Sometimes clients say to me, “Stories are fine at some Web sites, but not the one I’m working on now. I’m designing the Web site for the company’s annual report. Stories aren’t appropriate there; it’s just financial information.” Not true. There are appropriate stories you can use any time you are trying to communicate.
Medtronic is a medical technology company. Take a look at their annual report. (The online version is the same as the print version: http://216.139.227.101/interactive/mdc2010/).
The cover of the report is a high-quality photo of Antoinette Walters, a patient who was helped by one of Medtronic’s products. Later in the report there is a short story about Antoinette:
“Antoinette Walters, shown here and on the cover, had such a severe lumbar scolio-sis that the pain incapacitated her, and the deformity was progressively getting worse.
Then she underwent spinal fusion surgery using Medtronic spinal products to correct the alignment. Today, Antoinette’s spine is much straighter, her pain is virtually gone, and she is several inches taller.”
Antoinette’s is not the only story in the annual report. Sprinkled in with the financial information are high-quality photos as well as stories about people like Antoinette and employees who invented various technologies. The stories make the rest of the informa-tion in the report more interesting, and also create a link between the financial numbers and the stated mission of the company.
Takeaways
Stories are the natural way people process information.
Use a story if you want people to make a causal leap.
Stories aren’t just for fun. No matter how dry you think your information is, using stories will make it understandable, interesting, and memorable.
79 34 PEOPLE LEARN BEST FROM EXAMPLES
34 PEOPLE LEARN BEST FROM EXAMPLES
Let’s say you’re a marketing person and you want to email your customers about a new product offering. Take a minute to glance through some directions on how to build an e-mail campaign using the MailChimp service we discussed earlier:
1. From the Dashboard or the Campaign Tab click on the big ol’ “Create Cam-paign” button and select the type of campaign you’d like to create (start with regular ol’ campaign.).
2. On Step 1 of the Campaign Builder, select the list you’d like to send to. Once you’ve selected the list use the “next” option to move forward, or click “send to entire list”.
3. On Step 2 of the Campaign Builder, you will have the options to name your campaign, set up a subject line, from name reply-to email and personalize your “To:” field with *|MERGETAGS|*. You will also find your options for track-ing, authentication, analytics tracking and social sharing. (Use the “next” and
“back” options to navigate through the steps (not your browser’s back button)).
4. Select a Template for your email by clicking on “pre-designed”, “autoconnect”,
“premium”, or “start from scratch”, etc (to get a basic template layout that you can fully customize) under the templates heading. Templates you’ve set up and saved will live under “my templates”. If you’re providing your own code use the “paste/import HTML” or “import from URL” options. If you want to create an editable (or non-editable) Template for your clients, choose “code custom templates”.
5. Once you choose your template you’ll remain on Step 3 of the Campaign Builder. The content editor is where you will edit your styles and content. Click on “show style editor” to bring up the style options.
6. With the Style Editor visible and you’ll have options to edit the styles for each section. Here the “Body” tab is selected and the “title style” subheading has been clicked. This will allow you to set the line height, font size and more for this section.
7. Click anywhere inside the dotted red borders to bring up the content editor box.
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8. After you click save wait for your content to refresh then click on the “next”
option. Our plain text generator will automagically create the plain text version from your HTML version. Just look this version over to make sure it looks the way you like and click “next” to move to the last step of the Campaign Builder.
9. Step 5 of the Campaign Builder is a “pre-delivery checklist”. If we see anything missing on your campaign you’ll be alerted in red on this screen. Click on
“edit” to be taken directly back to any area that needs attention.
You can preview the campaign once more by clicking on the “pop up preview”
button.
Then we recommend sending tests to several email addresses to see how the campaign looks in your recipient’s inboxes. If everything looks good, you can schedule or send out your campaign.
Long and difficult to understand, right? Luckily this is not how the information is actu-ally presented at MailChimp. The text is the same, but it is combined with screen shots to show an example of what the text is talking about. Figure 34.1 shows a portion of what the screen really looks like, with text and picture together.
FIGURE 34.1MailChimp (mailchimp.com) uses pictures to give examples of the steps. (From MailChimp. MailChimp is a trademark of The Rocket Science Group, LLC.)
81 34 PEOPLE LEARN BEST FROM EXAMPLES
Screen shots or pictures are not the only way to provide examples. At the MailChimp site there are also links to videos that walk you through the same steps (Figure 34.2).
Video is one of the most effective ways to give examples online. Videos combine move-ment, sound, and vision, and don’t require reading, so they are attention-getting and engaging.
FIGURE 34.2MailChimp also uses videos to give examples. (From MailChimp.
MailChimp is a trademark of The Rocket Science Group, LLC.)
Takeaways
People learn best by example. Don’t just tell people what to do. Show them.
Use pictures and screen shots to show by example.
Better yet, use short videos as examples.
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35 PEOPLE ARE DRIVEN TO CREATE CATEGORIES
If you’re between the ages of 5 and 60 and grew up with a television in the U.S., you probably know what I mean if I say, “One of these things is not like the other.” This is a snippet from the popular children’s show Sesame Street.