Storyboarding

If you have ever worked on creating UX for any product, you must be familiar with user journey. Similar to that, we have another tool that helps us visualise the user journey and experience well.

A storyboard is a sequence of illustrations used to visually depict a story or narrative. It breaks the story down into individual scenes, mapping them out in chronological order so you can see, step by step, how the story unfolds — just like a comic strip.

The storyboarding technique was developed by Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s as a way to construct coherent stories that would later become the animated films we all know and love.

But, what does it have to do with ideation, or user research?

In UX and product design, storyboards are used to visually map out the user’s experience with a product or service. They consider the different steps a user might go through when interacting with the product, predicting likely scenarios and sketching out what happens at each stage.

Storyboards also serve as a communication tool, helping designers to express and communicate their ideas in a way that’s quick, engaging, and memorable.

Storyboards can be useful at various stages of the design process. You can use them:

1. After user research, before defining the problem and ideating solutions.
2. As part of the ideation process.
3. Throughout the design phase to guide product decisions.

What are the benefits of storyboarding?

1. Storyboards are easy to process and understand, making them a powerful communication tool.
2. Storyboards put your end user into the role of main character, ensuring a user-first design process and helping to cultivate empathy across the board.
3. Storyboarding can be used to explore early-stage ideas and evaluate their potential, making sure you don’t waste time (or money) focusing on the wrong solution.

So, to create a storyboard, you basically need to consider a specific scenario, a main character as your user, the visuals of how the scenario would play out and the accompanying text to better understand the user behaviour.

Example of a storyboard:

How did Airbnb started using storyboards?

Well, it’s a funny story for sure. Snow White helped them.

Over his Christmas vacation, Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb had picked up a biography of Walt Disney. In it, he found an idea that would change the way Airbnb launched products and would eventually help steer Airbnb’s next move toward its mobile product.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs began in the mid 1930s with a storyboard, a technique the animators at Disney had invented a few years earlier. A comic-book-like outline of the story helped all of the film’s collaborators understand the vision as they took on the new format. Chesky similarly wanted to use storyboarding as a way to understand the Airbnb customer experience as the company planned its next steps.

The Airbnb storyboards document the user experience from different perspectives:

1. In the host story, for instance, there’s a moment when the characters think about what they could do with the extra income.
2. In the guest story, there’s a “moment of truth” when they arrive at the Airbnb space they’ve rented and immediately decide if doing so was a good idea.
3. One of the storyboards begins with a character hearing about Airbnb for the first time at a cocktail party and ends with that character telling someone else about the service at a cocktail party.

This not only helped Airbnb better understand their users, but also helped them create a better experience for them, specially on mobile.

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