While I had already completed a Service Design Blueprint for this project, which will be incredibly useful for explaining how all the pieces work together, they do require a certain amount of knowledge and familiarity to fully understand them. I therefore decided to supplement the design blueprint with a storyboard that I could present to make the overall idea easier to understand. Storyboards are taken from the world of TV and Film where they are used as a visual guide to a scene so that the whole crew: camera crew, set builders, costume etc. can understand the director’s vision for the scene and the can all come together to bring it to life. Within UX and Product Design they also carry out the role of visualising the designer’s idea, so that stakeholders can better understand how it is designed to be used and solve the initial problem the design is intended to solve.
Before I started to create my storyboards I wanted to map them out on Miro, so I could better frame the story I wanted to tell.
Initially I planned to create one storyboard for each of my three user personas and I mapped out what I believed would be their story with my product.
As you see above these extended to many scenes and after discussion with Maíra my project supervisor, it was clear I needed to simplify these storyboards or they would not have the impact I hoped for. These plans were however, not a waste of time as their detail turned out to be a strength and I was able to use them to plan most of the screens I would need to design to build a proof of concept for my idea.
To simplify, the storyboards down to something more manageable I started to combine some of the separate boards together, I did this for the first storyboard plan.
At this point I realised that to describe the overall product I could use this with a couple of minor additions to represent the happy path for the whole product and therefore would not need to create the two further storyboards. This was ideal as it kept things simple to present and would also save me a lot of time when it came to making the storyboards themselves, which I knew would be a time-consuming task.
With a strong plan now in place I was able to move on to the next stage and start to sketch out my storyboards.
I decided to start creating my storyboards with a pencil and paper, as this would allow me to make any changes quickly and easily in comparison to going straight into a vector design tool such as Illustrator.
I started with a sheet of A3 paper and my plans, and got sketching, this allowed me to try different ideas and start to work out where the elements would fit into each scene. I find this happens more naturally on paper as you allow the ideas to flow, in comparison to working within a digital tool. You can see the results of these sketches below.
Unfortunately, I spilt some water on the first scene of the first sheet and I could also tell that my drawing skills were not quite good enough to be able to present these storyboards to an audience. I was happy though with the overall layout, so I decided that creating this storyboard in a digital tool would be a worthwhile exercise. This would also allow me to add text to each scene to offer an explanation of what was going on and how my product was supporting in each scene.
Now I had a clear plan of what I wanted to create I moved to Affinity’s Vector design tool to create the digital version of my storyboards. I selected Affinity over Adobe’s Illustrator as it causes less performance issues on my laptop and is free to use making it ideal for this task.
