Storyboarding

What it is

Storyboarding is a narrative technique adopted from the film industry and adapted to suit the needs of designers interested in ways to communicate the various features of a service design. Storyboarding can be used to test and evaluate ideas, as well as communicate them to others. Storyboards are normally presented as a series of ‘frames’ that communicate a sequence of events such as a customer journey.

What you get

If you’re using storyboards to represent your polished ideas you’ll get a visual and rich description of a service design that highlights key touchpoints and moments. The tone and quality of the descriptions of course depends on the style and skill of the storyboarder.

A storyboard storyboard!

If you’re using storyboards to explore ideas and check your thinking you’ll have a series of more ‘sketchy’ moments - its often best to draw these on postcards so you can re-order them and play around with the sequence of events.

When to use it

You can use storyboarding at many points during a service design exercise. For example to stimulate a focused discussion around key features; To imagine interactions in more detail; To gain useful insights to stimulate the prototyping phase; To provide the necessary detail to enable people to grasp some of the more complex features of a proposition.