Storyboards: What They Are, Why We Use Them, and How to Create Them
Storyboards are collections of cells that comprise an image showing us a story. These storyboards are most common in media & film production but now it’s our time to implement storyboards in our daily life as product managers. Creating Storyboards will make product developers think step-by-step, and we won’t be able to skip some steps — at least less frequently.
Why storyboards?
Storyboards create a more clear vision to show your Product Vision & Goal.
In fact, it’s no different from why we use storyboards in the film industry or product development.
Storyboards help product designers to test multiple versions of products, product flows, and customer journey maps until there’s a final design for all team members.
The product goal and user personas
Start with the product goal to create a storyboard. A simple story to tell your team what you want to achieve makes everything more clear.
You probably have a User Persona, right? If you don’t have please read my story Creating User Personas, it’ll help you to create one. Each user persona you create is essentially a character in your story — which means you will have to describe their story on the storyboards.
If you have at least one user persona, you can create a customer journey map with the help of a storyboard. When creating the map, ensure that your storyboard accounts for the key touchpoints and interactions, within the cells that comprise the images within the story.
It’s better to have multiple user personas, please make sure one is not enough for you & your company. You have to be in each customers’ shoes to be exactly on the same page. Because you want to be in every market you could be, to make that happen — be aware of the target audience.
Narrow down or refine your customer segments, create personas to understand them, and learn about the market and your competitors. I have a story about how to create a Customer Journey Roadmap. Go read it, and then come back here, after clapping of course!
User Interfaces and User Experience (UI/UX)
Ta-da! Now you have both User Personas and Customer Journey Roadmaps, let’s deep dive into UI/UX.
Create wireframes, mock-ups, and high-quality wireframes. These deliverables will help you to get the best information needed to create your storyboards. You can also do A/B tests to understand what your users need in the first place. The results of A/B tests will lead you to the final design of your product. Please make sure you apply the before-mentioned UI/UX action steps — because you can’t fool the product development process.
With a storyboard or several storyboards, you have the best opportunity to show your product’s vision and value to your clients. Creating storyboards will make sure you go step-by-step from the beginning.
So, the killer question is on the way:
How to Create a Storyboard?
Here are some steps to keep in mind:
- Create a product vision
- Set clear goals
- Brainstorm your ideas
- Create User Personas — describe pain points for target users. Make them your key characters in your story and storyboards
- Customer Journey Roadmaps — describe pain points for target users/key characters
- Create Flowcharts —UI/ UX Flows — write everything that should happen exactly in a desired character’s user experience. It doesn’t matter how many great ideas you have until you put them into words
- Create wireframes and mock-ups to describe the user/character interactions
- Don’t forget to write everything about the stories and characters in your mind with those cute post-its you have
- Break down and organize the story in the post-its, according to how you visualize the cells and images in the story. This is to reflect the events in the story in logical steps
- If you have time, brainstorm again with fresh eyes for new ideas!
- If you have time, review and revise 1 through 10
A great example:
Here is a great example of storyboards were applied in a UX design for an app for people who love wine:
https://www.vectornator.io/blog/storyboards-in-ux-design/
Try out these storyboarding tools:
Invision, Miro, Storyboarder, Milanote
Thank you for reading so far! Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn
Best Regards, İlayda.
Special thanks to Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor at Product Coalition for the valuable input which contributed to the editing of this article.
