The story promise
Whatever your reason for starting the adventure of prototyping, what if you could do it better, faster, cheaper, and have more fun doing it?
Exposition: Ideas and risk
We prototype ideas to de-risk our assumptions; to save time, money, and embarrassment of going too far with a bad idea. You have an idea and it seems great. In reality, you have no idea about all of the assumptions your ego and biases are hiding from you in plain sight. Prototypes are a great way to de-risk ideas on the way to new features, new products, new companies, new business models, new markets.
Inciting Incident: You make to show the world
Though prototyping is great at reducing risk, often the reality is that you decide to create a prototype to find out how much people love your idea, and to shop around to customers, users, investors, etc.
Rising action: You prototype in software because that’s what people do
Prototyping in the same production material you will “release” your product in is expensive, takes too much time, and is generally a mistake; but this is what people generally do. They fall into the build trap (see the book Escaping the Build Trap, by Melissa Perri) even in the earliest moments of an idea.
Prototypes are by definition limited; that’s the point; create something limited to test ideas about a more produced later thing. The 3 fidelities people usually talk about for prototypes are data fidelity, visual fidelity, and interaction fidelity. You make choices in these 3 fidelities and decide where to put the effort to best simulate the final idea.
Crisis: It’s doesn’t actually get at what really matters, Experience Fidelity
This misses the main point though…what we really care about is “experience fidelity.” Experience fidelity is about how well people are having an emotional experience when using your prototype that is similar to how they would feel if they were having a real future experience with your product or service.
The problem is that most prototypes as created today do not do well in the experience fidelity, which is what really matters.
Climax: Stories as prototypes:
This is where we get into the magic of stories…this is where I lead you around the curving path…are you ready?
The beautiful thing is that it turns out that when people experience a story (in one of its many forms), they do feel very close to how they would feel if what was happening to the characters in the story was actually happening to them. This literally happens because of brain chemistry; dopamine fires when we anticipate, oxytocin fires when we bond with a character, and that’s why what happens to a character feels like it’s happening to us.
Mac Barnett, a great children’s author, explains in his TED Talk, talking about fictional characters, “We know these characters aren’t real, but we have real feelings about them. We know these characters aren’t real, and yet we also know that they are.”
This happens because humans evolved to make sense of everything that happens as story.
There are many definitions of story and related words like narrative and plot, but here I’m using “story” as laid out by Lisa Cron in her book Story Genius, “story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes as a result.”
Put simply, plot is what happens, and story is how the characters (and therefore you) feel about what happens.
In a story, you are not limited by the same physics of the real world, so rather than a limited prototype you can make in the real world to have people try, in a story you can have characters using “real” products in the fake story world.
That matters so much, I’m going to say it again a bit differently:
In a story, you can have characters having experiences that feel more real than the less-real experiences people would have with your prototype in the real world!
This is the magic of story…actually the science of story (but it’s the kind of magic Richard Dawkins calls the magic of reality)…and you can use this magic to get insanely BETTER, faster, cheaper results from story based prototyping.
Resolution: Getting better, faster, cheaper, and having more fun while getting to outcomes that actually matter
The stories you create about possible future product and service experiences allow you to test your ideas out, and get better, cheaper, faster learning than if you were to prototype the ideas in “real” material like software, bricks and mortar, etc.
Now you can try out many ideas in minutes, hours, or days, compared to weeks or months! Just have potential customers, users, investors, etc experience these stories; e.g., using a textual narrative, a storyboard, a graphic novel, short film, VR stories and measure how they feel at different moments in the stories to predict which aspects matter to them the most, and how much they connect with different moments.
Give people a marker and have them change the story WITH YOU.
We use this in customer and user research as a way to collect, analyze, and communicate stories about people’s lives today, as well as to create these design fictions about possible future experiences with products and services.
Denouement: A whole new world of customer and product development awaits
You can understand your customers better and therefore can offer products and services that actually matter to them, that they will have strong feelings about.
One more thing…a preview of a topic for later:
For those that want to nerd out more on story and design experiences (and please connect with me if this is you)…
Based on my earlier study/work related to emergent behavior and the study of how nature solves problems, I have looked at “needs” that people have as being emergent, in that they arise from contextual interactions in the world, rather than being possessed by people. I’ve long thought about these as “selfish needs” based on an analogy I see to Selfish Gene theory work from Richard Dawkins.
Last year I was listening to an interview with Scott McCloud on the Data Stories podcast, and Scott gave what he called his “weird definition of story” as “Thinking of a story as populated by characters who possess desires is less helpful than thinking of stories as the lifecycle of a desire itself…and the ways in which desires express themselves through one or more characters.” He then related this as similar to Selfish Gene theory.
I literally got teary eyed, because I have never heard anyone else relate these ideas similar to how I have been thinking about them.
Therefore, putting that all together along with Lisa Cron’s definition of story, I now use Story and UX (user experience) as synonyms, and what we need to focus on is looking to discover customer and user needs as emergent desires and their life cycles, rather than focusing as much on the people themselves.
To be continued…