The User’s Journey
Storymapping Products That People Love
Like a good story, successful design is a series of engaging moments structured over time. The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome. See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.
Like a good story, successful design is a series of engaging moments structured over time. The User’s Journey will show you how, when, and why to use narrative structure, technique, and principles to ideate, craft, and test a cohesive vision for an engaging outcome. See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.
Testimonials
Lichaw delivers a creative, common-sense design method that simply works, no experience necessary. This book belongs on every experience designer’s desk.
Kristina Halvorson, Author, Content Strategy
You’ve heard the term storymapping before. In this detailed, tactical, and delightfully illustrated book, Donna Lichaw takes a different spin on how to bring the story of your product to life. Drawing from her days as a screenwriter, Lichaw deconstructs products into the stories they tell their users. Citing example after example from popular digital tools, Lichaw clearly illustrates how to bring the customer through various points of engagement, highs, lows and finally moments of delight. And how to do it using only Post-its and markers. If you’re working through customer journeys, experience mapping, and other ways to coalesce your team around your product’s story, The User’s Journey offers a fun, interactive way to build that narrative collaboratively to achieve great results.
Jeff Gothelf, Author, Lean UX
No one knows how to apply storytelling to designing compelling, successful products better than Donna Lichaw. The User’s Journey should be dog-eared, highlighted, and shared with everyone on the product management, design, commercial, and even development teams to know why and how story is critical to create innovative, useful, delightful products.
Chris Avore, Global Head of Product Design, Nasdaq
Send your customers on a hero’s journey and turn their pain points into the climax of the story. Donna’s book will help you use narrative architecture already hard-wired into our brains to create more engaging products and services.
Karen McGrane, Author, Going Responsive
Donna Lichaw’s The User’s Journey is an invaluable guide for anyone who wants to build a better product or design a better experience. Whether storytelling is your profession (like us) or you are a newbie, you will find plenty of specific actionable advice. Do yourself a favor, read this book and share it with your team.
Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg, Co-Authors of Buyer Legends: The Executive’s Storytelling Guide
Stories are as old as time and can make the difference between an uninteresting experience and an awesome experience. The User’s Journey teaches you step-by-step how to incorporate the art of storytelling into your product experience.
Hiten Shah, Co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Quick Sprout
Whether your audience once huddled around a fire, sits across from you in the boardroom, or will be considering your products in a crowded store, they need something more—and that’s a story. Story is the innate medium we all share to engage and hold the attention of our listeners. Drawing on years of experience with corporate clients, film, and academia, Donna Lichaw uses the tools of her trade to teach us how to use the various structures and techniques of story to engage, captivate, and motivate audiences. Get them on your side with her expertise and examples and discover for yourself how and why to use story to your advantage.
Margot Bloomstein, author of Content Strategy at Work and principal of Appropriate, Inc.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Jonath0n Colman
Chapter 1: Mapping the Story
Chapter 2: How Story Works
Chapter 3: Concept Stories
Chapter 4: Origin Stories
Chapter 5: Usage Stories
Chapter 6: Finding and Mapping Your Story
Chapter 7: Using Your Story
Chapter 8: Rule of Thumb
FAQ
These common questions and their short answers are taken from Donna Lichaw’s book The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
- Is this book about storytelling?
No. And yes. This book is about much more than what you traditionally think of when you think of storytelling. It won’t teach you how to tell a story. Rather, it will teach you how to use story and its underlying structure to craft intended experiences of use that are optimized for audience engagement, similar to what screenwriters and TV writers do with short- and long-form movies and TV shows. Plot point by plot point.
