A storyboard is a technique for illustrating an interaction between a person and a product (or multiple people and multiple products) in narrative format, which includes a series of drawings, sketches, or pictures and sometimes words that tell a story.
Designers can create storyboards to specify how a user interface changes in reaction to users' actions and to show things that are external to the system. Good storyboards allow design teams to get a feel for the flow of users' experiences. They are generally not very detailed and use the minimum amount of detail required to get key points about the big picture across.
Related Links
Wikipedia< describes the origin and wider uses of storyboards.
Sedaca, R. Comics: Not just for laughs!< Boxes and Arrows.Explains the process of creating storyboards and provides links to additional resources.
Originators/Popularizers
Storyboarding was originated and first used in the film industry. The storyboard form as it is known today, was developed at the Walt Disney studio during the early 1930s:
Disney Miller, D. (1956). The Story of Walt Disney. Chicago and San Francisco: Henry Holt and Company.
Troung, K. N., Hayes, G. R., & Abowd, G. D. (2006). Storyboarding: An empirical determination of best practices and effective guidelines. Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), 12-21.
Authoritative References
McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding Comics. Perennial Currents.
Rosson, M. B. & Carroll, J. M. (2002). Usability Engineering : Scenario -Based Development of Human Computer Interaction. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Wodtke, C. (2002). Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Press.
Published Studies
Harada, K., Tanaka, E., Ogawa, R., & Hara, Y. (1996). Anecdote: A multimedia storyboarding system with seamless authoring support. In Proceedings of the fourth ACM international conference on Multimedia, 341-351.
McQuaid, H. L., Goel, A, & McManus, M. (2003). When you can't talk to customers: Using storyboards and narratives to elicit empathy for users. In Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Designing pleasurable products and interfaces, 120-125.
Branham, S. M, Shahtab, W., & McCrickard, D. S. (2007). Channeling creativity: Using storyboards and claims to encourage collaborative design. In Workshop on Tools in Support of Creative Collaboration (part of Creativity & Cognition 2007), 1-4.
Sinha, A. K., & Landay, J. A. (2001). Visually prototyping perceptual user interfaces through multimodal storyboarding. In ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 15, Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on Perceptive user interfaces, 1-4.
Landay, J. A., & Myers, B. A. (1995). Just Draw It! Programming by Sketching Storyboards. Carnegie Mellon University, Human-Computer Interaction Institute Technical Report CMU-HCII-95-106 and School of Computer Science Technical Report CMU-CS-95-199. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~landay/research/publications/storyboard-tr/storyboard.pdf<
Landay, J. A., & Myers, B. A. (1996). Sketching storyboards to illustrate interface behaviors. In the Conference Companion of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: CHI '96, 193-194. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~landay/research/publications/CHI96/short_storyboard.pdf<
Related Subjects
Video storyboards: a storyboard can be created from a video by using key frames as images. Mackay, W. E., Ratzer, A. V., & Janecek, P. (2000). Video artifacts for design: Bridging the gap between abstraction and detail. In Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, 72 – 82.
Storyboards and QOC (Questions, Options, Criteria): a technique that follows the creation of a storyboard. The team finds frames where they have questions that need answers, they list their options and criteria for making choices, and uses the QOC method to explore potential solution spaces.
Comicboarding: a participatory design method that uses comic books in brainstorming sessions with children. Moraveji, N., Li, J., Ding, J., O'Kelley, P., and Woolf, S. (2007). Comicboarding: using comics as proxies for participatory design with children. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '07, 1371-1374.
Detailed description
How To
Special Considerations
Facts
Sources and contributors:
Tomer Sharon, Shermin Ekhteraei, Shannon McHarg, Chauncey Wilson.