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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