Think about what you remember. Most of us rarely remember facts and information. The stuff that sticks in our minds are the personal narratives that reaches our hearts and puzzles us. So why are we still building websites stripped of all that when we are selling our product or cause, or branding ourselves or our companies online?
The rise of social media have made it strikingly clear that you get much more traction by telling a good story with real human emotions and thoughts. Yet the classic corporate website or personal portfolio site still remain the main channel for most of us. It’s time to take a leap forward.
When you start planning your next website don’t sketch out the traditional structure with a homepage, about, products and whichever sub-categories you have. Think of the stories you can tell instead, and think of creating a universe with this. How would you introduce yourself or your companies if you were doing it at a dinner party in a personal voice? How you would serve your content if it was a Hollywood movie or a great novel? What is the tale around what you do? You don’t have to trash everything you know about websites, just adjust your approach a bit.
A recent example of the story driven approach is Magnum photographer Larry Towell’s personal portfolio site called Larry Towell’s General Store. Larry happens to be a pretty awesome storyteller who produces photo-books, films and even composes and records music. But you would be amazed how many great storytellers forget about their trade when they build their own website. The traditional approach to a photographers portfolio site is a collection of single images with some info and metadata, that you can browse in a more or less elegant fashion.
Image may be NSFW.
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But Larry decided to approach things differently. He is not reinventing the website, but he is surely evolving the approach to website content. His site is basically a collection of small stories, or to be precise the story behind his stories. It’s very personal and full of thoughts and emotions. But the data and information is also there, available as a layer on it’s own, and you can even buy most of the work on display.
Larry Towell’s general store is a project by an individual, but there are several interesting examples of the story driven approach applied to larger corporate or nonprofit projects – usually as mini-experiences serving a particular campaign or theme. Fashion leader Louis Vuitton has done it for years, and Shell is doing it with Facebook apps like their “Future of Energy” app (though not using this approach on their corporate website).
But why stop at the website? Why not make things like online surveys and polls story driven and human? Bring the users into an experience with sound, graphics and video, instead of a spreadsheet-like list of boring questions. The reply rate would surely increase if people felt they were entering an immersive experience. The key is to turn things around, so website content becomes human.
