will have ourselves a room full of motivated audience members of engineers and business users who are motivated to support us in helping the customers.
Scene
The scene is a very integral part in helping designers write about the plot the character is involved in. After all, your story needs to happen somewhere and sometime. In the art of storyboarding, drawing out the scenes where the events of the story is happening helps writers immensely in pointing out the fallacies or misalignments that may happen in the process of writing up the plot. Is the character in the middle of a city or in a jungle when this problem he or she is facing arises? Are the characters alone or are they in a crowded public space full of people? Asking these questions to yourself can help in thinking of better solutions for your problem as they now become much clearer and have better context attached to it.
Benefits of good storytelling
The main benefit of good storytelling is being able to have your audience empathize and relate to your end user. It creates a clear visualization of the problem that the customer is facing and it puts the audience members in said customers’ shoe.
In addition, stories have a much better chance of being remembered than a list of problems or user scenarios. That power of memorability will keep both designers and their audience members never lose sight of the goal they are aiming towards to. It creates a sense of empathy between them and the customers and hopefully it can become their main driving force when they do the work.
Finally, stories are engaging and easy to digest for anyone. In the process of writing up the story, audience members can easily put themselves in the narrative and give their own perspectives of what might occur in a specific scenario. Relatable characters in a compelling story is an effective way to get important engagement from the audience, allowing them to be a part of you instead against you.
Product designers are in a very special position as they are the closest to the customers and their needs. Designers have the power to tell a compelling story about the customer’s problem in such a way that everyone else in the company can empathize with and be motivated to solve that very problem. Don’t quickly scurry to all the cool features and solutions that you’ve figured out without giving an enough and compelling context of the problem. After all, a list of features is just another list of tasks for the engineers and a possible list of high expenses for upper management.
Airbnb used the art of storyboarding and storytelling to fully visualize their world class customer experience alongside the company’s vision and mission. With the help of a professional storyboard artist from Pixar, the company was able to get everyone in it on board with the idea of storytelling and be engaged in the process of defining the best customer experience for their users. A more detailed story of it can be read here.
If we can get everyone to care and empathize about the problems that the character in our story is facing, it will result in a product that solves problems and be happily used by our customers.
If you’re interested in applying for a full-time position or intern as an UX Designer or UX Engineer, Blibli.com is currently hiring! Send your resume to recruitment@blibli.com and join us in tackling challenging design problems to better our customer’s experience everyday!
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