What is it?

User Experience Storyboarding is a process that bridges people and ideas.

While in production, a storyboard invites teams to engage with meaningful concepts and questions. When completed, a storyboard invites teams to align on goals and practice new behaviors.

A successful project capitalizes on the combined strengths of user research, cinematic storytelling, and communication design. User research is a way of understanding human behavior, cinematic storytelling is a way of showing cause and effect, and communication design is a way of devising strategic engagement.

If well executed, a UX Storyboard can advance concepts across a company: it can lead to new lingo, new behaviors and attitudes; and new goals, procedures, and norms.

Project development follows a classic design process, where research and best guesses lead to rounds of prototyping and critique. With approval, final deliverables are created and the system is implemented.

As with any project, these rounds adapt to constraints of time and budget.

Problem definition

Strategic alignment, information gathering and research, and the creation of exploratory storyboards.

Problem solution
- Rough narrative, storyboard, design, and communication strategies are drafted.
Evaluation and iteration
- Critique leads to rounds of revisions and additional prototypes.
Execution and Implementation
- Stakeholders approve, the narrative takes its final form, and design work is executed.
- The project is introduced to the company, KPIs are measured, and the framework is optimized over time, in accordance with the data.
Stakeholders
Ideally, a project is the result of collaboration between stakeholders with different areas of expertise. They might include:
1. A Project Lead (vision and quality)
2. Project Manager (logistics)
3. Storyboard Artist (art direction)
4. Executive Advocates (strategy)
5. Design/Culture Lead (execution)
6. Research/Insights Lead (data)
A project can benefit from the involvement of internal research, design, brand, marketing, product, engineering, and operations teams.
Cross-departmental collaboration generates excitement in the project, ensures alignment, and adds consistency in brand voice.
Adoption is often driven by leadership. New ways of thinking and behaving can be challenging, and the enthusiam, support, and example of leadership play a vital role in normalizing the long term value of any potential framework.
Deliverables
Most work can be generated offsite, but in-house working sessions can aid and accelerate a project. Work takes the form of meetings, digital files, and physical mockups.
Final deliverables could include:
- Illustrations, text
- Exhibits, models
- Microsites, interactive displays
- Tearsheet, posters, window vinyls
- Audio/visual media, and animation
Rollout could include:
- Presentations, offsites, workshops
- Onboarding materials, swag
- Standardized processes, lingo
- Traditions, and norms
Timelines and Budgets
The effecacy of a storyboard framework lies more in careful execution and framing than in fidelity or expense, but quality is definitely a function of time and budget.
Planned in the four stages outlined above, a robust UX Storyboard should take between 3–12 months to complete, at a cost of between $10K–30K/stage.
This accounts for:
- Labor (both internal person-hours and external consultant fees)
- Production (e.g. Longitudinal research study, commissioning illustration or video, physical build out, offsite or event production)
and both are impacted by the:
- Scope of research and data, which can extend the discovery period
- Number of iteration cycles, which can extend the prototyping phase
- Allotment of internal resources and complexity of the final deliverables, which impact execution