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The Exhausting Case for Exhaustive Storyboarding.
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
We’ve all heard the idiom used at some point in our careers and, if you are a product designer, you’ve probably heard it enough that it’s become a cliche that may produce eye-rolling from colleagues (seriously, I’ve seen someone do this, and I’m not sure they even realized it). I find the saying to be accurate, yet incredibly challenging to explain its meaning and nuance entirely with fewer than a thousand words. So I guess I’ll do it with pictures… And a thousand words.
I realize that you saw this image already knowing what it was supposed to convey, but I suspect that you would have figured it out pretty quickly without the heads-up.
But what if the picture didn’t inform the audience?
If you came back to me and said “Hey Mitch if your audience is from a culture that isn’t familiar with that expression, they might not have understood the image.” you would have been correct my friend, and that is where exhaustive storyboarding comes in.
“The audience for our storyboards is often our teams of designers and developers, who don’t always speak the same dialect as the end users, nor us for that matter.”
In this case, you are the end-user, but we aren’t usually drawing ugly images for the end-user. The audience for our storyboards is often our teams of designers and developers who don’t always speak the same dialect as the end users, nor us for that matter. I know what it’s like to be the confused audience every time I see someone doing “the dab.” I still have no idea what it is, but all the young’uns around here sure seem to. Sometimes I feel like I’m on an alien pla —
I sincerely believe that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” However, the inherent problem lurking within such a powerful thing is that those “thousand words” might not be the message you intended.
SHADOW CAPTURED MOMENTS BEFORE KILLING!
That headline coupled with that image tells enough of a story to shock our attention into submission. At least it would have before the era of click-bait hardened our hearts.
But wait, maybe it’s not as bad as we thought. It looks like the bird is our victim today, not a person.
A shark eating a gannet? I mean, large fish eat birds all the time. That’s just nature doing its thing.
Wait a darn minute!
… Oh…
Because the third image did clear up my deliberate deception, we didn’t need the second one. I merely added that for dramatic effect. So if two could tell the accurate story from the example then maybe only a couple of pictures are needed to communicate the idiom.
This time, let ‘s assume we don’t understand the expression and draw something with slightly more visual explaining while keeping it nearly as simple as the first.
Here we have two subjects that are being compared to each other, which I believe is an integral part of the idiom that was missing from the first drawing. There is a conflict between “one photo” and “a thousand words.” Interestingly, the implication is that one photo is preferable to a thousand words. That is a type of abstraction that we rely on for communication almost every time we speak, but, when used through a single image, could allow for some unintended meaning.
Was that last part I said believable? Well, I made it up. I have no idea what I was talking about but, what is essential in my gibbering is that, putting that one little bit of that back-and-forth into the drawing adds a significant component of communicating to the viewer. And that leads us to — telling a story through visual dialogue.
What is the story?
- Character #1 is impressed by something in the real world outside the screen of his mobile device.
- Character #2 is distracted by his mobile device as he enters the scene and #1 tries to tell #2 about the impressive thing.
- #2 isn’t impressed by all the words that #1 is using to describe the extraordinary “thing,” and #1 is dejected.
- #1 takes a picture of the impressive “thing,” and #2 has gone back into his mobile device.
- #1 sends the image to #2’s phone and #2 is finally impressed as he whispers to himself “Oh, heck no! A photo of a shark eating people?”
So, why storyboard exhaustively?
In essence, a storyboard is a series of actions and reactions that communicate to the viewer a sense of progression. Usually, storyboards are a set of if-then statements, such as; If I poke your eye, you’ll shut your eyelid. A single image has the potential for interpretation, manipulation, and frustration.
Sometimes pictures are used merely to give straightforward directions. Other times to promise a vision about a product. In extreme cases, they are used to fabricate “news” stories by presenting a photo that would lead a viewer to make assumptions that aren’t true (and no, your favored news network is not innocent of this).
The point is that the thousand words we might squeeze out of an image are most likely not going to be the ones we need. Storyboards can be valuable to the progression of a project by avoiding miscommunication and confusion. The more detailed our storyboards are, the higher the chance that we avoid the pitfalls inherent in the development process.
In closing, I leave you with an insightful video, by Sage Hyde of the Just Write Youtube channel, which goes into great depth about this very subject. He speaks on the power of storyboarding much more eloquently than I ever could here. Also, he uses my favorite movie for his example, so I just had to share it with you.
[I humblebrag to point out that I wrote this in precisely a thousand words.]
