The power of theme: Storytelling without a user journey
Recently, my coworker Steven and I led a workshop at the Service Experience Chicago conference. For those of you not familiar with the conference, it’s known for it’s small size (75 people), diversity of attendants (VPs, students, educators), and quality of material presented. The workshop we led was called “Storytelling & Narrative in Service Design” and dealt with how we should be using story differently in product and service design than we do in traditional UX. Over the next 1800 words or so, I’ll try to lay out what we covered during the workshop, and hopefully some of these ideas resonate with you the way they did with us.
There’s no doubting that storytelling has become an important tool in the designer’s arsenal. The litany of Fast.co articles, Rosenfeld books, seminars, and workshops help to drive that point home. We could, and do, use a lot of those techniques every day. But as Moment gets more sophisticated about how we design products and services, Steven and I wanted to form our own opinion about story. To do that we needed to start by asking a really fundamental, and inane, question: What is a story?
While the answer to that question isn’t mind-bending, it’s still important to review and understand that most stories can be broken up into four components:
Setting: where the story happens
Character: who is in the story
Plot: what happens in the story
Theme: the driving idea(s) behind the story
When those components are integrated into a cohesive system you get pretty amazing results. Stories from Homer’s Odyssey to Star Wars are two top-of-mind examples. They also use a similar “Hero’s Journey” structure to create narrative. It’s compelling evidence that when executed properly, story is a hugely impactful tool.
Knowing this, Steven and I started thinking about how narrative and storytelling could be used in Service Design. However, the more we thought about it, the more we kept running into a familiar roadblock: Stories as we know them are linear, and services aren’t. This difference is critical for two reasons:
1. You can’t control everything in a service like you can in a story. Services are often complex systems built to help people use products. As such, they often contain additional layers, actions, actors, contexts, and other factors that make the goal of fully controlling an end-to-end experience quite daunting and often impossible. The complexity of these systems is perhaps better illustrated by example.
Consider the additional complications of offering a service like Zipcar compared to simply owning your own car. While the end result from Zipcar may be more streamlined, to the service designer trying to design it all, there are many more details happening backstage in order to create that appearance of simplicity. There’s negotiating parking contracts, organizing membership, car insurance and maintenance, fleet management, expansion of the service, and customer servicing, just to name a few. Additionally, even if you did have full access to the entire service you were working on so that you could design every last detail, you’d be working with an interdisciplinary team. Design efforts should never be solo flights, and that collaboration is key to managing the complexity of a service. At the same time, we also need tools to help us manage and organize that complexity; an aspect of design where story and narrative can be useful.
2. We shouldn’t utilize the linear aspects of story in service design. The most immediate way this manifests itself is that we no longer need to frame service storytelling around a happy path, because there isn’t one. Take a traditional car rental company for example, what’s the first step in that journey? Is it when I reach the service desk at the airport? When I book my car beforehand? When I use my points to book? When I think about booking? Is there even a step one? In addition to not accurately representing the structure or story of a service, trying to center your journey around a single contiguous line of events might actually have negative effects in that it oversimplifies the service you’re trying to design for stakeholders (and for you). This can make the effort you’re engaged in seem a lot easier than it actually is, and we all know how difficult designing service systems can be.
At this point, it’s necessary to ask, “What can we do about this?” How do we actually use storytelling without a happy path? For us, the breakthrough was reframing storytelling as world building. World building has two parts: actually breaking down the world into its component parts, and directing those parts towards a desired outcome.
Let’s take a look at the types of component parts in a world:
Map: the geography and layout of the world
Character: the inhabitants of that world
Mythology: the past of that world that informs current events
Culture: the ceremonies that exist in the the world
Remember, there are probably multiple instances of each of these types in any given world.
We then laid out how those component types map to types of service components:
Map = Service Context
This is where the service takes place. It can be anywhere, even places that are digital. If we think about a ridesharing or car rental service, it’s easy to start thinking of places: service desks, roads, mobile phones, etc.
Character = Service Actor
Service Actors are the elements of a service that make it happen. Actors can be people, but can also be inanimate objects, like a credit card.
Mythology = Industry History
What has happened in the industry that’s informing current behavior? Look to precedents that have been established in order to tease out industry history that might be affecting the current experience.
Culture = Service Processes
The more linear flows that take place in a service. This might be something like opening a bank account, or applying for a mortgage.
Once you’ve identified all of your service components, you’re at a point where your approach is no longer governed by the happy path. Put another way, you’re not using the happy path to understand and design the service. This is good, because it means there’s no bias towards a certain part of the service, as well as the reasons outlined earlier. The question that now remains is how do we direct all of these service components towards a unified experience without a happy path?
Theme
To Steven and me, theme is like a north star. It’s a tool that helps you understand how you’re positioned in the world you’ve created. It also helps you make strategic decisions about your service and design decisions. While many people have talked about theme at length, we think Robert McKee’s definition stands out:
“A true theme is not a word, but a sentence — one clear coherent sentence that expresses a story’s irreducible meaning…it implies function: the controlling idea shapes the writer’s strategic choices.” — Robert McKee, Story
This is a pretty dense sentence, so let’s break it down. First of all, McKee asserts that a theme is a complete sentence. That means that words like “greed” or “power” aren’t themes. This makes a lot of sense, because those words can’t express a real point of view. What matters is how greed or power affect the story. Which brings us to the second part of the sentence: using theme as a tool to make strategic choices. This is a powerful idea, and to take advantage of it we need to understand how we can write effective themes.
The formula for writing a theme is very straightforward. The first part of a thematic sentence focuses on an action; something a character does during the course of a story. The second half is an outcome, or how that action changes the story. Let’s go through some traditional examples:
Star Wars
Action: Over reliance on technology
Outcome: Hurts more than it helps
Theme: Over reliance on technology can hurt more than help.
Lord of the Rings
Action: Chasing absolute power
Outcome: Changes the nature of your character
Theme: Chasing absolute power will change the nature of your character.
Now let’s apply this concept of theme to some services:
Virgin Airlines
Action: Develop a unique brand personality
Outcome: Achieve luxury airline market positioning
Theme: Virgin America leverages a unique brand personality and user experience to position themselves as a luxury airline.
Spirit Airlines
Action: Allowing customers extreme flexibility with fares
Outcome: Is the lowest cost airline service
Theme: Spirit places the optional costs of traditional airline operation on the customer to offer the lowest cost airline service.
Hopefully these examples help illustrate how we might utilize theme when making design decisions. Asking whether or not a design decision is thematically consistent means you can keep your service or product cohesive without having to compare every component to every other component. Let’s look at some of the themes we just presented to understand how service component types (Context, Actor, History, Process) can work together to support a theme.
Star Wars
Theme: Over reliance on technology can hurt more than help.
Component 1: Darth Vader, a villain who is “more machine than man”
Component 2: Luke opting to use the force over his missile guidance system
Component 3: Has a stormtrooper ever hit anything with their high tech blaster rifles?
This same idea applies to the service components we discussed earlier:
Virgin Airlines
Theme: Virgin America leverages a unique brand personality and user experience to position themselves as a luxury airline.
Component 1: Limited routes to big cities and luxurious vacation destinations
Component 2: Distinct check-in counters differentiate Virgin as soon as you enter an airport
Component 3: Interesting and fun features like Google Street View cabins help make your experience unique in a positive way
Hopefully by now this is all starting to come together and make sense. Taking the time to understand the components of your product or service, whether by extracting them or creating them, allows you think through their purpose. That purpose is ultimately to support the theme, but each component might do it differently, and some might even do it indirectly. Remember, it’s ok for components to not support the service theme(s), but it’s important to be intentional about that. The ability of theme to catalyze intentional decision-making is what makes it such an indispensable tool for us, and hopefully for you too.
I know we just went through a lot of information, and hopefully you’ve learned something you can apply in your organization or in the work you do every day. Let’s take one more look at what we covered today:
- Services aren’t linear like stories, and this means we shouldn’t use traditional storytelling as a lens for applying narrative in service design. Instead we can take a non-linear approach guided by components and themes.
- World building > Storytelling. Instead of trying to create a user journey where there isn’t one, we can work to break down (or build up) a service as the interrelationship of its component parts
- The components of a service should work together under a guiding theme. Digital products and services can be immensely complicated. Themes are important tools that can be used as a shorthand to evaluate the systemic quality of a product or service by checking to make sure all of the components support the themes.
I hope the ideas in this post help you in several concrete ways, the first of which is better your conversations with stakeholders. By reframing narrative, you’re able to reject the premise of a happy path and user journey when interacting with stakeholders. This is important because it lets you respect service complexity, which breeds consistency and cohesion throughout whatever it is you design.
