Storyboarding - A Very Simple Way of Explaining Your Story and Building Business Cases

Story telling is a very old art form. Even in the field of User Experience Design it forms a very important role. It can cover important persona, their key tasks, wish lists and desires. A storyboard can clearly set the tone for the app or a website you are developing based on the explicit wishes and desires that come on the white board.

 The storyboard Drawn here elaborates an interaction flow which happens in any new age India Budget Wedding. The story revolves around planning a wedding for a techno savvy guy Ravi, his dreamy wife Rashmi, his orthodox father Papaji and his 4 Friends. This is a story of individual aspirations, dreams, emotions and managing things using new age technology. This is a story of Love Cum Arranged marriage, the agony of managing your own wedding from long distance and expecting a final scenario of a situation - “and they happily lived ever after!!!!” scenario can be visualized.

Aspirations, Journey, Budgets, Inter dependencies, Workflows, Authorities and responsibilities etc can be narrated very effectively through this sketch or storyboard as we may term it. How technology plays a helping hand and bridges the gap, how virtual tools like video call can be integrated can be spelt, how the need of managing budgets, comparisons, order placements, is needed can be visualized. The task-list, guest lists, event lists, multiple of them, created by multiple stake holders and their inter-dependencies also can be seen here. So many things that one needs to write long business cases also can be explained to multiple teams using the tool and technique of story boarding. 

Further Story boarding is also used in software development as part of identifying the specifications for a particular software. During the specification phase, screens that the software will display are drawn, either on paper or using other specialized software, to illustrate the important steps of the user experience.

The storyboard is then modified by the engineers and the client while they decide on their specific needs. The reason why story boarding is useful during software engineering is that it helps the user understand exactly how the software will work, much better than an abstract description. It is also cheaper to make changes to a storyboard than an implemented piece of software.

References (if any): 

Relevant reading: http://johnnyholland.org/2011/10/storyboarding-ux-part-1-an-introduction/

About Author: 

Shetall Natuu (Principal Mentor, Umber learning facility)
Umber Learning Facility is incepted and conceptualized by Shetall Natuu, a design educator, NID 1993-1996 (FDP). She has worked with various design schools in the country in various capacities. NID, Symbiosis Institute of Design, SOFT, School of design studies, UPES are few to name. She has been imparting education in domains of Industrial design, Interaction design, Design management and transportation design. She is driven with passion and an ambition to pursue a challenging career as a Design Educator. 
Currently her focus is on UX design for non-designers and is closely associated with many software companies like Cognizant Interactive, Spadeworx and so on.