Kathy Sierra: Storyboarding for Non-Fiction (2024)

How do you create riveting technical presentations and user manuals?Tell a story. Kathy Sierra isteaching 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 yourmessage, what would happen in the reader? Does you message changethe readers behavior? Do you know how you want it to change them?You can't create the right material without understanding what youwant to achieve. In the case of

What creates a page turner? Suspense, for one. The feeling that youcan't wait to see what comes next. Or even just the joy ofunderstanding something complex.

What makes you stop turning the page? The audience responds withseveral examples including jargon, exclusion, competition with funneractivities, and so on. Kathy talks about how jargon is an example ofsomething that's good for people to know, but someone has to providethe bridge and too many books suffer from only being understandableafter you know the area.

There's a hierarchy of requirements for a "bestseller."

1. The right topics
2. In the right order
3. Clear and accurate
4. Interesting
5. Enchanting

The competitive advantage is in the final two. Good writers don'tusually have a huge challenge with the first three. But you have tonail those first.

One of the biggest problems that technical writers have iscontentitis: the need to cover everything. Mostbooks would do better with much less material in the same time. Thisis related to the happyuser peak that Kathy has talked about related to productfeatures.

Good books are brain friendly and seductive. When you can properlyintroduce people to topics, they get a richer experience. It'simportant to get people past the suckthreshold and above the passion threshold as quickly aspossible. 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 getsomething done, accomplish their goals. People do become passionateabout tools, but largely because they allow them to get things done.Kathy uses the Nikon Learning Center as a positive example offocusing on the pictures people want to take and then walking throughthe ways to use the camera to get those results. Contrast that withuser manual which is a dry exposition of features. She takes it onestep further and contrasts sales literature with user manuals.

The brain has spam filters. No matter how hard you might want to getsome information in your mind, the brain has natural processes thatfilter out some information as "not important." Authors have tofight to get past the spam filters. Legacy brains have to be fooledinto thinking that the topic we want to learn is something they careabout.

Brains care about chemistry (i.e. emotion). Brains pay attention tothings that have an associated emotional cue. Brains like novelty,weird, different. You should be afraid every moment that you'relosing you're reader. Brains pay attention to things that arescary. Brains care about changes in light and shadow. Brains payattention to faces. Brains like joy. Brains like young cute things.

Brains don't care about cliche. Brains don't like things that aren'tresolved. The brain gets pulled in trying to figure things out.Curiosity is irresistible.

Bottom line: emotions tell the brain "this matters." So talk to thebrain, not the mind. In other words, trick the brain into thinkingpolymorphism is as important as a tiger.

Formality is a problem. People's ability to use and apply newinformation is positively affected by using a conversational tone.She cites research by Moreno and Mayer (here's a goodsummary) that " research seems to show a self referentialeffect where information is retained, memorized better when itis given a personal reference."

Biggest lesson: if you're in the business of communicating things,you're in the emotion-delivery business.

Reader as hero. This doesn't mean that you write your book as afictional story. But you want the reader to identify with thejourney and the endpoint goal. The experience should be a hero'sjourney: life is normal, something happens to change that, (add ahelpful sidekicks and mentor), things really suck, hero overcomes badthings, and then, finally, the hero returns to normal. The hero ischanges after overcoming bad things. As an author, you should figureout what that change is. This is the outcome that you want for thereader.

The reader as hero can't be supported by "dumbing down" thematerial. The reader won't feel heroic if the material is too easy.Don't shy away from challenging. But use brain friendliness tocreate the emotional experience that gets them through the challenge

Here's the overall process we're going to consider.

1. Log line
2. High level 3-acts
3. Create 'story' template
4. Create topic list/cards
5. Rearrange in template
6. Fill in holes
7. Do detailed storyboards
8. Miracle occurs

The log line answers three questions:

1. Who is this about?
2. What is he up against?
3. What is at stake?

Act one is the call to action. Act one typically ends with thehero's refusal of the call and ultimate acquiescence. Act two is thechallenge and ends with figuring out how to meet the challenge. Actthree is the road home.

Here's the story template:

1. Set tone
2. Question posed
3. What's at stake
4. Catalyst or motivation
5. Skepticism or debate
6. Cross threshold (to Act 2)
7. back story and tools
8. Fun and games using tools
9. Stakes raised
10. Not out of woods
11. All is lost
12. Answer found! I rule!
13. Lessons learned

Keep in mind that learning experiences are fundamentally differentfrom reference experiences. You can't create a great leaning tooland make it a great reference too at the same time.

Steps 1-5 in the preceding template are Act 1 and should be about20-40 pages in a technical book. Steps 6-12 are Act 2 and areusually around 300 pages. Step 13 is the final Act and is againaround 20-40 pages.

For every thing in your book from Acts to chapters to parts ofchapters, use the spiraluser experience model.

Ask "why?", "who cares?", and "so what?" about very topic. Make surethis is front loaded so that the brain knows what it should payattention. Make sure that when you say "This matters because..."that what follows in emotionally engaging. Show, don'ttell. 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 yournatural passion about why it matters and affect writing in a positiveway. Make this discussion real. Better to do it with a helpfulcritic, 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 motivationfor concept B: now that you understand this, you're ready to approachsomething even better. Game designers are good at this.

A technique for getting emotional benefit is "just in time" vs. "justin case." Just-in-time learning is highly motivated.Just-in-case is what books and lectures are all about. Setting upscenarios with "image you want to ..." is one way to makingjust-in-case feel like just-in-time. You'll end up with the topicsin the right order.

The representation of getting to the next level. What are therewards someone gets for completing an activity or learning somethingnew? What are the new "superpowers" that they get? What can they donow that they could do before?

We need to get readers in the flow state--that state where they can'tstop reading. To get there, knowledge and challenge have to be inbalance.

These things turn the brain on deeply: discovery, challenge,narrative, self-expression, social framework, cognitive arousal,thrill, sensation, triumph, flow, accomplishment fantasy, andgrowth. Complete the description: "Learning experience as..." Don'ttake people outside the experience with extraneous material andnarrative. Don't make users think about the wrong things.

Variety is important. We get tired if we hop on one leg over andover. Make sure that you're exercising different parts of thebrain. Insert cooler stuff with dry stuff. Pace the topics.

We ended with an exercise of writing out some storyboard ideas forsomething we care about. I did it for the first product Kynetx isbuilding and it was fun and helpful.