By Douglas Ross & Elliott Grigg, August
Imagine you’re hosting a dinner party, but instead of your guests entering from the front door, they come in through the windows, side doors, back gate, and any other possible entry point. How do you create a consistent and premium experience with so many flexible variables to accommodate?
This scenario reflects the same challenges and opportunities that exist today in storytelling and experience design: the party being your website, product, or application, and the many entrance points being...well, exactly that. Effective storytelling is about successfully identifying and catering to the many narratives people may expect when interacting with a brand. Doing so helps to ensure consistency, predictability and trust, which has significant impacts for brand performance.
Research by PwC finds that 32% of all customers in the U.S would stop doing business with a brand they love after a single bad experience, and the same research suggests that consistency—in addition to speed, friendliness, convenience, and ‘human touch’—is key to providing a good experience, regardless of how guests arrive at your dinner party.
The Rise of the Multi-Narrative
There are three core drivers for brands needing to adapt to multi-narrative storytelling.
An increase in fragmented pathways to and around a website or product, based on varying organizational objectives
Customer journeys are sophisticated and multifaceted. Consider some of the most common pathways to a website or digital product: social media, search, QR codes, apps, referrals, VR and AR.
These varied pathways typically drive people to equally variable destinations, each with differing narrative needs. Sometimes the best story involves the fastest delivery of information. Consider a promotional campaign driving people to specific products in e-commerce. Here, optimal storytelling is concise and conversion-focused, whereas an awareness campaign for the same brand might be longer-form, with a story designed to support key decisions throughout the purchase process. Here, the ideal story is likely a more meandering and immersive experience. The journey drives the approach, and there are many, many routes to any given dinner party.
Rapidly evolving practices in device design
Innovations in device design will always impact storytelling. For example, the smartphone boom coincided with the prevalence of progressive disclosure principles. The increase in smaller screens necessitated a ‘dosed’ approach to storytelling, with designers offering information and functionalities in manageable chunks that align with cognitive load limits.Today this is exacerbated even further by features like Apple’s ‘reachability’ function in iOS 18, where screen sizes can be halved to facilitate single thumb navigation. As device conventions continue to evolve, your dinner guests are arriving through different doors while the dimensions and styles of those doors are fluid and continually in flux.
Increased potential for personalization
The rise in Digital Experience Platform technology and its parts, especially MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless), expands the potential for personalization. The expectation from customers is growing at an equivalent speed. Research from McKinsey suggests 71% of customers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and that 76% are frustrated when this doesn’t happen. This is the ‘human touch’ element of good customer experience. Regardless of where and how your guests arrive for this increasingly complex dinner party, it’s crucial they’re each welcomed by name. In an ideal world, they’ll also have equally individualized meals and experiences, too.
Effective storytelling is about successfully identifying and catering to the many narratives people may expect when interacting with a brand.
So, Where—and How—Do You Start?
Holding multiple narrative threads together requires sophisticated storytelling. Sometimes, catering for sophistication comes from mastering the basics; it’s difficult to play free-form jazz without an understanding of the fundamental rudiments of music theory. In line with that thinking, here are three core best-practices to lean on as you continue to add new layers to your multi-narrative storytelling:
Map all potential journeys with a view to smooth each path
Designing for a ‘no wrong door’ approach to product architecture and customer experience means designing for every possible arrival point—and the entire journey that comes well before. This includes consideration of context, pain points, opportunities, potential dead-ends and drop-offs. As a design tool, journey mapping is a well-trodden path, but still one that is incredibly effective in identifying journeys, and seamless, consistent, easy, and positive experiences. It’s key to map the elements of every story you need to tell, especially when the elements have evolved far beyond simple ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘end’.
Create guardrails for consistent experiences
Storytelling encompasses much more than content. An effective brand narrative requires consideration of, and consistency in, the molecular elements that contribute to customer experience: from fonts and colors through to interaction states and tone-of-voice.This is where design systems provide value. But a good design system won’t simply dictate visual aesthetic. It has a narrative itself: articulating the conceptual rationale behind key design and content presentation choices. This ensures all teams understand how and why their work contributes to an organization’s overall narrative, and prevents content or design from feeling disjointed.
A well-maintained and readily accessible design system is crucial for cohesion given the amount of variability involved in facilitating positive customer experiences, including flexibility in pathways, objectives, devices, and personalization. With known, documented, and well-rationalized guidelines, teams can maintain a unified language and a consistent approach to storytelling. This ensures continuity of messaging, sentiment and experience, regardless of entrypoint or journey.
An effective brand narrative requires consideration of, and consistency in, the molecular elements that contribute to customer experience: from fonts and colors through to interaction states and tone-of-voice.
Embrace scalable building blocks with flexibility for emergent stories
There is always cause for new chapters in evolving stories. Building with a replicable modular approach ensures organizations can flexibly create emergent customer journeys and experiences as they become apparent.
Imagine identifying a new market segment—which equates to a new wave of guests for your dinner party. This new audience might conceptualize the value of services or products in a different way, or even as a different category, than your existing audience. This creates new opportunities for storytelling.
For example, in working with a vision services provider using a goal-based approach to describing services, we learned that clients see the same service (Orthoptics, in this case) as providing multiple benefits depending on their personal context: some view the service as offering techniques to ‘live better at home’, while others will rely on the same service for ‘support through a change in vision’.
Of course, both pathways are equally valid, and so should be supported in the architecture of the website. We must articulate the value of the service in the way that resonates with prospective clients, effectively creating multiple versions of the same story. A modular design approach empowers teams to rapidly create new narratives as new journeys become apparent in customer research.
In a world where customer experiences—and the stories needed to facilitate them—are increasingly fluid, the ‘no wrong door’ approach becomes the only right one.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
With over a decade of experience as a digital copywriter and content strategist, Douglas has a strong background and interest in the field of UX writing and web accessibility, and their relationship with content strategy. His role at August uses storytelling to help connect organizations with their audiences and build strong brand awareness, recognition and perception.
Elliott draws on fourteen years’ experience telling stories for brands and businesses in a variety of sectors, spanning healthcare, technology, manufacturing, and social services. While written words are Elliott’s craft and primary tools, his role at August involves developing and delivering ideas that contribute to positive change.