10 Reasons Why Storytelling Will Help Your Startup

Design Better User Experience

How can you use storytelling to design products that solve real problems?

We met with Conor McGlauflin, Design Lead at Codecademy. Guerric de Ternay and Conor discussed how storytelling can help you identify the problems your customers have and find opportunities to increase your sales.

Learn from these 10 ideas that Conor McGlauflin shared with us to discover why narrative product design works.

1.

Writing the stories of your customers allows you to understand what they want.

2.

Don’t focus only on the moment when your customers use your product.

Investigate the whole story,from the moment they recognized a need

to the time they’re using your product.

3.

Use the ‘Five Whys’ technique.

Ask “why?” several times to understand the context in which

your customers need and use your product.

4.

Make sure you rely on the right buyer personas*.

*Personas = the profiles of your most important customers, which include attributes they have

in common and how they make decisions.

5.Don’t build personas solely on

quantitative attributes (e.g. age, location, salary).

Use more qualitative attributes—like anthropologists do.

Interviewing and observing customers will help you build better personas.

6.

Write your customer stories using what you learn from running user interviews.

This will help you plan your product roadmap.

7.

Three steps for designing good products and services:

1) Understand who you’re designing for

2) Spot problems in the customer journey

3) Think about the solutions writing stories

8.

Encourage your team to write stories about your customers discovering and using your products.

Everyone can write stories. Doing this will make them feel that

they are involved in the designing process.

9.

A good customer story encompasses: - what your customers really want, - how they discover your product, - how they buy it and use it, - and what happens next.

10.

A good narrative should be tied to a specific persona.

More about narrative product design

Listen to the full episode here.

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