Good products have a clear vision. Great products tell a story.
A vision will identify your goals, your ambitions, and your path forward. But is that enough? To really succeed you need to take the time to understand the optics of your product, the narrative: how it’s perceived by others, and what story it gives them. How they feel using it. You must tell the story of your product.
Let’s take Apple. During a keynote in 2008, then CEO Steve Jobs announced a range of new products — but left the best to last. Picking up an envelope that had been lying on the table in front of him throughout the keynote, he pulled out the new MacBook Air.
At the time, this was a huge feat of engineering, but that wasn’t the product narrative. The story was: the MacBook Air is so small, so portable, it fits into a standard envelope. The audience understandably went nuts.
So what are the important things to consider with storytelling? Three things. Life improvement, connection, and consistent authenticity.
Your product needs to improve people’s lives. Maybe it helps them work smarter, sleep better, be healthier. Comparative adjectives are helpful (faster, leaner, higher) as improvement involves a change to the ‘old normal’. What are you trying to help them with?
You must connect, emotionally. There are a number of ways to connect, even if you don’t have the resources available for an impressive Apple keynote. You can include ‘delighters’, animations or sounds that please your users. Duolingo is a great example of an app that rewards success through its version of Pavlovian conditioning, the ‘ta-da’ trumpet at the end of a level, or a bell tone for each correct answer. Why is it so addictive? Because people connect to it. They rely on that reward to feel good about themselves. This aspect of storytelling is all about appealing to how people feel.
There is another deeply (and perhaps more troubling) element to emotional connection. Most of our decision-making is unconscious and emotional. We also justify those past decisions by crafting a conscious reason — which is why we forget they were based on an emotional response to start with. Humans, it turns out, are really easy to manipulate.
Be consistent and authentic. People do not like jarring experiences and they do not trust them. Your marketing team could do a great job bringing users in, but if your product doesn’t live up to expectations then people fall out of love, feel forced to use it, and offer worse feedback. Ensure your product aligns with your branding, and delivers on its promises. And be open to change, working with your users to bring them into your story and along for the ride.
It’s worth adding that data is at the heart of all of your narrative. Consider why people would use your product, and when they might, so you can prioritise the features that your human users will fall in love with and return to, again and again.
Thanks for reading. If you’re interested in understanding emotion and product design, I highly recommend two books: Emotional Design by Don Norman, and Designing for Emotion by Aaron Walker.
