The world is going quickly online, and today, forward-looking businesses struggle for a firm digital presence. This goal is achieved with innovative, feature-rich digital products like websites, platforms, subscription services, and apps. Thus, the digital market develops very dynamically, urging everyone to expand their channels to the digital space.
However, practice shows that one can hardly succeed by simply creating and launching a digital product in the online market. A huge percentage of new apps and services fails because their offer and message to users are pretty confusing and fuzzy. Some features don’t make sense to users or seem redundant. There is no uniform, convincing story behind the brand.
An effective solution to this problem is to use storytelling to enhance your brand’s impact. Here is a step-by-step guide to incorporating storytelling into UX design. Share these tips with your UI/UX team when you hire UX designers, and you’ll see how the consistency of your approach rises.
How to Use Storytelling in UX?
Here are a couple of tips on integrating the storytelling component into your UX work.
#1 A Shared Story for the Dev Team
The greatest problem that dev teams experience during the process of app development is speaking the same language. Designers and developers often have different stories at the heart of their vision of the product they work on. As a result, the process gets fragmented, and the launch is delayed because of the team silos.
To solve this problem, you need to ensure that all teams working on the project have the same vision thereof. Such a shared vision will serve as their anchor about why this project was initiated, who it is made for, what problem it will solve, etc. The shared story can be effectively constructed with the help of UX research that gives valuable insights into the app’s features, user personas, and the app’s use cases.
#2 Storyboarding
Next, storytelling gets vital in the UX development process due to its contribution to storyboarding. The latter is an important step in UX design, showing the user’s activities in all app use scenarios. You don’t need to focus on the app’s features or in-app activities when doing the storyboarding. The main task is to concentrate on the user’s sequence of actions, behavior, and environment within which they function.
The simplest way to get this done is to take the intended action and break it down into practical steps. For instance, you’re making a hotel booking app. Focus on the actions that a user typically takes to book a hotel for a weekend. That will probably be entering the parameters into the filter, setting the price range, determining the location, and reviewing the recommendations and testimonials for the search results. After that, the user will choose the room type, enter the personal details, and choose the payment option. The final stage is the checkout and booking confirmation.
Based on this breakdown, you can create a storyboard of the user experience throughout the booking process. Single out the features that will improve the user’s UX and make the path simpler and more enjoyable. Focus on the features without which the successful booking activity cannot be completed. The same can be done with every other app type and purpose; just be consistent, creative, and user-centric in your approach.
#3 Story for the Client
Another way to use storytelling is to achieve the client’s buy-in or stakeholder approval. Once you’re done with the UX design and need to negotiate it with the client, you shouldn’t just present it as it is. You need to share a story about how the UX design will work, what value it will deliver to users, and how it fits the overall business strategy of your employer.
Such UX presentation lets the client understand their project within the context of its use. It focuses on the value of specific features and ensures that you get much more positive feedback for your design choices and solutions.
Credit: Medium
How to Make a Good Story in UX?
Now that we know stories rock, it’s time to make up your own one for the product. The vital steps to achieving a compelling impact with storytelling are:
- Picking the genre. It should correspond to the type of product you’re promoting. For instance, a medical app’s presentation will differ from a personal finance one, and a fitness app will follow an approach distinct from an astrology companion.
- Setting the context. The context is the actual experience that a user will have with your app. As a UX designer, you can craft the visual context to make the app’s value tangible and appealing.
- Making a hero. Next, you need to create a user persona and develop a detailed scenario of their journey within the app. What problem does this person come with? What steps do they take to solve the challenge? The visualization of these steps gives a sense of consistency to all stakeholders and points to the features you need to include for a positive UX.
- Refining the story for maximal effects. No story can become ideal without thorough editing. So, it’s vital to make it evolve based on the user feedback, achieving a better match with the users’ expectations and needs.
- Going on. Your product’s promotion is not a one-time campaign; it’s a process that takes place all the time of your presence in the market. So, it would be best if you built sequels around the initial story, creating a rich context for its updates, broader customer outreach, and brand repositioning.
Storytelling Really Matters
As you can see, the ability to tell your story is a vital skill you can apply both at the beginning and throughout the development process. The app creation path will be more consistent and aligned with your brand’s core message and value. Thus, as soon as the product is ready, you won’t need to invest extra effort into building its story because your product will already speak for itself.
