UX Storyboarding: Where communication and clarity collide
Storyboarding has helped the CX team at Sainsburys to communicate and engage on projects by visualising how the digital and physical experiences will work effectively together.
In the Customer Experience Design (CXD) team, it’s our job to think about the customer and colleague experience from start to finish. The Sainsbury’s eco-system is made up of multiple brands: Sainsbury’s, Argos, Habitat, Nectar, and Tu. Each one of these brands has different processes for both our customers and our colleagues.
Take the returns process at Argos, for example. What does that look like? What does it involve? Or how does a Sainsbury’s store design flow, and what interactions does a customer make as a result of those design choices? Or how will digital interactions make the experience better for both customers and staff?
These are the kinds of questions we have to answer in the CXD team. We, as designers, ask these questions, and the detail of the answers all go into the solutions we come up with. When it comes to explaining our ideas, which can be complex and full of detailed information, it can be hard to achieve clarity and convey the overall vision — and too easy to get distracted by specific details.
What is a UX storyboard?
One way to get around this is with storyboarding. Storyboards are an effective tool to communicate visions and solutions to complex issues by showing journeys in a visual way. This helps stakeholders see the experience from a customer’s or colleague’s perspective, and greatly assists with research and end-to-end testing.
Storyboards help cut out a lot of the noise, letting us communicate an overall journey or vision without the audience getting hung up on the details. That way, it’s easier to align teams and different areas of the business.
But more than that, they put you in the customer’s shoes. How the customer arrived, their journey through the store, the interactions they had, and how they left. Storyboards give that understanding with a clarity that a written list simply can’t convey.
Hitesh, a Senior Experience Designer in our CXD team, has used this method for a long time. Having a graphic design background, he has always used visual means of communication to explain projects, engage people and get buy-in. When he shared this method with the team, the feedback was very positive, both with the CX team and from other areas of the business.
Storyboarding workshops
Colleagues wanted to know how to create their own storyboards and use them in their own work. This led to Hitesh creating and running storyboarding workshops to give his colleagues the tools and techniques they could use for their own projects.
The workshops covered the makeup of a storyboard — such as the customer persona, and the scenario being considered. The process itself is straightforward: plot out a narrative of a customer journey or scenario, pick out the steps that will best convey it, and finally, get drawing.
Hitesh shares a few ways to create the visuals in the workshop. If you’re already a confident sketcher, simply picking up a pen and paper is probably the quickest way to start. Hitesh uses a digital pen tool to sketch freehand. If not, one approach is to visualise what you want to sketch, then find a relevant picture online or from a central database like Figma. Hitesh has set up a central store of useful pictures and sketches — showing stores, devices, customers, baskets, phone-screen close-ups and so on.
Several digital pictures can be put together and sketched around even, so the process can be adapted to each person’s preferred way of working. It doesn’t matter how the visuals are created — they are just there to communicate an idea and help the audience focus.
Why use storyboards?
Drawing out the scenes in the journey can help in many ways. It can lead to new ideas and perspectives, or the development of creative solutions. It can also help identify what we do — and don’t — know about the customer journey. These revelations are what help make storyboarding so effective. They are also particularly helpful when used to communicate a vision with a view to gaining buy-in and engagement from across the business or for research and testing purposes, to help gather valuable feedback by walking customers through the end-to-end experience.
Inspired by Hitesh’s workshops and following positive feedback from colleagues within and outside the CXD team, more and more CX colleagues are finding their own way to storyboard as part of the experience design process.
Written by Hitesh Supeda
Senior Experience Designer (Product) — Habitat/Argos
