Storyboards — a new way to understand your audience
Are you feeling sick and tired of working with personas and target groups? Is it still not enough to get your message across? Well, in that case: make way for storyboards — an efficient and innovative tool for thinking differently about your customer and her behaviour. I’ll show you how.
When I originally wrote this story in Swedish for our client Billogram — a fintech start-up in Stockholm — I used storyboards to help me shape the post to the liking of their readers. How can I hook them? How can I make the article stand out amongst the plethora of content their audience receive every day?
Based on what I knew of their customers and the way Billogram distribute their content, I started drawing (had to replace my original words with english, but you get it):
Despite my lackluster drawing skills, it totally worked. I’m actually surprised by how well it turned out for the purpose of improving the story.
Storyboarding is useful tool for tasks big and small. At Uppfatta we see this time and again, when we use storyboards to visualize customer journeys and specific situations together with our clients. Storyboards serve to prove the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. They send your thoughts in directions and unlock a creativity that a regular bullet list or Microsoft Excel sheet can only dream of.
Has my magnificent artwork not quite convinced you to start working with storyboards?
Totally understandable. Let’s dig deeper into this tool that will complement your overall target group work perfectly.
The three little pigs, Star Wars and the beginning of storyboarding
First off: What is a storyboard? American blog io9 demonstrated the many possible faces of a storyboard when they published several beautiful examples from Star Wars. The following could be considered a storyboard:
And so could this:
So could a storyboard be defined as a movie in sloppy comic book style? That’s not an altogether bad description (but slightly narrow). It was first used as a tool in Hollywood in the 1930’s at Walt Disney Studios when they produced the short film The Three Little Pigs, which was released in 1933. It’s been a while since 1933, and the fact that the movie business has been using storyboarding for so long is a convincing argument — the technique is well proven, refined by decades of use. But why is storyboarding nowadays essential to movie producers?
Imagine the scene illustrated above, with Luke and Leia being chased. Imagine you’re the director, reading the scene in a word-based script. Now try to shoot it with only the written instructions in the script. Then compare that task to having these storyboards, filled with ideas (but no set rules) about where to point the camera and how to move it. Imagine as well how much easier it would be for Mark Hamill (Luke) and Carrie Fischer (Leia) to understand how to act in this scene. Not to mention how much easier it would be for everyone else in the production team to discuss and plan with storyboards on hand.
What clothes will we need?
What type of environments do we need for the film shoot?
What special effects will we need?
For these types of questions, storyboards can help provide a common idea of what the scenes will be like and be a starting point for discussions.
And now we’re closing in on the reason why storyboards are becoming increasingly popular as a tool to create strong customer experiences. If the purpose of storyboards in the movie business is “to create the movie before you actually create it” then the purpose of storyboards for brands could be something like “to create the experience before you actually create it”.
Why use storyboarding for brands?
“By bringing words to life, storyboards show you things that words can’t.”
This is a quote from Joe Gebbia, one of the co-founders of Airbnb. Speaking at the 99U Conference in New York a couple of years ago, he underscored how storyboards had improved AirBnB’s work processes drastically. Airbnb is a great source of inspiration for companies that want to focus on their customers, and they are precursors in using storyboards (as well as other innovative tools) to strengthen the customer experience. If storyboards can be used to bring a movie script to life, they most certainly can be used to give life to the words that usually control the brand: strategies, briefs, statistics.
You’ve probably been handed one of those spreadsheets, filled with numbers, curves and comments about what should be done. Sure, it’s neat and informative — but is it inspiring to work with? And can that sheet really give you and your coworkers the same idea of what you need to do, just from that piece of (electronic) paper?
Nope.
Those spreadsheets don’t help your memory at all. However, research shows that doodling does strenghten our ability to remember things, so even if you draw your brand strategy in little boxes only for the sake of your own memory, it’s a wise choice.
What happens when you create a storyboard?
Let’s pretend that we’re selling mobile phone plans and we have customer portal on our website that we wish to improve with a new calculator. To understand the customer journey, we start by making it into a bullet list:
- Jessica hears a coworker talking about their new mobile phone plan.
- She starts to think about her own plan.
- She enters our website and examines her options.
- She sees the new calculator in the menu and clicks it.
- She enters a few different values into the calculator and tries it back and forth.
- The result shows that Jessica should change to the plan “Go 30”.
This could be a real scenario, right? (Especially if the behaviour of the persona Jessica was properly substantiated by qualitative and quantitative data). The problem with this kind of description is that there are too many plot holes for this scenario to be useful. But when these dots in a list become a story, something happens. Let’s revisit Jessica’s situation with a storyboard:
We have the same description and a terrible drawing, but they are good enough to demonstrate the situation. But if this was for a movie, this drawing wouldn’t be enough to understand who Jessica is. There are too many questions rising, way too much empty space in the drawing.
Where does she work?
What does she do?
Is there really just one coworker around? Is no one else saying anything?
Jessica’s face seems a bit stiff, doesn’t she have some kind of reaction to what her coworker is saying?
There are a lot of potential questions here. What used to be just a line of text is now a whole scene. The storyboard forces us to reflect on all these things. The key to start understanding the customer journey is a simple drawing within a box. This is how Adam Chesky at Airbnb explains the effects of storyboarding:
“When you have to storyboard something, the more realistic it is, the more decisions you have to make. Like are these hosts men or women? Are they young, are they old? Where do they live? The city or the countryside? Why are they hosting? Are they nervous? It’s not that they show up to the house. They show up to the house, how many bags do they have? How are they feeling? Are they tired? At that point you start designing for stuff for a very particular use case.”
Once we have criticized our original drawing, we can create something a bit more specific:
A perfect story is not a real story
When I imagined this second scenario, I barely escaped the trap that you’ll also risk falling into when creating a persona: imagining a perfect situation. A persona who represents your ideal customer and who can’t wait to make business with you. If those customers even exist (not very likely), there’s really no point in trying to improve their experience — they’re already on your side.
Don’t forget it’s called a storyboard — your mission is to visualize a story. That means characters like Jessica will face obstacles and challenges. There has to be conflict, some kind of uncertainty about how the whole thing will end. The bullet list version is not a story; it describes a straight line from the beginning, where Jessica first hears about the calculator, to the end where she has switched mobile plan. It’s as if Romeo were to walk straight up to Juliet, tell her he loves her and they proceed to marry, the end. Not exactly a classic love story. (I’ve written a whole story on the subject of introducing conflict and antagonism into your brand’s storytelling, should you want to delve deeper into that.)
That means characters like Jessica will face obstacles and challenges. There has to be conflict, some kind of uncertainty about how the whole thing will end.
Looking at Jessica’s situation as a storyboard (as if you were writing an actual story) opens up a lot of possibilites to ask yourself the hard questions and realize the complexity of real life. When I drew the extended version of Jessica’s situation, I asked myself: what possible obstacles are to be found here?
Perhaps it’s another coworker who joins the discussion and who still is not satisfied with the new customer portal? Or perhaps it’s Jessica’s children, who distract her when she’s at home trying to get through the terms and conditions of the plan? Could there be something in Jessica’s personality that is working either for or against you? Have you considered the possibility that she’s completely uninterested in phones and just zooms out when the talk gets going? Or maybe she’s super stressed from work, so in order for you to get through to her you have to reach out at the exact right moment for her to even have the energy to visit the customer portal. How does that affect the rest of the story to ensure a happy ending?
Obviously, all of this needs to be based on actual obstacles that you know might occur (figure out what they are by doing customer interviews and collecting data); the purpose is to bring them to life, not to make them up. To go crazy and make up a story about how Putin invades Jessica’s hometown when she’s logging on to the customer portal won’t do you any good. The point of using storyboards as a tool is to consider every side of the story. Look into your data, ask colleagues about their experiences with customers — anything to fill your storyboard with elements to make the story more realistic.
Be creative, but don’t make it all up
If it wasn’t for that storyboard I showed you in the beginning of this text, the story you’re reading would be a very different one. When I sketched out the story of how I imagined the Billogram reader would receive and read the article, several questions appeared. At first, I drew frame 1, (Annie checks her email) and the frame where she’s browsing a newsletter from Billogram, which later turned into frame 3. Frame 2 was added because I realized I lacked context. How is Annie today? How’s work? So I put some thought into what I know about the readers of Billogram and then drew the scenario where the work is piled up, the corners of her mouth are pointing down and the clock on the wall is watching over her almost threateningly:
As I was looking at that drawing I realized what I’m up against on my mission to catch her attention, convince her that my article is worth reading. For example, I jotted down a note about what I wanted the heading and pre-amble to be like in order to make sure my readers would not discard the article as “that’s not relevant to me”. I also took a good look at the outline for the article, and decided that the introduction just wouldn’t do. “I need something that stands out and catches Jessica’s attention right away” I thought, ditched the previous intro and jotted “show storyboard instantly”. And there you have it — the beginning of the story that you are now reading (albeit in a slightly different Medium-ified version).
How to do it? Just grab pen and paper and go!
A quick review of what we’ve been through so far regarding the purpose of storyboarding:
- to ask new questions about the customer
- to get a deeper knowledge about your personas
- to present a common idea of the situation and use that as a starting point for discussions and the work ahead.
It’s important that you make sure these three things happen. HOW you then create your storyboards is secondary. Storyboarding really is a democratic tool, in that way — everyone can do it. Make your storyboards as simple or complicated as you wish. As shown in the Star Wars example, the same movie can use two completely different types of storyboards. It is just a tool to achieve the things listed above.
To create the really simple storyboard, like I did here, all you need is pen and paper. Without any more preparation, you could start your next meeting with the following sentence: ”Today we are doing a storyboard for the customer experience that we are trying to create, so everyone has the same idea of what it is.” And then you do that. It may very well be the simplest yet greatest leap you ever made in your creative process.
Of course you can be as creative as you like. George Lucas used video clips from WWII documentaries to do the storyboard for certain parts of Star Wars. Stanley Kubrick apparently used pictures from filming locations and created sketches on those pictures. A very clever way to avoid having to draw the entire background. And since you’re not actually shooting at a real location, you can just google for pictures of a random office that you believe would suit Annie, and use that in the creative process.
Do you have access to videoclips? Then why not use it? If the goal is to sketch the experience you want your customers to get when they unpack your product, put the clip of the “N64 kid” in that storyboard frame to bring the feeling to life:
Just because the people working with service design were first to use storyboarding as a powerful tool, that does not mean it’s a tool just for them. They way we see it, storyboarding has the potential to be so much more.
You could create a storyboard for how you’re going to present this idea of storyboarding to your coworkers.
You could create a storyboard for your next conference, to get a better idea of what you want the participant’s experince to be like.
You could create a storyboard to show to new employees to help them understand how your organisation works.
You could create a storyboard to visualize how a new working process should be carried out to make sure everybody understands it. You get the idea: the possibilities are endless.
Let’s get the visualization started!
“It has allowed us to align around a common vision”, Mr. Gebbia at Airbnb said regarding storyboards during his talk at 99U. That testimony should be powerful enough to make it worth your while to try storyboarding. In a time when more and more people have no choice but to work with people from totally different areas, creating a common idea of what you need to achieve is more important than ever. Trust the saying from the beginning of this text: a picture really is worth a thousand words. So wait no more, start crafting the customer experience that you want to give your customers not by writing about it, but by drawing it.
And by the way: since you’ve seen the storyboard for this story, you already know what to do next:
