The User's Journey. Donna Lichaw

      Story is not only a tool your brain uses to understand what you see, it’s a tool your brain uses to understand what you experience. In other words, the same brain function that you use to understand what you see in a photograph is the same brain function you would use if you were one of those grandparents using FaceTime. Life is a story. And in that story, you are the hero.

      In Badass: Making Users Awesome, Kathy Sierra argues that creating successful products is not about what features you build—it’s about how badass you make your user on the other end feel. It’s not about what your product can do, but instead about what your users can do if they use your product.

      Amazon, for example, is not a marketplace with lots of stuff. It’s a way for you to have a world of goods at your fingertips. Using this perspective, you can see how your job building products comes down to creating heroes. When I rush-order toothpaste with one-click on Amazon to replace the toothpaste I used up this morning—as boring as it sounds, I’m a hero in my household.

      This job you have of creating heroes isn’t just an act of goodwill. In the time I’ve spent over the past two decades helping businesses build products that people love, I’ve seen what happens when people feel good about what they can do with your product. They love your product. And your brand. They recommend it to others. They continue to use it over time…as long as you keep making them feel awesome. They even forgive mistakes and quirks when your product doesn’t work as expected, or your brand doesn’t behave as they’d like. People don’t care about your product or brand. They care about themselves. That’s something that you can and should embrace when you build products.

      What’s great about story and its underlying structure is that it provides you with a framework—a formula, if you will—for turning your customers into heroes. Plot points, high points, and all. Story is one of the oldest and most powerful tools you have to create heroes. And as I’ve seen and will show you in this book, what works for books and movies will work for your customers, too.

CHAPTER 3

       Concept Stories

       What Is a Concept Story?

       How Concept Stories Work

       Avoiding the Anticlimactic

       Supporting the Story

       Mapping a Concept Story

       Finding the Concept Story at FitCounter

       “Stories are about people, not things.”

       —Chris Crawford, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling

      When the first iPhone came out in 2007, the iPod was a popular device. If you were like me, you carried an iPod in one pocket and a mobile phone in another. Sometimes, you joked about how you wished you could duct tape them together so they could be one device. But really, you wanted Apple to invent an iPod that was also a mobile phone.

      When Steve Jobs gave his keynote presentation in January of 2007, that is exactly what the media and pundits expected him to announce. And he did announce an iPod that made phone calls. Sort of. What he demonstrated to the world in that presentation surprised people because it was much, much more.

      During his keynote presentation, Jobs presented a problem: smartphones are no good. Then he revealed a new smartphone that not many people expected—it consisted of not one, but three products:

      • A widescreen touchscreen iPod

      • A revolutionary new mobile phone

      • An Internet communicator

      As he cycled through three slides in his presentation that illustrated these three points, he repeated them a few times. “An iPod…a phone… and an Internet communicator…” he repeated this phrase until he finally asked the audience, “Are you getting it?” At this point, the audience erupted in applause as he announced that Apple was not launching three, but one singular device that did all three things. They were going to call it the iPhone.

      No one had asked for a three-in-one communication device. Actually, most iPod owners in 2007 would have been content with an iPod that let them make phone calls. This moment in Apple’s keynote presentation was not just momentous because it changed the world of mobile computing, but also because it was the inciting incident that kick-started a storyline that flowed through everything from the actual product itself to the rest of the presentation that hooked and engaged not just the audience, but much of the world. What bolstered the presentation, more specifically, was a concept story.

What Is a Concept Story?

      A concept story is the conceptual story model of your product: it illustrates the big picture overview of what a product is. At the highest level, it also outlines how your customers think about that product. It is the foundational story and structure that you will use to identify and communicate your core concept and value proposition both internally and externally, as well as weave into everything you eventually build.

      Concept stories, when used to define products, help you answer the following questions:

      • Who is this product for?

      • What is their problem?

      • What is their big goal? Secondary goals?

      • What is this product?

      • What is the competition?

      • Why might someone not want to use this product?

      • How is this product better than the competition?

      • What does this product need to do?

      • What is the straightforward solution to the problem?

      • What is the awesome solution to the problem?

      NOTE WHAT CONCEPT STORIES DO

       At the very least, good concept stories get people excited about your product. As a requirement, the stories live within your product and how you shape it. At their best, they get people talking about your product. Concept stories help you achieve three goals:

      • Communicate a shared vision

      • Align toward that shared vision

      • Innovate and prioritize against that shared vision

How Concept Stories Work

      Because concept stories illustrate how your target customers do or could think about your product or service, they are either based on real data or are aspirational. Think of them as the mental calculation that someone makes when they first hear about your product. The story might only last a few seconds as your customer puts together the important