The process of making movies and videos comes to mind when we hear the term “storyboarding,” but the value of storytelling also applies to the process of designing products. The fact that storyboarding prevents misunderstandings and allows input from various departments during the product design and development process is one of its biggest advantages. It’s likely the most effective and successful method for completely eradicating the communication issues that arise during the various stages of product development. This article will delve deeper into this idea and demonstrate why storyboards are such an effective tool for the product design process, as well as how to use them to their fullest potential.
How Do You Storyboard?
Let’s look at the fundamentals of storyboarding before getting into the details. Storyboards, as we all know, are lists of plot points that are represented by cells. These cells will each have a heading, a description, and occasionally even an image. Storyboards are, therefore, a condensed representation of a complex idea. We use them to break down the broad product concept into its key points rather than using them to project an overall plot.
Storyboarding’s Function in the Typical Product Design Process
Product conceptualization and design are the stages that come before product development and require a lot of brainstorming and the exchange of feedback or input from different stakeholders. Storyboards serve as a highly presentable medium at this point in the product design process that can incorporate both the creative and technical aspects to settle on the best design.
1. Developing Personas
Identifying the target market is the first step in the product design process. User personas and buyer personas are the two types of personas that storyboarding will assist in developing. Let’s look at both because they aren’t always the same.
User personas are pictures of people who fall into a particular category. These are the people whose issues the product will try to solve. To avoid information duplication when storyboarding, try keeping user personas to a maximum of three characters.
Although it is not always the case, buyer personas typically align with user personas. Infant products would be one illustration. Even though it’s a very simple illustration, it simply demonstrates the fact that consumers aren’t always the ones who use the product. Simply consider whether or not your users will be the ones making the purchase in this situation.
When creating a new product, personas enable you to put yourself in the position of your potential market and pay close attention to their needs. Simply designate a fictional character who shares your users’ and/or buyers’ characteristics so that other departments can contribute from their viewpoints.
2. Highlight Your Users’ Pain Points
It’s time to create even more detailed storyboards by highlighting the users’ pain points after you’ve created the personas. At this point, we want to list every issue that these particular people are dealing with.
Let’s take a closer look at this. There are three different categories of pain that people can experience.
- financial difficulties.
- pain points in terms of convenience or productivity.
- obstacles in the purchasing process.
You should explore each of these categories and identify each pain point that the persona you created has. For instance, the cost of goods is likely a problem for low-income households. The cost and quality of goods are probably a problem for small business owners. Elders find the buyer’s journey difficult. Each of these could cause pain.
3. Highlight Your Product Design Features
We’ll now highlight the features of the products on your storyboard. Naturally, listing all of the features connected to the product comes first. Then, using the personas and pain points developed in the preceding steps, narrow down that list. To get the most out of storyboarding, we want to go beyond simply listing features, which is the simple part.
Write a succinct description of each feature. These will outline the advantages of each feature, which are crucial for product development and marketing. In this step, try to translate your brainstorming into useful, attainable advantages that your finished product should provide.
Finally, try labeling each feature with an emotional response since each one should connect with particular emotions.
4. Align the benefits with the persona’s problems
Make a link between each benefit and the problems that your personas display. It is crucial to consider emotions during development because they have a significant impact on how well-liked a product will be.
Although there are grey areas here, you must be aware of these practical advantages while developing products. You will go over each problem in your storyboard and relate a product benefit to each one.
5. Draw a Customer Journey Map
You must use your storyboard to depict the customer journey now that all the pieces are in place. Be sure to take into account every interaction the customer will have with the product as they use it to accomplish their objectives. You should ideally do this for each of the benefits and pain points you listed.
The customer journey storyboard must contain six key components. These are what they are:
- List the issue you encountered.
- What steps will the persona take to find a solution?
- How will they find your product as a result of that search?
- List the methods the persona will employ to use the product to address their issue.
- How does the solution to the issue work?
- What advantages does the persona stand to gain from using your product?
You should have all the materials necessary to walk through the storyboard’s development at this point because we have already covered the entire process of creating one.
Storyboards for Product Design Development: Benefits
Let’s examine some incredible advantages of product design storyboarding and how it will aid in the creation of your products.
- offers a quick and affordable way to test a variety of features and designs.
- Plan out the entire customer journey in advance for marketing.
- UX storyboarding offers efficiency by detailing each step of the product design.
- Present products using storyboards when speaking to stakeholders.
- Storyboards are a fantastic tool for thinking of new features for products.
Best Practices for UX Storyboarding in Product Design
If you adhere to a few tried-and-true best practices, you can make the best use of storyboards in the product design brainstorming process by creating various viewpoints, elaborating the features, and bifurcating the results.
- Personas should be the main focus of storyboards rather than the actual product.
- No more than three screens should be used for each sequence in the storyboard.
- Like a plot, the context should change throughout the storyboard.
- To speed up the process, storyboard templates should be saved and used.
- The storyboard needs to be very specific about the story’s pain points.
- Detailing customer interactions with regard to pain points is necessary.
- The customer journey should be detailed in product design storyboarding.
Using Detailed Storyboards Made With Visionary Web Studios, You Can Accelerate The Product Design Process
Storyboards can be used to conceptualize a product’s functionality, features, and other aspects, but you can streamline the process by delegating the visualization and storyboarding to the Visionary Web Studios team of professionals. We can work in tandem with your product design team as part of our animation and storyboarding service, take the initial inputs, and produce interactive storyboards for each stage of the design process. To get started, get in touch with us, or let our team of professionals guide you through each step.
