Kathy Sierra talks about storyboarding
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How do you create riveting technical presentations and user manuals?
Tell a story. Kathy Sierra is
teaching the tutorial and using her own experience creating the
"Head First" books on Java and Design Patterns as examples.
Define your "post-click" behavior. After someone has gotten your
message, what would happen in the reader? Does you message change
the readers behavior? Do you know how you want it to change them?
You can't create the right material without understanding what you
want to achieve. In the case of
What creates a page turner? Suspense, for one. The feeling that you
can't wait to see what comes next. Or even just the joy of
understanding something complex.
What makes you stop turning the page? The audience responds with
several examples including jargon, exclusion, competition with funner
activities, and so on. Kathy talks about how jargon is an example of
something that's good for people to know, but someone has to provide
the bridge and too many books suffer from only being understandable
after you know the area.
There's a hierarchy of requirements for a "bestseller."
- The right topics
- In the right order
- Clear and accurate
- Interesting
- Enchanting
The competitive advantage is in the final two. Good writers don't
usually have a huge challenge with the first three. But you have to
nail those first.
One of the biggest problems that technical writers have is
contentitis: the need to cover everything. Most
books would do better with much less material in the same time. This
is related to the happy
user peak that Kathy has talked about related to product
features.
Good books are brain friendly and seductive. When you can properly
introduce people to topics, they get a richer experience. It's
important to get people past the suck
threshold and above the passion threshold as quickly as
possible. That means you need to get information to them quickly.
And that means that creating a page-turner is vital.
People don't want to be experts at a tool. They want to get
something done, accomplish their goals. People do become passionate
about tools, but largely because they allow them to get things done.
Kathy uses the Nikon Learning Center as a positive example of
focusing on the pictures people want to take and then walking through
the ways to use the camera to get those results. Contrast that with
user manual which is a dry exposition of features. She takes it one
step further and contrasts sales literature with user manuals.
The brain has spam filters. No matter how hard you might want to get
some information in your mind, the brain has natural processes that
filter out some information as "not important." Authors have to
fight to get past the spam filters. Legacy brains have to be fooled
into thinking that the topic we want to learn is something they care
about.
Brains care about chemistry (i.e. emotion). Brains pay attention to
things that have an associated emotional cue. Brains like novelty,
weird, different. You should be afraid every moment that you're
losing you're reader. Brains pay attention to things that are
scary. Brains care about changes in light and shadow. Brains pay
attention to faces. Brains like joy. Brains like young cute things.
Brains don't care about cliche. Brains don't like things that aren't
resolved. The brain gets pulled in trying to figure things out.
Curiosity is irresistible.
Bottom line: emotions tell the brain "this matters." So talk to the
brain, not the mind. In other words, trick the brain into thinking
polymorphism is as important as a tiger.
Formality is a problem. People's ability to use and apply new
information is positively affected by using a conversational tone.
She cites research by Moreno and Mayer (here's a good
summary) that " research seems to show a self referential
effect where information is retained, memorized better when it
is given a personal reference."
Biggest lesson: if you're in the business of communicating things,
you're in the emotion-delivery business.
Kathy Sierra
talks about the Hero's Journey
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enlarge) |
Reader as hero. This doesn't mean that you write your book as a
fictional story. But you want the reader to identify with the
journey and the endpoint goal. The experience should be a hero's
journey: life is normal, something happens to change that, (add a
helpful sidekicks and mentor), things really suck, hero overcomes bad
things, and then, finally, the hero returns to normal. The hero is
changes after overcoming bad things. As an author, you should figure
out what that change is. This is the outcome that you want for the
reader.
The reader as hero can't be supported by "dumbing down" the
material. The reader won't feel heroic if the material is too easy.
Don't shy away from challenging. But use brain friendliness to
create the emotional experience that gets them through the challenge
Here's the overall process we're going to consider.
- Log line
- High level 3-acts
- Create 'story' template
- Create topic list/cards
- Rearrange in template
- Fill in holes
- Do detailed storyboards
- Miracle occurs
The log line answers three questions:
- Who is this about?
- What is he up against?
- What is at stake?
Act one is the call to action. Act one typically ends with the
hero's refusal of the call and ultimate acquiescence. Act two is the
challenge and ends with figuring out how to meet the challenge. Act
three is the road home.
Story templates
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Here's the story template:
- Set tone
- Question posed
- What's at stake
- Catalyst or motivation
- Skepticism or debate
- Cross threshold (to Act 2)
- back story and tools
- Fun and games using tools
- Stakes raised
- Not out of woods
- All is lost
- Answer found! I rule!
- Lessons learned
Keep in mind that learning experiences are fundamentally different
from reference experiences. You can't create a great leaning tool
and make it a great reference too at the same time.
Steps 1-5 in the preceding template are Act 1 and should be about
20-40 pages in a technical book. Steps 6-12 are Act 2 and are
usually around 300 pages. Step 13 is the final Act and is again
around 20-40 pages.
For every thing in your book from Acts to chapters to parts of
chapters, use the spiral
user experience model.
Motivational milestones
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Ask "why?", "who cares?", and "so what?" about very topic. Make sure
this is front loaded so that the brain knows what it should pay
attention. Make sure that when you say "This matters because..."
that what follows in emotionally engaging. Show, don't
tell. This might mean pictures but can also be an example.
"Imagine you want to do..." is a way to set up a scenario.
Smoking out the topics with the "who cares?" question can ignite your
natural passion about why it matters and affect writing in a positive
way. Make this discussion real. Better to do it with a helpful
critic, I think.
The other part of the spiral that readers care about is the payoff.
Once users understand concept A, that leads right into the motivation
for concept B: now that you understand this, you're ready to approach
something even better. Game designers are good at this.
A technique for getting emotional benefit is "just in time" vs. "just
in case." Just-in-time learning is highly motivated.
Just-in-case is what books and lectures are all about. Setting up
scenarios with "image you want to ..." is one way to making
just-in-case feel like just-in-time. You'll end up with the topics
in the right order.
The representation of getting to the next level. What are the
rewards someone gets for completing an activity or learning something
new? What are the new "superpowers" that they get? What can they do
now that they could do before?
We need to get readers in the flow state--that state where they can't
stop reading. To get there, knowledge and challenge have to be in
balance.
What engages the brain?
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These things turn the brain on deeply: discovery, challenge,
narrative, self-expression, social framework, cognitive arousal,
thrill, sensation, triumph, flow, accomplishment fantasy, and
growth. Complete the description: "Learning experience as..." Don't
take people outside the experience with extraneous material and
narrative. Don't make users think about the wrong things.
Variety is important. We get tired if we hop on one leg over and
over. Make sure that you're exercising different parts of the
brain. Insert cooler stuff with dry stuff. Pace the topics.
We ended with an exercise of writing out some storyboard ideas for
something we care about. I did it for the first product Kynetx is
building and it was fun and helpful.
Tags:
etech
etech08
product+management
storytelling
