The most important thing you have to understand about the UX (user experience), is that it does not depend on a single feature as much as the overall impression that your website (or business) makes on them. As Maya Angelou once said: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. When it comes to this, the easiest way to evoke such a strong and memorable sensation is through storytelling. Still, you don’t have to actually go on and tell a whole story. Just by using some great narrative techniques or finding a way to implement them into your design might do the trick. Here are a few ideas!
1. What are the elements of storytelling?
Before we go into depth describing the way in which storytelling elements can enhance your overall approach to the UX, we must first determine what they are. Here, you have several important points like the reason for the story, the protagonist, the conflict and the structure.
2. The context
The reason is the first point you need to address and it deals with a couple of important logistical issues. First, you need to introduce your company, so that the person that lands on your homepage know exactly where they are at. Next, you need to tell what is your field of expertise, your sub-niche. In this way, you create the broader context of your future interaction with your customers and thus urge them to learn more.
A great example of this can be seen on the website of Bapple web design agency, where the first thing one learns about them is that they are a digital agency that deals with hand-crafted business performances.
3. The protagonist
Even though this may sound a bit simple, you would be surprised at just how many companies pull this off completely wrong. You see the protagonist is not your company but the client. Making this mistake would make it incredibly difficult for your target demographic to get immersed in a story. Furthermore, making the story business-centric may seem a bit narcissistic which could potentially drive away some of your customers.
What you need to do here is show your audience exactly where they fit in this arrangement. Give them few examples of benefits that doing business with you brings to them. At the end, express once more that it’s all about them.
4. The conflict
Eventually, you reach the conflict, the reason why your audience is on your page in the first place. Sure, everyone has a reason for reaching out to your business in the first place, however, they might still not be fully aware of all the problems you can resolve in their stead or full benefits you can bring to their cause. The easiest way to persuade them is to present them with a statistic of satisfied customers or an approximate ROI figure. Apart from this, there are a few more interesting techniques you might want to try out.
Customer journey: Is a technique where you go into detail to describe a whole journey of a customer from the moment they contact you to the point at which your work is done. Of course, you shouldn’t be too elaborate in this effort or you risk boring them, so try to be as exact in the limited time-span that you have.
Scenario: This particular technique is more or less similar to the customer journey with a major difference that it focuses on a problem rather than the customer. Surprisingly enough, by impersonalizing the customer, you are allowing a higher level of immersion, seeing as how most of your potential clients will be able to see themselves in these shoes.
Storyboards: Finally, this particular feature is a testimonial in which a former satisfied customer describes the way in which you managed to help them overcome their problem. Now, even though this may seem the most personal, you would be surprised at just how scripted some these testimonials sound. Therefore, it might be for the best if you were to edit these stories as little as possible, due to the fact that they will appear the most genuine in their natural form.
In conclusion
For millennia, greatest minds and the most talented writers of our civilization dedicated their lives to finding a way of immersing the readers into their stories. Therefore, it is no surprise that most of these techniques are applicable to the modern business world as well. After all, what is a business if not an art of its own, an art that requires talent, originality and effort? With this approach, you can easily find a way to make your story unique even with 1.3 billion active websites out there as a competition. A bit of outside-of-the-box thinking really goes a long way.