From the fairy tales of our earliest years to the soap operas, newspapers and box office hits of our maturity, we humans love stories. But it’s not just about adventure and a happy ending. Stories are a medium through which we communicate and mentally store information in a handy recall framework of associated items.

“Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact”. Robert McKee, screenwriter.

It’s easy to dismiss storytelling as something for kids and I wouldn’t recommend starting your corporate presentation with ‘Once upon a time there was a brave little CEO…” but as a technique for engaging audiences and conveying information it’s as good today as it was thousands of years ago.

The fact stories follow a narrative, building up layers of information and associated items (first this happened, then as a result that happened) helps us create a linear mnemonic – one that photographic memory performers use to connect and remember huge lists of seemingly unconnected items.

Used as a communication tool, stories and storytelling allow us to lay out a message in a clearly accessible form that we’re all familiar with.

“Rapport is created between the storyteller and the audience. They feel that they are actively involved, rather than just passively listening”, Lindsey Warnes Carroll, comedian and story teller.

Our brains and basic cultures have changed little since the days of hearing the news, learning about the latest religion/King/invaders and keeping in touch with our community through stories. In fact, traditional storytelling is enjoying a renaissance with storytelling festivals like Beyond the Border, held in the grounds of a cliff-top Welsh castle, on the increase.  And now there are even companies like The Story Tellers who “help business leaders engage their people in strategy, vision, values and change”.

But you don’t have to be a pro who’s spent years learning the art – we tell stories all the time: “Have you heard? She was with HIM last night at the bar and then…”.  Engaging stakeholders, communicating the progress of a project, concepts for design or delivering an unpalatable message, we all engage with this medium without thinking – it’s how we’re taught as children, how we consume news and entertainment: it’s our common culture as a species.

Some principles:

• Beginning THEN middle THEN end. Build up to the ‘big issue’ from the beginnings so your audience can start with simple concepts and add the detail – like Lego.
• Make sure the end has a real end. A joke without a punchline doesn’t work. Make sure your story builds to the main point, deliver that point, then finish or move to a new and different thread. Unless you’re very good, don’t try to carry several threads at once – people will get lost.
• Use a narrative to plan your presentation material (yes, I do mean PowerPoint slides amongst other things).
• Make sure you include details if you’re introducing new ideas. Don’t be afraid to stop the narrative and explain. E.g. ‘for those of you who don’t know what social networking is…’, or, ‘And the sword he held was carved with sigils and signs of a dark and unnatural nature…’, depending on your subject matter and audience.
• Stories can be spoken, written, pictorial or use just about any medium for their production. The importance is in the structure, building narrative and communication of the message.
• Experiment with stories that don’t yet have an ending and allow or use the audience to discover and create as a collaborative exercise. Remember those ‘choose your own adventure’ books? On the internet, a user’s journey through a website doesn’t always follow a prescriptive path, but is … wait for it … hypertextual.
• Enjoy the telling of the story and your audience will enjoy the story too – no matter how potentially dry your subject – believe me, I’m delivered some stats stories in my time that could have bored people into an early grave, without improving the engagement through storytelling.

“And they all lived happily ever after. The End.”

The Long Dog.

“Mr Chatterbox was one of those people who simply couldn’t stop talking.

“He used to talk to anybody and everybody about anything and everything, going on and on and on.

“And on and on and on!”

For those of you unfamiliar with the ‘The Little Miss’ and ‘Mr Men’ series of children’s books it may please you to know that Mr Chatterbox (right) is a loveable but garrulous little character whose unbungable flow of waffle is eventually stopped with a magic hat that steadily grows to cover him when he doesn’t stop talking.

There are far too many websites and intranets that need their own magic hats, but it’s often difficult to explain to your CEO / subject matter expert / Marketing Director / Training Manager (delete as appropriate) that making content too wordy, confusing to follow or simply boring your site’s audience into submission has one of two effects:

1. If your site makes money, your competition is only a back button away: Your revenue drops – simple as that.
2. If your site is an information site or an intranet, people don’t find answers and your avoidable cost increases (calls to helpdesks, lower efficiency, wrong answers, referrals to other colleagues to find answers etc).

Oh, and don’t forget the damage it does to your brand. Business objectives mean nothing if your customers aren’t engaged with what you’ve got to offer. Don’t be showy, be smart about what and how you write your content.

Ok … so where’s some science to back this up?

In 1997 (yes – TWELVE years ago, so why is so much dross still being commissioned) Jakob Nielsen wrote an article outlining research on how people read web pages. While he talks about all the things we should already know about, like page scanning instead of reading, a particularly good demonstration shows how to edit eight lines of dull prose into just over one line and six clear bullets.

While some of the article is now outdated, humans haven’t evolved noticeably in the last decade so it’s worth a punt: “How Users Read on the Web”. A strong caveat I’d add to this concerns the logic of emboldening keywords (one of the aforementioned outdated thingies): Gerry McGovern, self styled content guru and repackager of information architecture as ‘Carewords’, sensibly pointed out that if you only want your readers to read the bold words, why bother with the rest of the text? Of course he’s right – just create focussed content and cut the waffle.

Last year I designed a tool for a UK bank – one of those things where you put in the details of all your various outstanding debts and they tell you just how much you can save every month if you consolidate your loans with them. One of the features that I killed off was the need for the customer to specify what interest rate they wanted to pay. Given the choice I’d have said 0% or at least something like 0.0000000000001% every time. What they really needed to say was how much they wanted to pay every month and then the bank can tell them what the interest rate is, if they’re … wait for it … ‘interested’ (ba-boom-tish!). My point here is this: don’t put obstacles in people’s paths to answers – or your product, for that matter.

Recent usability testing has shown that it’s not unusual for people to open several browser windows at once and compare services from different sites as they go along. As services don’t make the grade (difficult to understand, higher price, slower response time etc) they close those windows down until only one remains: the probable winner. Darwinian ecommerce? If your site’s still chattering about irrelevant or extraneous info while another’s taken your audience straight to the point then you lose, they win, and likely as not, your competitor will be the place that they return to next time.

So …

• Cut out all … that’s ALL … extraneous waffle
• Avoid sesquipedalian maledictions (cursed use of overly long words)
• No vanity publishing (the text equivalent to loving the sound of your own voice – that includes valueless pictures of grinning execs and their “welcome – this is site is full of useful information…” blarney)
• Pitch your language to the level of your audience
• Write a draft, chop the word count in half then chop it in half again
• Remove all speeling eroorrs and grammatical errors (unless the style says it ain’t so)
• Learn when to stop

And on that note … I’m going to shut up.

The Long Dog