World-building and transformative journeys is the new Product Design - PART 2
Storytelling as a language framework for product design, but what happens if you add TIME ⏰ as a design premise to your design? A world would appear.
Read PART 1 here.
Many internet companies often approach product design through the lens of Figma and on-screen interfaces, moving from page to page, action button to feature, and focusing on the next step in the user journey. The customer, the protagonist, however, operates in a much bigger world: their life — and a crucial aspect of their world is time. What happens to product design if you start considering time as a central design premise?
Add time and you'll get a world — and it is in this world that product design's true canvas lies. It's where you design your value offering.
And if you truly recognise your customer's "world," you can also start appreciating to a greater extent some realities that influence your protagonist's world, which is usually overlooked in the calming safety of the Figma board. This world is very much governed by game theory. And not to forget, behavioural economics principles like "Sunk Cost" (Arkes and Blumer, 1985), "Prospect Theory" (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), and "Mental Accounting" by Thaler, to name a few, which are always in full play:
Where to start designing with storytelling
Start by asking yourself: where does the protagonist want to be in one month? (And what activities and features do they need to get there?)
Well, consider this argument by Steve Chaparro. The concept of the Experience Economy is a concept that was introduced by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in the late 1990s. It emphasises the importance of creating memorable customer interactions based on the theory of "Progression of Economic Value." Value offerings have evolved through stages in our economy from the Commodities Economy to the Goods, Service, and currently, the Experience Economy. While experiences can be powerful, they can also become short-lived and superficial.
This is where Mr. Chaparro introduces a new exciting idea that I think describes what capitalism has been missing for so long, the next Progression of Economic Value: the Transformation Economy, an economy that focuses on sustained change in people's lives for the better. It's based on the idea that what people really seek to add to their lives are deeper connections and experiences that impact how they live, work, and play. This is supported in many ways by Maslow's ideas about humans' hierarchy of needs and similar arguments. If you look at successful brands in both B2B and B2C, it seems that this is what they are succeeding in. Creating value offerings is really about facilitating emotional, holistic, and transformative experiences, in which you embed products, services, and features while trying to anticipate the needs and desires of their protagonists (customers) living in a rapidly changing world.
Are you ready to delve even deeper? Transformations occur most effectively when there is a high level of trust in the relationship between two parties, and when both parties are eager to actively collaborate.
Chew on this argument inspired by
and his post Enablers vs. Growers:The key questions for emerging companies to ask themselves are whether their primary relationship to their customers' growth is passive (enabling) or active (growing).
A grower-business plays an active role in increasing customers' success in their journey and works to increase, improve, and expand the value generated for their customers, their growth. A very powerful way to do this is through alignment of incentives, which refers to a situation where the goals of the business and the customers are aligned, in agreement, and both parties' actions are mutually beneficial.
With the right incentives, activities, storytelling, and features, customers will add value to your world, thus increasing the overall value and value output for all, achieving a network effect.
There are three primary ways for companies to move from enabler to grower:
Enable customers to gain value from a wider range of areas, situations, and topics.
Facilitate business model evolution on behalf of customers.
Shift risk from the customer to the business, helping them grow faster.
As customers go about their journey, your services, products, interfaces, and activities should be able to be triggered into relevance as the customer needs them, or triggered by you, the company, into relevance in order to guide and help them along the journey. Value offerings, rewards, and achievements should naturally become a part of your story, the routine, and the roadmap that is crafted to inspire, educate, and grow your customer.
Questions to chew on:
What does the protagonist want to build with your service? What's your available character development here?
How do you sequence your value proposition through time to fit different customer-journeys and scenarios?
When during the week, the month, the years is my offering relevant to the protagonist?
What triggers its relevance?
Classics like: What problems are we solving? What barriers are we lowering? What jobs-to-be-done are we automating? Which ones arise in which scenarios?
What features do I need for which types of scenarios found in our people's journeys?
How should we guide our customer to take better actions? What is the best route? (See the striped orange line in the time illustration above)
What are the pitfalls the customer can fall into, and when do they arise?
What's the calendar/routine for what happens when? Weekly, monthly, quarterly, half a year, a year?
Conclusion
Ultimately, this product design strategy is all about respecting the humans you design for, completely🌻, and truly designing from their perspective, the way they see their world, over time. Storytelling in time-aware world building reframes product design in a way that enables you to understand people even more deeply, celebrating them like heroes, in a language they care about with meaningful and timely interactions through the course of their continuous, personal transformation. This approach allows you to design a truly useful sequence of activities, features, and interfaces: a storytelling product that earns engagement, builds a long-lasting relationship, and is most likely to win the market of humans in the coming decade.
What do you think?
Awesome that you read all the way! 🦄
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Cheers!
M