Storyboarding Your Product Into the Future
Storyboarding isn’t just for validating problems; it’s also for imagining new futures.
UX and product researchers often utilize storyboards as a low-fidelity prototype during product validation in one-on-one customer interviews. They’ll draft up a few scenarios, make them into storyboards, and use them to ask questions to research participants like: “Could you imagine yourself in this scenario? Have you ever had this problem before? What if you could solve it like this?” Storyboards are used to get feedback from users on desires and potential solutions.
Recently, I was planning a remote workshop for a client whose project was wrapping up. Over the weeks prior, our team had been testing out digital prototypes with preschool age children. We had been seeing whether they were able to understand and interact with particular sequences and screens. The workshop was the time to help the client get to the bottom of the research questions, ideate on solutions, and imagine a new future for their designs.
Storyboards immediately came to mind as a great way to get creative with stakeholders and help them tell a new story about their product after being immersed in the research.
I decided to work storyboarding into the latter half of our workshop. After watching the research sessions as a group and doing a couple of analysis activities to bubble up important findings and answer some research questions, the team was beginning to align on some new possible futures for their digital product. We launched into a storyboarding activity; I prompted it by defining the first and last frames, and suggested we take 15 minutes to “fill in the middle of the story — what happens between the child first hearing about this product, and them being able to begin playing with it?”
Using storyboarding as an imaginative exercise in a research-based workshop (rather than as a validation exercise during the research) was a great tool to help stakeholders feel proactive, future oriented, and like they were experts in their own customers’ desires. It also helped inspire them to tackle the problems we’d uncovered in the course of the research, because they could see and reinvest in a future where the problems had been resolved.
During what can sometimes be an intense workshop day of discussion and problem discovery, storyboarding helped to create an optimistic atmosphere and make even the toughest issues feel solvable. It also helped to zero in on exactly where and how the problems we encountered in the research would affect the ideal customer, and acted like a small-scale journey map with a narrative feel.
