The essence of Storyboarding

At Ergomania, we use Storyboarding because it’s a great tool for testing ideas. It can also be useful during design sprints when the prototype is built by many people in a very short time. Design decisions can also be communicated effectively through the screenplay.

During the UX design process, Storyboarding presents the user path and character (persona) in an almost tangible way, even without any design being made beyond the concept. The pictorial screenplay helps designers connect the personas user stories and various research findings while developing product requirements. The familiar combination of images and words makes even the most complex ideas clear.

Storyboarding at Ergomania

We find Storyboarding an effective way to capture, explore, and transfer user- or persona experience during the design process. At Ergomania, Storyboarding has the following advantages in designing UX:

1. The design approach becomes people-centered
2. It helps getting into the mindset of the the user
3. It helps prioritize what is really important
4. The user journey will be more tangible for stakeholders
5. It makes it easier to iterate

A well-designed storyboard shows how each solution improves the customer experience or eliminates problems, so we use the following method: we imagine user surface snippets (“pieces”) (or dialog pieces when designing a voice-based interface).

We spare our customers from drawing (of course they can draw if they want to) and a professional designer makes the cartoon-like script based on the snippets.

The main methods of Storyboarding

After a brief theoretical introduction on he basics of Design thinking, the personas and the storyboard in general, the storyboarding workshop is about making design comics in groups.

All you need is paper, pen, markers, post-it and glue. During the design process, when we use Storyboarding, you can switch between ideas relatively quickly and once you’ve incorporated the successful ones into the story, you can move on and come up with a new solution.

Many may think that since you need to draw during Storyboarding, in order for a script creation to be effective, you need to draw really well. Rest easy, this is not the case. Really good Storyboards are not created by painters or graphic geniuses, but great communicators.

Each story should include the following elements:

• Character
• Venue
• Action
• Story

Before drawing a single line on a piece of paper or on the board, it is of the utmost importance that the story is logical and understandable. By understanding the basics of the story and building it up to the building blocks, we can present the story more strongly and convincingly.

What do our customers gain from Storyboarding?

By Storyboarding, our customers can not only optimize their product, but also achieve a much better customer experience. Storyboarding in UX design helps you better understand the people we plan for.

Storyboarding relies heavily on the iterative approach. Sketching allows us to experiment at low cost and try out multiple design concepts at once.

What is the role of our customers in Storyboarding?

Storyboarding is always useful in a customer-based design process. This is because participatory planning involves all stakeholders (customer representatives, UI and UX designers, developers, researchers) in the planning process to get the best results possible.

The result of successful Storyboarding

The result of Storyboarding implemented by Ergomania is a screenplay that demonstrates the use of the product from the user perspective of our customers, so that strengths and weaknesses, their likes and roots of the problems are immediately revealed.