Storyboarding user flows

A tool for ideation that helps you outline an ideal flow for your design.

What is Storyboarding

In UX, a storyboard is a series of panels or frames that visually describe and explore a user’s experience with a product.

Keep in mind, we’ve made the transition from the problem the user is facing to coming up with ideas for solutions we can provide as UX designers. Think about storyboarding as a tool to visualize potential solutions to problems the user is facing.

You might have heard the term storyboarding used in reference to movies or commercials.

In those cases, a storyboard gets divided into a set of panels, and each panel tells a piece of the overall story.

Well, in UX design it’s similar.

Storyboarding is a tool for making a strong visual connection between the insights you uncovered during research and the flow of experience.

Using storyboards to sketch an idea helps you work through the flow of the experience. It can also act as a visual aid to explain your ideas to stakeholders, because they can visualize how the product you’re designing will be used.

A real product might have many screens, but your storyboard should focus on just the most important parts of the user’s experience with a product, and as the name suggests, there’s a story that should be told through the panels of a storyboard.

The four key elements of a storyboard are the character, the scene, the plot, and the narrative.

• Character: States the user in the storyboard.
• Scene: Gives designers a way to imagine the user’s environment.
• Plot: Describes the solution or benefit offered by the design.
• Narrative: Describes the problem the user is facing and how the design will solve this problem.

Now, let’s take a look at the template that’s often used to sketch a storyboard.

The scenario is a short sentence that helps us understand the user and their problem we’re solving.

The visuals guide us through the user’s experience with the app or service. This is where you’ll actually sketch.

And the captions combine the visuals and scenario by describing how the user interacts with the product. Basically, it’s the text that describes each frame of the story.

Here’s a tip: The captions are useful for interactions that may be difficult to sketch out.

Let’s explore two types of storyboards and when to use each type.

Types of Storyboards

There are two common types of storyboards in UX design, both of which incorporate these four key elements:

Big picture storyboards

First, let’s discuss a big-picture storyboard, which focuses on the user experience. Big picture storyboards think about how people will use the product throughout their day and why that product will be useful. This helps you understand the entire user experience, including the different challenges, potential pain points, and types of interactions the user will encounter.

Take a moment to think about a movie you watched recently. Maybe it was an action-packed superhero movie or a thoughtful romantic comedy. Each panel of the big picture storyboard captures a part of the character’s actions that push the story forward. Again, it’s similar in UX design. Each panel of a big-picture storyboard captures a part of the user’s journey with a product.

Notice that the big picture storyboard is focused on how and why.

Think about questions like, How will the user use our app? Why will the app be useful? And why will the user be delighted by the app?

Checkout the example below,

Concluding the idea,

A big picture storyboard can show the emotional engagement that a user will have with our app or with any product. Understanding how a user feels while experiencing your product is an essential part of the design process.

Close-up storyboards

In a close-up storyboard, the sketches in each panel focus on the product instead of on the user experiencing that product.

While big-picture storyboards focus on the how and the why, close-up storyboards focus on the what.

Think about questions like, What happens on each screen of the product? What does the user do to transition from one screen to another? And after you’ve created the storyboard, what are potential problems with the flow?

Keep in mind, we only need to pick a few key screens to sketch in order to demonstrate the product experience. It’s not necessary to do a detailed click-by-click play of every part of your product.

The close-up storyboard is less about emotion, since we’re not focused on the user. Instead, the close-up storyboard is focused on the practicalities of the design itself.

So how do you decide which type of storyboard to use?

To decide, it’s helpful to think about this stage of the design process you’re in. If you’re early in the design process, you might want to present your high-level ideas to stakeholders to get them excited and bought in.

In this case, a big-picture storyboard makes sense. so your team can focus on the user, their needs, and their experience with your product.

On the other hand, a close-up storyboard is more useful after your initial design directions have been explored. Since a close-up storyboard focuses on the details within your product, like screens of an app, this type of storyboard can help you think through practical ideas about improving the product.

One more thing. In many cases, you might want to create both a big-picture and a close-up storyboard. There are also ways to bring both types of storyboards together.

That’s okay. As UX designers, it’s good to have a flexible and creative approach to explaining your ideas. So try experimenting with both styles. And that’s a wrap!