IA Tools: Storyboarding

I’ve been using storyboarding as a way of demonstrating the user-experience.

What’s storyboarding? It’s the same technique that you’ve seen on Pixar’s DVDs where they use cartoons on pieces of A4 paper to graphically represent sections of their movie before they make it. It’s a good way to determine whether or not their story makes sense, what movie goers might see on the screen, and the camera angles they might use, before they actually start ‘filming’.

For this project I’m working on, it’s been a good way of abstracting the business processes, putting up skeleton pages of the system, and determining whether there’s anything wrong with the logic of the interaction.

Presented graphically, this information has allowed users to comment on the flow of information and the flow of their future-interaction without getting bogged down in the detail (which they always seem to do when you put a process map in front of them). It’s also allowed me to determine whether there are any steps that might need system support, and whether there are any existing screens that are missing or even in the wrong order.

If you’re a BA, then storyboarding can certainly help as well. At the recent BA Conference in Sydney I learned that Use Cases can be presented in this way, with the Actors presented along with their process and system integration.

Not used storyboarding before? Here’s some tips:

• Don’t be afraid to draw a cartoon to represent what’s going on rather than using words. Even a stick figure is good enough
• Find the biggest wall you can to stick the storyboard onto
• Present the storyboard at a workshop. Tell the story and walk people through the flow of events as presented by the storyboard.
• Ask people to get out of their seats, read through the storyboard again, and write all over the storyboard or use sticky notes
• When everyone is done, let them discuss their thoughts and ideas.

Storyboarding is very quick and very cheap and an excellent way of looking at web design or just business processes and a good tool to add to your iterative design methodology.
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