What is Storyframing?
By Steve McCarthy
Storyframing is a method of designing a digital service or product around distinct user behaviour, helping to ensure user adoption and repeat use are front of mind from the outset of a project.
In the same way that wireframing provides a template for design, storyframing creates a template for experience.
Wait, aren’t there already processes for defining user stories and journeys?
Yes. There’s actually quite a few…
- Service blueprints — Maps that display all the touchpoints of the consumer with your brand.
- Consumer Journey Maps — Diagrams that explore the multiple steps taken by consumers as they engage with a service.
- Storyboards — Translate functionality into real-life situations.
- User Flows — Are visual representations of the user’s flow to complete tasks within a product.
- User Stories — Short, simple descriptions of a feature told from the perspective of the person who desires the new capability.
...but none of these consider behaviour change or long term user engagement in detail.
Storyframing ensures that business needs are heard, KPIs are set, and long term user adoption is considered.
User journeys state: “This is what we think or know customers are doing”. Storyframing states: “This is what we want them to do”.
The storyframing process is commonly used as a way of progressing user persona research into the realms of storytelling, whereby online and offline touchpoints can be identified and framed within a narrative construct. We call these moments.
Storyframing leans on existing UX design deliverables for inspiration, such as blueprints, customer journey maps, and experience maps. But builds upon these frameworks by applying a focus on behaviour modelling, where the narrative is designed to amplify and encourage specific customer behaviour.
How do you Storyframe?
All successful frameworks follow a process. Here are the 5 steps you need to take in order to successfully storyframe:
- Categorise your users
- Define your moment ingredients
- Understand moment types
- Set behaviour goals
- Craft your stories
1. Categorising Your Users
Who are your users?
If you don’t yet have an idea about who your users will be (your audience) then stop now. You shouldn’t be attempting to storyframe. In the same way you wouldn’t expect to begin wireframing without having an idea what the end product might be, you shouldn’t storyframe without first understanding your users.
Before you go any further you need to categorise your users. An important distinction to make is that you will have some users who are known to you and others that are unknown. These are often referred to as customers (known) and prospects (unknown). But for the purpose of clarity we will be calling these returning users (known) and new users (unknown).
Arguably these classifications could be further defined to include returning users who have been away for a short period of time and those that have been away for a longer period (lapsed customers). But for simplicity, when crafting our stories it is easier to think of users in this binary ‘new vs. returning’ way.
Users can be further categorised by personas.
A persona is a representation of a group of users who share similar behavioural characteristics.
These characteristics can usually be condensed into a single behaviour goal, which aims to exemplify the group’s combined hopes, desires, and needs into a tangible objective.
The creation of personas requires research supported by qualitative and quantitative data analysis.
We recommend working with no more than 3–4 personas when you first start storyframing.
2. Defining Your Moment Ingredients
What are moment ingredients?
Moments (m), as you’ll come to see, are incredibly important in the storyframing process. They can also be referred to as ‘micro-moments’, which Google defines as:
“Occurring when people reflexively turn to a device increasingly a smartphone — to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something. They are intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped.”
For a successful moment to occur four ingredients need to be present:
- a Service (S) needs to exist
- the service needs to be accessible via a Medium (M)
- the medium needs to be delivered via a Device (D)
- and all three need to be received by a User (U)
Offline and Online
Moments (m) can also occur offline, as well as online. This expands upon Google’s definition of a micro-moment where there is a tendency to favour digital experiences only, which is why we prefer the term moment. This allows us to acknowledge that our stories play out in both the physical and digital worlds, and that often we move between these offline and online experiences seamlessly and without realising it.
Offline moments can lead to online moments. For example having a conversation with a friend about booking a taxi, can lead to you reaching for your smartphone and launching Uber.
And similarly, online moments can lead to offline moments. For example ordering a book on a website, can lead to you physically accepting delivery of the book the next day.
When storyframing, we use colour to help quickly differentiate between online and offline moments. The choice of colours isn’t essential to the storyframing process, but to avoid any accidental cultural connotations e.g. red = danger, green = go, we’ve opted for two neutral colours of magenta and cyan.
How do you define the moment ingredients?
We only need to define 3 of the 4 ingredients, as we can make the assumption that a User (U) will always be present (until the time that we start developing apps for robots).
The first ingredient that needs to be defined is the type of Services (S) that you want to offer your users.
These can be loosely grouped into 8 online categories and 10 offline categories.
Once the services have been outlined, we then need to define through what Medium (M) they will be delivered and to which Devices (D).
These can be mapped like so:
This process will be driven by the scope of the project and the technological reach the brand is looking to achieve.
We now have all the ingredients necessary for a moment (m) to take place.
m = (S + M + D + U)
3. Understanding Moment Types
What type of moment can we create?
Moments (m) can also be classified into 4 types:
- Trigger (Tm) moments
- Action (Am) moments
- Reward (Rm) moments
- Investment (Im) moments
These 4 types can come together to form a Hook (h), as identified by educator and entrepreneur Nir Eyal in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-forming Products.
Eyal’s Hook Model shows that the relationship between these 4 moment types is cyclical — each moment leading to the next.
Moment types explained:
Trigger moments (Tm)
Trigger moments provide the cue or stimulus to start a hook (h) and can be external e.g. an advert, or internal e.g. an emotion.
Action moments (Am)
Action moments follow the trigger and describe the effort being exerted by the user e.g. the user logs in to a website.
Reward moments (Rm)
Reward moments describe the benefit that the user gets from taking action e.g. after logging in the user can view their account information.
Investment moments (Im)
Finally investment moments describe the exchange from the user in return for the reward e.g. the user updates their account information.
Remember: the stored value users put into a product increases the likelihood they will use it again. Investment moments should also look to load the next trigger moment.
4. Setting Behaviour Goals
How do I construct a story?
You now have all the components you need to create a hook.
You have your moment ingredients…
m = (S + M + D + U)
… and you know what types of moments are needed for a hook…
h = (Tm + Am + Rm + Im)
…but what about stories?
Stories (s) are constructed by combining multiple hooks (h) together to create a narrative that allows the user (U) to reach a behaviour goal. This is the big question: What do we want the user to do? What is their story?
A user’s interaction with a brand’s product or service is rarely a one-off event. If it is, then the brand has failed.
A successful product or service is one that permeates the user’s lifestyle, forms part of their daily routine, and is craved when unavailable or absent. To reach this level of intimacy and trust with a user, the product or service must satisfy simple behavioural goals.
“I don’t want to be lonely.” — Facebook
“I want to be fitter.” — Fitbit
“I need to get across town.” — Uber
What do we want the user to do?
To help answer this big question we can use BJ Fogg’s Behaviour Grid.
Fogg, and his team at Standford Unviversity, have defined 15 behaviour types, each requiring different psychology strategies and techniques.
“For example, some target behaviors are one-time actions. This includes installing solar panels on a home or selecting a college.
In contrast, some types of behavior happen everyday: exercising, eating, and so on. And, yet again, some types are about stopping an existing behavior, such as quitting smoking.” — BJ Fogg
For the purpose of storyframing we are primarily interested in the path category. For brands, a one-time behaviour or a behaviour that has a duration can be beneficial in the short term, but to achieve long term success the ultimate goal must be to influence lasting change.
“The columns refer to behavior familiarity or change. The first two columns deal with new (Green) and familiar (Blue) behaviors.
The next columns also deal with familiar behaviors; however, these behaviors are changing. Purple Behaviors are increasing in intensity or duration. Gray Behaviors are decreasing in intensity or duration.
Finally, Black Behaviors are being stopped.” — BJ Fogg
Knowing which behaviour to choose for your story will also depend on the relationship the brand has with the user.
A new user will require different stories and different behaviour goals than a returning user.
Using the behaviour grid we can now try to answer the big question: What do we want the user to do?
If we are running an ecommerce website for example, the answer to this question may be as simple as follows:
New Users — We want them to start buying from us
Returning Users — We want them to continue buying from us
5. Crafting Your Stories
Can I be creative yet?
Yes.
The process of crafting stories is all about imagination, guided by empathy; it’s part of discovering the best solution for the brand and user at the same time.
Like haiku poems, limericks, or sonnets, Storyframing provides a storytelling framework within which creativity can flourish.
Form facilitates exploration of creative solutions.
We’ve even designed a story template for you to use…
And here’s some examples of how brands you know could have used the storyframing process when designing their services and products…
Uber
The storyframing framework was developed while working at Brandwidth.
If you’ve found this article useful and want to know more about how you can use the storyframing framework to increase the success of your (or your client’s) products and services then write a comment below and I’ll get back to you.
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