Building Empathy with Storyboarding

Joelle Hagen
3 min readMay 31, 2020

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As a UX Designer I am listening, analyzing and reacting to user’s story. The emotions that are being experienced by the user- gathered through interviews and testing- are valuable gems that directly influence the solution designed. It’s important to remember those emotions and use them as building blocks to communicate user needs and wants.

Storyboarding is a great way to represent those emotions and build empathy for the user. It’s a tool to communicate with clients and stakeholders the need for a specific approach or solution.

How to construct a compelling Storyboard:

Establish the narrative

Every good story has the same five stages: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution.

Map out your narrative anyway you’d like. I suggest using a story arch to help imagine the emotion trajectory of the story. I draw mine as slanted because majority of the story is focused on the rising action.

Plug in the plot points and what needs to be communicated at each step. Each point will be a separate scene in your board. In this example, I was working on a solution for newcomers moving to Seattle, WA.

Translate into Imagery

Imagine how each plot point will be displayed. Sometimes I like to write out the scene before adding illustration to clearly define what needs to be represented.

Sketch it Out

You don’t have to be an artist to do this! Use whatever level of fidelity you’d like- stock photo images, stick figures, etc…

… as long as the message is delivered unencumbered (making something funny might not always be in the best interest if it sacrifices the impact)

For my project I began with simple stick figures:

Enhance your story with some simple cinematic tools to help convey emotion and keep viewers engaged.

By elongating the room, the scene is more ominous and provides distance between the character and his responsibilities.

Alternative perspective is helpful to put the reader directly in the seat of the protagonist/user.

Voila!

Your end result doesn’t have to be a masterpiece as long as it aids the emotional point across and displays how the product will impact the user’s life.

Here is the storyboard I used for our inexperienced, Seattle newcomer persona:

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