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Lavacon presentation - Intuit
- 1. @Speaker #LavaCon When Easy Isn’t Enough What video games can teach us about content strategy John Caldwell & Ria Hagan
- 2. @Speaker #LavaCon About the Speakers
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- 8. “Money is where our inner lives meet the outside world.” Susan McCarthy, Value of Money
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- 20. 01 Games are big business ✤ 59% of Americans play video games ✤ Consumers spent $25 billion dollars on games in 2014 alone
- 21. 01 The impact of games ✤ Games are ancient ✤ Digital technology have given games a new relevance ✤ We live in a world of systems ✤ Games are a literacy - and more and more people speak this language
- 22. It’s the customer’s story. Not yours.
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- 25. There were two stories playing out at once 1. The player’s story… 2. And the game’s story…
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- 29. ✤ When it comes to stories, players are not passive listeners. ✤ They are telling their own story to themselves, about who they are and what they want. ✤ The game’s story has to resonate with the player’s story – or it fails.
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- 37. Give them what they want. Not what they don’t.
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- 40. 01 Player character Non-player character +
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- 43. 01 Anyone up for some algebra?
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- 48. Was there a time when you were asked to discover something new? Maybe even tricked into learning?
- 49. ✤ Words are not an end in and of themselves ✤ Words are a means to an end… …the emotional connection underlying the words
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- 53. We must accept that people are CRAZY.
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- 55. 01 Who’s really in charge? ✤ It would be great if we could be purely logical creatures
- 56. 01 Who’s really in charge? ✤ But our emotions and instincts are usually running the show
- 57. 01 Who’s really in charge? ✤ They see this in video-game development every day ✤ We all need to be thinking about it
- 58. 01 The lizard brain rules ✤ Our customers can’t access their critical-thinking skills until their emotional brains and their lizard brains have been calmed down ✤ Critical thinking doesn’t come first ✤ It comes last
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- 61. Get comfortable with being (really) uncomfortable.
- 64. Bringing our non-player character to life
- 66. speak to my higher self.
- 67. Below the neck verbs … Put Above the neck verbs …
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- 72. 01 ✤ So what did we learn… 1. Listen to our customers – understand the story they are telling themselves 2. Tell them what they want to hear, not what they don’t – with optional discovery-based learning all along the way 3. Accept that they are crazy (We all are!) 4. Get comfortable with being (really) uncomfortable
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Editor's Notes
- John: Hi everybody. Thanks for coming. I’m John and this is Ria. We work for Intuit on their flagship TurboTax products. I’m the lead content strategist, and Ria is a senior content designer, with the privilege of delivering delight to 30 million customers every year. Today, we’re going to talk about some new ways of thinking about voice and tone, and content strategy.
- For years at TurboTax, we had a content strategy based on delivering the benefits of ease and accuracy to our customers. It worked well. But eventually we knew that wasn’t enough. Our customers weren’t always loyal. That’s because they had no reason to be. So, last year we wanted to see how our content could play a starring role connecting with our customers on an emotional level to encourage loyalty, drive revenue and deliver delight. We started looking for inspiration outside our world, hoping to be provoked into thinking differently. We decided we needed a provocateur. We brainstormed some possible analogies to TurboTax in an effort to identify potential provocateurs. Ria: And as a life time gamer, I thought, hey! These guys are killing it when it comes to delivering on fiercely loyal, incredibly delighted fan base. So we played some video games. We talked with a number video game writers, designers and developers. And what we ultimately determined, was that video games, strangely enough, had exactly what it would take to provoke us into a whole new way of thinking.
- John: That’s right. Video games. But not just any video games. Narrative video games, games based on deep and immersive experiences that tell a story in which the player is the lead character. We wanted to learn from that, and we want you to learn from it too.
- Which for some in this room might seem crazy. Well, it is. But we’ll get to that crazy business a little later. First, we’d like share the relevance and impact of games.
- Ria: In the gaming world, especially in narrative video games, a Silver Arrow is a term game writers use for connecting with the hearts and minds of gamers. The term Silver Arrow actually comes from the video game Zelda. In this game, your final enemy is beyond difficult. Attack him with everything in your arsenal you’ll get the same result…GAME OVER. But find the Silver Arrow, and you can pierce his previously impenetrable armor to connect with his heart…and win the game. Game writers are closer to cracking the code than ever when it comes to connecting with the hearts and minds of gamers and that’s what keeps their fans coming back for more. This is what we’re here to share with you all today, the Silver Arrow game writers and game designers have found that can help everyone in this room overcome barriers between their message and their audience.
- Once we’d identified gaming as our source of provocation, we started by digging into the hearts and minds of our customers. We worked with some game folks to apply their methods for doing this, and what we came to realize was that it wasn’t about figuring out taxes. It was about figuring out people, and how they RELATE to their taxes, and really to money in general. That changed everything.
- There was a really insightful quote we came across that said “Money is where our inner lives meet the outside world.” What we believe about ourselves, what we hope for and what we fear, all the best and worst parts of ourselves gets played out in the world of money.
- And the same is true for games. Video games are just an electronic version of an activity we’ve been engaging in for thousands of years. We’ve been playing games for as long as we’ve been using money. Maybe longer. “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” – Plato said that! And it still holds true today.
- John: Everybody in this room is a communicator. That means we are ALL interested in people. In what makes them tick. We are social animals. We need other people. It’s why we all got onto trains, planes and automobiles to be here today. We could have just chatted over email. But we come to conferences to be together. And we play games often to be together.
- So we’re social animals and we want to be together. But there is a huge barrier in the modern world that keeps us from being together, and that barrier is technology. We spend less and less time communicating face-to-face. More often than not, a machine is in the way. We text, we write corporate emails, we write copy for a software program, we write stories — we communicate to an audience that we can’t see or touch or hear.
- Video games have found ways to bridge that digital divide, and make deep emotional connections with players. They learned how to do this the hard way. And they’re not perfect at it yet. They made a million mistakes, but they were also able to learn from those mistakes. And today we’ll share some of their best practices that in some weird ways could apply to the work YOU do too. Because in a way, we all have the same job, and that is to communicate effectively with other people.
- Ria: Video games used to be two-dimensional, task-oriented experiences.
- Something that looked like this…but, they’ve evolved…
- Into highly polished, money making (sometimes killing) machines
- Show of hands, how many people here have played a game or know someone who has played a game like one of these? Ok so about X many Anyone love video games? Hate them? I won’t be offended! Anyone not particularly care? Well whether we love them, hate them, or even if we’re completely indifferent, the gaming industry is virtually minting money, and some people are saying that games are going to be a huge cultural juggernaut in the coming years, bigger than they already are.
- John: In 19th century, the dominant storytelling medium was the novel.
- In the 20th century, it was film.
- What if, in the 21st century, the dominant storytelling medium is games? It might seem improbable now, but things are changing fast.
- Ria: The gaming industry is already huge, and getting bigger by the day. In 2014 alone it generated $25 billion. That’s billion with a B!
- But how are games having such a huge impact? What tools are they using to reach their audiences in such powerful ways?
- John: OK, so now that we’ve got you thinking about the impact of video games, let’s dig in to some of the things we can learn from them. We’ll cover four different lessons game designers learned over the years, and then relate them to the work the we do. The first thing is the value of listening. In talking to game designers and writers, they told us that we need to listen to the player’s story…listen to our customer’s story, whether we want to or not.
- In our work with narrative game developers, they told us that early on they saw a need to create more loyalty - just like us - and to make this happen, they decided they needed to strengthen the connection between the payer and the game story. So they spent A LOT of time and money creating elaborate cutscenes to tell the story to the player. For those of you that don’t know what that is a cutscene is a beautifully designed story segment that plays out much like a mini movie within the game. And after millions upon Millions of dollars spent writing, casting, directing and perfecting…
- Players ignored all of their hard work. Why were players skipping cutscenes? Sometimes it was because the cutscenes weren’t very good. But even when they were GREAT, players still skipped them. Argh! After a lot of trial and error, they finally figured what was going on
- There were two stories playing out at once: the player’s story and the game’s story. And if there was a disconnect between the player’s story and the game’s story, the player tuned out. He might keep playing the game, but he completely ignored the story. I’ll give you an example.
- So here’s this game. In it, you’ve got a gun with a chainsaw at the end of it. Your job in this game is to kill as many monster aliens as humanly possible. It’s pretty straightforward, testosterone-happy and and over-the-top.
- But the cutscenes tell what’s meant to be a powerful, dramatic story about how one of the guys in the squad is looking for his missing wife, Maria. This is supposed to be moving and sad and a glimpse into the human cost of warfare, and about love lost. Then you get back to this.
- Chain sawing aliens’ heads off! And THIS is what the player wants to be doing!!!! How does this go with a sad story about a wife’s death? WHAT wife? Who’s married? Huh?
- Ria: At TurboTax we already knew what a lot of us sitting in this room already know, that we need to create experiences that resonate with customers. What talking to game writers and designers both validated and helped us to see, was the importance of recognizing that our customers are coming to us telling themselves their own story about what’s going on. We can’t just tell people doing their taxes using our software “is easy” Because, for many people, it’s not easy. In fact, lots of people are telling themselves it’s going to be hard. Let’s take a quick poll. Who here thinks doing their taxes is easy? Show of hands.
- Ok and who thinks they’re harder than getting the toothpaste back in its tube? Right. So you can see why when we told people doing their taxes would be SIMPLE and EASY it was no surprise we were creating an emotional disconnect right from the get go.
- There are many very smart, highly educated people that don’t fully understand their own finances or taxes. And we don’t blame them! Managing personal finances and learning to do your taxes isn’t something we were taught in school or required to learn before graduating from college. But in their minds it certainly SEEMS like something they should know how to do as an adult. So when we say “See how easy it is” and they then stumble or get stuck while tackling something, the frustration of not being able to achieve this “simple” task makes the struggle all the more discouraging, and on some levels potentially embarrassing.
- But the gaming world is leaps and bounds ahead in learning how to listen and have a conversation with the player. And once they’ve succeeded, they are set to become the literature of the 21st century. So even though our technology hasn’t quite caught up, and allowed us to have ACTUAL conversations, we also need to learn how to simulate that interaction. The secret to how game designers do it so well is based on PLAYER DESIRE. On what the player wants. Here I’ll give you an example.
- Example: Portal 2.
- If you noticed in that clip, eye in the sky directs the player to say apple and speak, but instead of completing these actions, they jump. What Portal 2 is doing is actually “listening” by predicting what the player really wants. Which is to have fun. Not performing routine actions correctly. So it doesn’t bother the player that when he tries to speak, he jumps instead. That’s a feature allowing him to do what he wants – which is have fun – while moving the story line along in a humurous way. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XLBhlSxwX8)
- So how does this relate to the work you do? I’m guessing your usual day doesn’t include being a detached voice emitting from a eyeball like sphere hanging from the ceiling. But it does relate because it’s all about understanding what your audience desires. Because your audience is not sitting their passively, even if they’re reading an email or copy on a screen. They’re engaging and thinking about how - or whether - what you’re saying connects to their lives. In order to communicate effectively, we have to know what our readers want, and then tailor what we say in such a way that connects with an audience emotionally. It’s not just about facts and figures, it’s about connecting with who people really are, where they really live.
- And for some players or customers that means just staying out of the way. Engagement needs to be optional. In this example the player is given the option to sail off on a mission to save a beautiful damsel in distress right away by selecting the pre-highlighted “Jump in the boat” option, or they can opt to make a deeper emotional connection with their current traveling companion by selecting the non highlighted option to ask “That still bother you?”. But it’s totally up to the player to engage and decide how much story / content their interested in consuming at any given time. They are in control of their destiny and completely free to follow their own desire line. And that’s true for TurboTax, not everyone wants strop and learn more about charitable deductions, but if they would like to, we make it easily available.
- John: So the next thing we want to focus on has to do with words. Game writers use their words carefully — but not in the way you might expect.
- Game writers decided that if they had extremely limited player attention, but had something that really needed to be communicated, they would just have to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible. They wrote short, direct dialog. One step above grunts, really. And guess what happened?
- You got it – the player skipped ahead. They didn’t like to be lectured or dictated to, even if it was brief. It turns out what gamers, and perhaps your customers are looking for isn’t efficiency. It's a connection. I’m sure we’ve all had a time where we think we’ve created the most concise, short, very snackable copy, that probably ended up with the same result because it was being presented in a way that got in the way of what the user wanted to do.
- Modern games are moving away from informational “data drops” and towards character/relationship development. There’s a player character – the hero of the game – and a non-player character. who’s there to enhance the experience without getting in the way. The non-player character is the voice you create in your product experience or website. Sometimes the game and the player work together to create a stronger player character. As an example, watch how the conversation unfolds in this Mass Effect 3 demo.
- (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI37OWdzoag)
- When they said there would be voice recognition in this game, a lot of people thought “oh no this is going to be stupid. I’ll read the line, and then the guy on-screen will say the same thing, and that will be stupid.” But instead the player and avatar are working together, like a team. He’s almost finishing the player’s sentences. They’re using the conversation engine to almost make player and avatar buddies. Here, they had more words than they needed. WAY more. But they serve a different purpose. The words aren’t just there to give information, but to build character and relationship. People will listen for a long, long time to something that connects with their curiosity, or their humanity.
- Ria: Quick question: How does the idea of doing some quick algebra strike you? Don’t worry, we will not be breaking out into groups with pencil and paper to solve quadratic equations. But what if I told you, doing algebra could be fun? Are you curious? Would seeing how this would even be remotely possible interest you? Some of you may have already seen our call to download the app I’m about to show. For those of you who did, we’d love to have a few of you share your experiences with the group. Need 3 QUESTIONS here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=35&v=V1z68nGl3F4
- John: So this idea of discovery based learning works in our world too. Who here knows about Moo? Moo.com offers small business owners an awesome way to create beautifully designed business cards. The other day, I was poking around on their site and I saw a tab called “Inspiration.”
- I already knew what I was there to purchase, but I found myself clicking on it anyways. When I did, I was served up a somewhat predictable selection of things related to designing business cards. But wait, what’s this “startup toolkit”?
- Curious, I clicked on that and was given some educational and empowering advice on running my business, things like tips on how to solve your own problems. By this point, I’ve forgotten about business cards. I read the whole thing, and before I knew it I had learned some powerful. And afterward, I felt a deeper connection to Moo. They had made me better at something.
- So how does this relate to what you do? Obviously there won’t be animation or music in TurboTax or a corporate newsletter. Sometimes words are all we’ve got. But words are a means to an end, and that end is the emotional connection underlying the words. Figure out how you want to make your reader FEEL, and then work from there.
- Because after all… It’s all about feelings. (Play song here?)
- Our users don’t FEEL like taxes are easy, so let’s start acknowledging it!
- This dramatically increased the engagement with our customers.
- Ria: Now for our third point. We told you in the beginning that we’d get to that crazy business. Indeed, none of this would work if we didn’t accept that people are crazy. All people. You, me, that guy… (point at John)
- That’s because we all have brains. And they are AMAZING. The logical part - that neocortex there at the top - is the weakest, “buggiest” part. It’s only been around for a few hundred thousand years. Even the limbic brain the, emotional or feeling portion of the brain, has been around a lot longer, and is a lot more powerful. And the LIZARD brain — fight or flight — is the most powerful part of the brain there is! It's the part that makes EVERY decision we make. The neocortex may be the king’s counselor, but the lizard brain is the king.
- John: So who here has seen the Martian? Awesome movie, no? Well, I loved it. One of the most interesting things about the lead character in the story, Mark Watney, is that he is a purely logical, rational person. With only a couple exceptions, he is NOT completely freaked out by the fact that he must figure out how to survive on Mars all by himself… for FOUR YEARS!
- If that were me, and I was stranded on Mars for four years, I don’t care how much training and technical ability I was gifted with. This is how I would react.
- They’ve learned this in video-game development and so have we.
- In games, players can’t access their critical-thinking skills until their emotional and lizard brains have been addressed. And that’s true everywhere else in life, too. Critical thinking doesn't come first…it comes last. And you don’t have to work at TurboTax to know this is especially true when it comes to money.
- At Intuit we work with Dan Ariely, and he’s got some good news for us all: People are PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL - in games and in life. Dan’s basically THE GUY when it comes to behavioral economics. And he agrees we are driven by invisible forces that in some ways are beyond our control. So when we are trying to communicate to our audience, we can’t always treat them as thinking rational creatures - because that’s only part of the picture. They are also irrational - but predictably so.
- So understanding that people are irrational, even predictably, we’ve learned that the path to connecting to them is not with facts. We tend to remember things we learned in kindergarten more vividly than we remember some of our college classes. Why is that? Because when we are kids, learning is FUN. It lights up our limbic brain, where emotion lives. And you know what else lives there? Long-term memory. If you are trying to communicate something and you want it to stick, it’s not enough to give just the facts — the trick is to give the experience an emotional, or human charge. Make it feel like it’s one human connecting to another, and you’ve got it. This applies to financial or corporate communications just as much as it applies to entertainment.
- John: And now for our fourth and final point: get uncomfortable! Now that we’ve learned some things from video game writers, we need to take that and marry it with our other insights, and then get out of our comfort zones. The truth is, if we’re not doing things that make us uncomfortable, we’re never going to change the game and win over our customers for the long term.
- After digging deep into our customer’s needs, and then applying the lessons we learned from video games, the TurboTax Content Design team decided the customer – our player character - needs to be the hero, just like the player in games. Our hero’s desire is to do their taxes their way, to feel good about their money, and to succeed at life. They are brave enough to go on the adventure, but uncertain about doing it on their own.
- So our customer is the hero, and TurboTax is the mentor, the non-player character. We’re at their side, supporting them throughout the journey, while respecting the story they are telling themselves about their taxes and their money. The mentor’s desire is is to impart knowledge and insights to help the hero to succeed and win the game. The mentor leans in when needed, and when it’s appropriate to the story, and leans out when the hero needs to take charge. The mentor doesn’t get in the way of the hero’s game.
- Out of this, we developed some provocative new principles to bring this character to life.
- We pushed ourselves to be aspirational. “Keep it simple” is a solid principle, but we were already doing it. And it’s wasn’t going to help us connect emotionally with our customers.
- So we we turned “keep it simple” into a “no duh,” a principle that we should be doing anyway, and elevated our thinking into character-generating principles. This principle brings maturity into the relationship, thereby increasing the level of engagement between you and your customer. It forces us to do something they’ve been doing in narrative video games to great success: Use above the neck verbs.
- Below the neck verbs are all about actions. They are often very transactional in nature. Above the neck verbs are about thoughts and feelings. Using more of these changes how we communicate to our audience. It forces a change in the nature of the relationship we create.
- Ria: Another principle that came out of our exploration of the player/non-player relationship has to do with understanding our customer’s potential vulnerability. This is very provocative for our design business. In fact, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable just talking about it. But remember, we going from ease and accuracy to deeply felt emotional needs.
- We’re understanding that many of our customers might actually be feeling a sense of shame around not understanding their taxes or having control over they’re money. But they won’t tell us, or even themselves. They’ll just leave. Just like they do in games, we can strip these negative emotions away by being playful, by rewarding them, and lending a helping hand without getting in the way.
- John: As a result, we started to think about the TurboTax experience in terms of the relationship we were building with our customers. We started listening, AND sharing – in this example things like birthdays.
- We used to be very transactional. It worked fine, but there was no real engagement. It was about getting the task done, nothing more.
- John: So what did we learn? Listen to our customers. Understand the story they are telling themselves. What do they desire? Ria: Tell them what they want to hear…and not what they don’t John: Accept they are crazy. We al are. Until we address the needs of the lizard and emotional brains, we’re never going to reach them on a rational level. Ria: Comfortable with being (really) uncomforable
- John: Think of your customer as the hero. And you are there to set them up for success.
- Ria: As you soak in what we talked about here today, we’d like you to imagine a world where users actually have a better life because they no longer feel shame for not knowing something. A world filled with colorful balloons and picturesque country roads hah! But no seriously, we have a responsibility to create a world where users aren’t bored by an overload of information, to the point that they’re glazing over important things that could actually enhance their life. A place where they can actually looking forward to using your product as something that WANT to do instead of something they HAVE to do. And it all starts with each and everyone of us in this room, because we are all at the forefront of becoming the non-player character can help our hero win. And because using software, or a website or even reading an email needs to be more than just easy. It needs to create an emotional connection that pierces their armor and connects with their heart. (Something about because it’s more than being just easy. It’s about an emotional connection. And it starts with each and everyone of us in this room.)
- And it doesn’t have to be overnight. Because…it’s all a journey. And it ‘s all about knowing when, and how, to use our words. And this game doesn’t use any at all. We’ll let it play while we take any questions or comments you might have
- Journey trailer, just for fun… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mF8KkDiIdk