Storyboarding Experiences

Last month my design director and I gave a presentation and workshop on a technique we have developed at gravitytank for designing user experiences. The workshop was during 'Influence', the annual IDSA Midwest conference, held in Kansas City this year. (KC, by the way, actually was a pretty cool town, but more on that later*)

The basic premise of our presentation was that designers are constantly trying to explain concepts to people-- whether it be consumers in a focus group, decision makers in companies, or shoppers in stores-- but the current tools we use to do this often fall short. Imagine trying to express the experience of using the Nintendo Wii through a product rendering (no matter how hot), a few illustrations of how it's used, and some text call outs. Now compare that to an ad for the Wii. Nothing conveys experience like storytelling over time (Notice they don't even show the whole product until the end? The product is definitely secondary to the experience). Now obviously we can't make an ad every time we want to communicate an experience, but as designers we all share one tool that can get us pretty close: drawing. By using our rapid visualization skills to create storyboards of user experiences, we can express more than just what the product looks like, but how it's used, what it's like to use it, and how different people might interact with it. It creates dynamic stories from static objects.

But beyond using storyboarding to explain ideas, it's also an excellent tool for designing experiences from the ground up. We showed some video from behind the scenes at Pixar-- how they use storyboarding to create scenes in their movies. Some of the most important details from this clip are how they work with storyboarding: each shot is on its own page, and they will collaboratively shape their story by physically moving, adding, and removing pages from a tack wall in hectic critique sessions. Using a similar storyboarding process, design teams can document an experience "shot-by-shot". In attempting to capture an experience accurately, teams will shuffle pages all over and add new touch points as they define them. Once the "scene" is completed, the team can easily see pain points in the process that they should focus their design attention upon, and the ideation begins...

So, what's great about using storyboarding in design is that it:

• Combines speed and clarity - it's a rapid process that conveys ideas in their purest form.
  
• Focuses on benefits not features - it keeps teams looking at the overall user experience, instead of novel details.
  
• Conveys experiences - it can portray a timeline of use, instead of a slice of time.
  
• Forces decisions - because they can see all of the touchpoints at the same time, design teams can begin to prioritize them.
  
• Connects with emotions - just like any good story, you can empathize with characters as the story unfolds.
  

We shared a basic framework for how to work through a process like this, we showed some examples of how we've been using it in recent projects, and then the workshop portion started. We had our 70+ participants break into teams and storyboard the airport security experience. Obviously this is a painful experience for the average traveler, but also interesting would be storyboarding this process from the viewpoint of the TSA worker, the child in the baby carriage, or the man-handled suitcase (not a person, but why not?). Sharpies, 1/2 page storyboard sheets, and Mr Sketch Fruit-Scented Markers exploded around the room and pages were tacked to the walls and torn down in a whirlwind frenzy. (Maybe it wasn't that dramatic, but roll with me here). In the end we had the teams present their experience storyboards back to the workshop, and we wrapped it all up. From the feedback I heard from participants, the workshop helped them understand why and how to use storyboarding, but also was successful in arming them with a basic feeling for how a collaborative storyboarding session might run, and the methodology behind creating successful storyboard pages. We had a lot of fun sharing it with everyone, and hope to present it again to other groups. I can think of many other uses from consumer products, public space, transportation, events, and on and on...

Man I love getting paid to draw.

Apologies to this anonymous guy-- I don't know your name-- but you illustrate the workshop pretty well, and you happen to frame the storyboard sheets and my graphic facilitation quite well.

* Yeah, so like I said earlier, KC is actually a pretty cool town. Sure it's pretty spread out, but in my few days there, I saw some great old buildings, a firm with a great Brooklyn-style loft space, a great bar with a great band in a strip mall, a nice cozy jazz bar with a modern jazz trio performance, and some really bitchin' BBQ. (Although I was told the BBQ at a certain gas station across town would have been the best. Next time.)

  5/13/2008