How to Use Story Structure for User Journeys
At Delve, we sometimes get asked what our feature roadmap is. Truth be told, we don’t have a feature roadmap. What we have is a story (a very structured story).
This blog is a companion piece to my breakdown of Lyft’s short. In the short, the main character June journeys from being a lonely non-Lyft driver to a beloved Lyft driver. I love this video because it perfectly fits Dan Harmon’s story circle of a user’s journey to embrace a product.
In this post, I’m going to introduce our product-oriented version of Dan Harmons’ story circle. As with all genre of story, it’s a specific subset of the more generic monomyth.
The Traditional Beats of the Story Circle
The traditional beats of the story circle are as followed.
1. You — A character is in a zone of comfort
2. Need — But they want something.
3. Go — They enter an unfamiliar situation,
4. Search — Adapt to it,
5. Find — Get what they wanted,
6. Take/Pay — Pay a heavy price for it,
7. Return — Then return to their familiar situation,
8. Changed — Having changed.
The Product Adoption Story Circle
Here is the sub-genre of the story circle of a user adopting a new product.
1. User — A potential user is in their comfort zone
2. Need — But they need something.
3. Go — They go looking for a solution
4. Learn —They find your product it, learn about it, and decide to try it
5. Believe — The user has the the “Aha moment”, where they truly believe your product will solve their problem.
6. Act — The user needs to act on the belief they gained in step 5, and overcome any final obstacles.
7. Return — They return to their familiar situation,
8. Changed — Having changed in two ways: they are now a recurring user of your product, but more importantly, have solved their problem.
Delve’s Story
As an example, I’m going to apply the Product Adoption Story Circle to Delve, and point out how each beat influenced product decisions.
User — A potential user is in their comfort zone
Right off the bat, the story circle is asking a hard question. Who is your user? You’d be surprised how many product companies can’t answer this question (I’ve worked at one or two of them). At Delve our target users are research consultants who conduct generative ethnographic research.
Need — But they need something.
Ah, a second great question, what does your user truly need. One of the best ways to understand your user's needs is to talk to them. At Delve we actually spent 4 months interviewing researchers to understand what their greatest needs were (yeah, we did qualitative research to inform our qualitative research product, we’re one of those meta-startups).
As I emphasized in the June blog post, the main character will have a conscious need and an unconscious need. From talking to researchers, we found that there were two needs that ranked high on importance and difficulty: having enough Time and making an Impact. This mapped perfectly onto the story structure: researchers are very conscious of their time constraints. But deep down, we all want to make an impact.
Go — They go looking for a solution
The Go moment is the moment that the user decides to start searching for a solution to their problem. The go moment is usually connected to the user’s conscious needs. So in Delve’s case, the user’s go moment would be triggered by a looming deadline.
Our favorite real-life example of this came from a demo we gave to a potential user. She normally conducted research with just a couple of interviews. She always analyzed them by adding the transcripts to one large google doc. She would then group quotes by copy and pasting text all around the document. This time around a client had given her a strict deadline to conduct and analyze one hundred interviews. She knew her normal copy and paste method would not work, and she was deeply worried about this deadline. So she went looking for a solution.
Learn — They find your product, learn about it, and decide to try it
Up until now, you have had little control of the events that have unfolded. The user, their needs, and the reasons to “go” are important to know, but are out of your control. Now the potential user is entering an unfamiliar experience. And it’s an experience that you want to design as much as possible. So there’s a lot to talk about. Because of this, I’m going to break this part into two sections: Marketing and Onboarding.
Marketing: This part of the story is where the marketing team shines. So how do your potential users find out about your product? What are your inbound and outbound channels? What does the potential user need to learn about your product? Are their evil competitor products that might lead the user astray? How do we measure any of this?
At Delve, to be honest, we’re still kinda figuring this part out. We’re both researchers and neither of us has a marketing background. But we’re starting to get the hang of it. Like just today, I thought to myself “What if I made a blog post that taught people a framework for user journeys AND simultaneously was a (not-so-subtle) content marketing piece for Delve.”
Onboarding: The marketing was convincing, and the user has decided to actually try your product. What do they need to know, and what actions do they need to derive value from your product?
At Delve, one of our main selling points is that we are simple to use and easy to understand. So we’ve spent a lot of time on this story beat. At this point in the story, we want researchers to find their first insight as quickly as possible. The user needs to upload a couple of transcripts, and start coding (tagging) quotes based on theme. In one click Delve will gather all the quotes from across all the interviews, and organize them by theme.
This leads directly to…
Believe — The user has the “Aha moment”, where they truly believe your product will solve their problem.
There is a moment, in every story, where the main character fundamentally changes. And in product stories, this is the moment where your user stops being a skeptic of the product and starts believing in it instead.
In storytelling, this belief moment should be tethered to the user's unconscious need. In our case, this is the moment where the user truly believes that they will be able to make an Impact because of Delve.
For me, when I do qualitative coding, after reading through and coding a couple of transcripts, the insights still exist in a primordial haze. But after grouping and summarizing some of the codes, the insights take sudden form and burst forth.
Act — The user needs to act on the belief they gained, and overcome any final obstacles.
But, believing in a product is not the same as actually solving your problem. The user needs to take this internal belief, and actually externalize it to impact the world. However, there is usually one last hurdle standing in their way. In movies, this cold harsh reality is often personified by a Big-Bad (the main villain). Luckily your product and everything the user has learned previously in the story will help them overcome this Big-Bad.
In Delve’s case, and many B2B product stories, that Big-Bad is a stakeholder. Whether it’s their teammates, a boss, or the client, the user needs to convince them to take meaningful action based on the insight found earlier.
Our initial version of Delve did not help users overcome their Big-Bad. By talking to our early adopters, we learned the importance of convincing stakeholders. Our story had a third-act problem (movies with third-act problems tend to have a promising premise but fail to wrap up in a satisfying way). So we launched collaborative features to bring co-workers into the research process (a great way to get buy-in from stakeholders with time to participate). And also launched a feature where you could see and present your research findings, as well as export it into a presentable form (a great way to get buy-in from stakeholders who don’t have time to participate).
We’re still striving to make the process of winning over stakeholders easier because it is crucial to our user’s journey.
Return — They return to their familiar situation
In movies, the return moment can literally be returning home. But it always means some sort of return to normalcy. The main characters have spent the majority of this story on very uncertain terrain, and now it’s time for some stability again.
For Delve our product adoption journey ends after the user completed their first successful project. Since the go moment, our users have been in an uncertain world. They have been rushing against a deadline, trying a new product not fully confident that it would work, and taking on their stakeholder Big-Bad. But in the end, with the help of Delve, they were able to overcome the Time pressure and make an Impact.
Changed — Having changed in two ways: they are now a recurring user of your product, but more importantly, have solved their problem.
This last beat in movies can be a mirror image of the first beat. It is often the main character back where they started, but things are fundamentally different. This journey has changed them. And in changing, they have addressed their conscious and unconscious needs. Life will continue, but you know it will be happily ever after from this point on.
For our product story, it means that Delve has been fully integrated into the researcher's workflow. Hitting deadlines under Time constraints and making an Impact are no longer tensions. Delve has made it part of their normal everyday life.
The beauty of the story circle is that it’s cyclical. The ending of one story leads right into the beginning of the next story. It’s only a matter of time before new needs and tensions arise in the user’s lives. It’s always worth asking, what is the sequel to the user adopting our product? What new tensions will arise? How can we both improve our user’s lives and have them invest more in our product?
Writing Tips
There is one key difference between using story circles as a script writing tool and using story circles as a user journey tool. Movies need to be internally consistent, but they don’t need to be based in any sort of reality. If your Take/Pay moment isn’t as cathartic as you want it to be, the solution could be tweaking your character’s Needs at the beginning.
This is not a solution for user journeys though. You can take your user journey in so many different directions, but they must still be grounded in reality. That’s why it’s important to start by researching your user’s needs. The user’s needs ripple throughout the story. The user’s Conscious Need defines the Go moment. The user’s Unconscious Need defines the Believe moment. And both needs combined define the Change moment. There’s still plenty of room in the Learn and Act moments to make the story your own. But if you write your story without understanding user needs, it will be a fairy tale, not a user journey. We use (and built) Delve to help organizations uncover people’s conscious and unconscious needs.
A Quick Shout Out
I always want to give a shout out to my Story Structure partner, Kendra Allenby, who has explored Story Circles with me for over 2 years. Kendra is a cartoonist and story structure extraordinaire whose work has appeared in the New Yorker among other places.
Want to learn more?
Want to learn more about how to use Story Structure, leave a comment below or reach out on Twitter. Happy to answer any questions and write more of these.
Want to discover people’s conscious and unconscious needs? Check out Delve! It is a tool for pulling insights out of human conversations.
