

Another nifty set of tools is the specialized sketchpads and templates that give you boxes with space for narration underneath. One of my favorite incarnations of physical storyboarding is in Adaptive Path’s “sketchboarding” approach.
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Of course, you don’t have to use software to leverage storyboards in your design process. There is precious little out there in the way of software that helps you leverage storyboards in software design. If you search the Internet for “storyboarding software,” you’ll be confronted with a nice batch of software designed for storytelling in the media formats previously mentioned. Some Examples of Software-Oriented Storyboarding

Using storyboards is one way to help keep your mind on the flow and not get lost thinking of the UI you’re designing as an isolated artifact. It’s all too easy when designing a UI to lose sight of the context and flow in which it will be used in, much to the detriment of the end experience. I recommend Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience for a good primer on why this is important. Third, storyboarding helps enforce a discipline of thinking in terms of experiential flow. Second, since software almost inevitably involves a user interface (and because we already know that drawing pictures of the UI is far more effective than verbally describing it) storyboards allow us to situate these UIs in the real-world contexts in which they’ll be encountered (or at least some of them). You can often learn unexpected things from storyboards, and embedding that context into your design efforts helps keep them grounded in the reality of the users’ lives. There are three primary benefits of doing this.įirst, using storyboards allows the designer to quickly and easily add real-world contexts that involve place, people, and other potentially informative ambient artifacts. Storyboards have long been used as a tool in the visual storytelling media-films and television especially, though graphic novels and comics are perhaps an even closer analog (there are even presentations and articles I’ve seen on how comics can inform interaction design).Īlthough their uses and needs are somewhat different in these contexts, given that they are literally telling stories as the end product and not a means to an end, we can still leverage storyboarding to enhance the stories that we are telling by incorporating visual illustration. Whatever they’re called, stories are an effective and inexpensive way to capture, relate, and explore experiences in the design process.
