Storyboarding in UX Design | Hacker News Reader

Storyboarding in UX Design

uxplanet.org

106 pointsbabich11 comments

I saw this concept with Airbnb in Design Disruptors, an hour long film about various designers at top companies like Julie Zhou of Facebook. Airbnb hired a Disney storyboard artist to walk through not just what the app would look like but what the consumer would feel and experience as they went through the app. Because Airbnb's appeal is not within the app but outside, in someone's home, the storyboard talked about the interactions between the in app world and the real world, and how to connect them. An app is just as much about emotion, how the experience makes people feel, as it is about the raw functionality, so storyboarding through an emotional experience is a very good way to achieve UX design.

I can't seem to find the documentary you're referring to, any pointers?

https://www.designdisruptors.com/

Do note that it is sponsored by InVision, but I didn't think that detracted from the message because there was no product placement. It is also in limited showings, not online anywhere as far as I know.

I'm pretty interested in this, but wasn't able to find it online. Was it released publicly?

It has limited release I think. I was able to watch it through a design group that I am in local to our area that hosted a screening.

I sit very close to our "Snow White" storyboards that map the journey for Guests on our platform and a separate journey for Hosts. It's a reminder to think about the "key frames" that we are trying to impact with our product and constantly remember that the online experience is an enabler of a more emotional offline interaction.

One other thing that Airbnb does that I haven't seen done at other companies nearly as much is a focus on producing videos/stories to tell our story both internally and externally. When I first joined it seemed crazy that we would spend so much time and effort to produce a high quality video (almost a short documentary) to talk about why we were launching a new initiative on our platform. After watching one though, it's clear that video is a much more effective medium to communicate emotion/feeling and that helps employees understand the deeper human element that we're trying to impact and continues to drive employees to champion the mission. Sure, you could have just thrown a bunch of words and stock art on a slide and call it a day but the story doesn't come across as effectively and you don't get the same impact on the feels.

If someone is looking for resources/art work for creating nice storyboard, you can find some great templates with characters, backgrounds and objects at

https://experience.sap.com/designservices/approach/scenes

All released under CC4.0

Wish I can give you +100

Would you say it's overkill to be using these processes to design a Qliksense dashboard?

Do you mean make a story of the emotions/steps someone goes through when engaging with an awesome dashboard? I wouldn't storyboard that. First, what is the Qliksense dashboard monitoring? What is the key metric you're trying to move? What is the core reason your product can move that metric? Storyboard how users use your product to enable them to solve problems, not the dashboard that measures that impact.

Hmmm... storyboarding in software design, this is definitely a new idea for me. Going to try it out in my hobby projects and see where it takes me.

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