Prototyping tools — storyboarding

Movie-makers use storyboarding to plan their films, even if, like in Finding Nemo, they already have a complete script. For Pixar, storyboarding meant they could uncover inconsistencies in plot, flaws in the storyline, unnecessary deviations from the main story, and where there was room to make jokes even funnier.

Today, IAs and BAs use storyboarding to interact with users so as to full articulate the story of the way they work in the way they want to work and interact with the systems they’re building through a process is called user-centred design.

In typical systems development cycles, users are not involved in articulating the ‘how’ of the system. Often, they’re not even invovled until the end where user-acceptance-testing reveals problems that will only require expensive re-development. A user-centred design processes, though, like storyboarding, seeks to involve users from the very beginning of the project, and at each stage of development, to ensure that the all difficult concepts, systems logic, navigation, issues with usability and terminology, as well as interactions, are worked through. This ensures that the end product, as with the movie-markers and their films, is something that people will want to engage with.

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User-centred design and prototyping

Last night I presented to the Australian Business Analysis Association (ABAA) on a topic that is close to my heart — user-centred design and prototyping.

As business analysts, we’re often focussed on eliciting business requirements for systems, managing the relationships between the business owners and the vendors and developers of the technology. Unfortunately, we sometimes forget that what we’re doing is delivering a system that is for users. This results in us delivering the ‘what’ in terms of requirements, but forgetting that there’s a very strong need to find out from the people who will use systems the ‘how’ it will work for them. If you’ve worked with an Information Architect before, this is exactly the head-space that drives their activities to determine navigation paradigms that are truly usable and accessible and systems that are designed to meet people’s needs in an intuitive way, rather than systems by developers that you have to ‘learn’ how to use.

User-centred design seeks to change all that by putting the user as the focus of all project activities, from scoping, to analysis and requirements gathering, all the way through design and delivery.

Starting with prototying in the scoping and planning phase is a great way to swing things back to the a focus on users — storyboarding and interactive prototypes are two of my favourite tools to achieve this goal.

If movie-makers like Pixar and Peter Jackson can use these tools to make movies that people will go to see and enjoy, then BAs can also make use of them to design systems that people will want to use.

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