Listen to the full episode of Unlock People’s Potential with Conor McGlauflin: https://www.contriber.com/narrative-product-development-codecademy/ It is common to see a startup that fails because the team is not solving real problems. They create new products and services, but don’t make sure these solutions fit into people’s lives. This can be solved with using storytelling and qualitative research — interviewing your customers and investigating their stories. How to get more out of your customer interviews? How to build buyer personas? How to create customer stories? How can using narratives benefit your company? We found answers to these questions. For that Guerric de Ternay interviewed Conor McGlauflin, Design Lead at Codecademy. Codecademy is an online platform that teaches people how to code. Conor shared with us his experience in using storytelling to make Codecademy’s successful product even better. Dig into the presentation to find out 10 reasons why storytelling will help your startup design better user experience and increase your sales. Listen to the full episode of Unlock People’s Potential with Conor McGlauflin: https://www.contriber.com/narrative-product-development-codecademy/

1. 10 Reasons Why Storytelling
Will Help Your Startup
Design Better User Experience

2. How can you use storytelling to design
products that solve real problems?
We met with Conor McGlauflin, Design Lead at Codecademy.
Guerric de Ternay and Conor discussed how storytelling can help
you identify the problems your customers have and find
opportunities to increase your sales.
Learn from these 10 ideas that Conor McGlauflin shared with us
to discover why narrative product design works.

3. 1.
Writing the stories of your customers allows you
to understand what they want.

4. 2.
Don’t focus only on the moment
when your customers use your product.
Investigate the whole story,
from the moment they recognized a need
to the time they’re using your product.

5. 3.
Use the ‘Five Whys’ technique.
Ask “why?” several times
to understand the context in which
your customers need and use your product.

6. 4.
Make sure you rely on
the right buyer personas*.
*Personas = the profiles of your most important
customers, which include attributes they have
in common and how they make decisions.

7. 5.
Don’t build personas solely on
quantitative attributes (e.g. age, location, salary).
Use more qualitative attributes—like anthropologists do.
Interviewing and observing customers
will help you build better personas.

8. 6.
Write your customer stories using
what you learn from running user interviews.
This will help you plan your product roadmap.

9. 7.
Three steps for designing good products and services:
1) Understand who you’re designing for
2) Spot problems in the customer journey
3) Think about the solutions writing stories

10. 8.
Encourage your team to write stories about your
customers discovering and using your products.
Everyone can write stories.
Doing this will make them feel that
they are involved in the designing process.

11. 9.
A good customer story encompasses:
- what your customers really want,
- how they discover your product,
- how they buy it and use it,
- and what happens next.

12. 10.
A good narrative should be
tied to a specific persona.

13. More about narrative product design
Listen to the full episode here.

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15. More about Contriber
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