Week 8: Scenarios & Storyboarding

Say hello to our first week of generative research and design!

With all of our client interviews completed, we came back after a restful spring break to begin exploring specific concepts and solutions we could pursue. This is where the design exercises from previous weeks really came in handy- we realized that we had actually generated a lot of viable ideas already.

Some of the resulting ideas from our previous design exercises.

Scenarios

To explore which ideas were most promising, each of us then individually wrote scenarios, in which we illustrated a hypothetical solution and how users would interact with it.

Once we came back together as a group, we shared our scenarios and identified six common themes to our solutions. This allowed us to move onto our next step- storyboarding!

Storyboarding

We decided to create a storyboard for each of the six themes we identified from our scenarios, illustrating how a potential user may interact with each solution.

One of our storyboards illustrating a tracking solution.

When utilized in speed-dating, storyboards are an extremely valuable way of gaining quick insights and feedback straight from the users and stakeholders themselves. To practice, we speed-dated with our faculty advisors. This was helpful, since we gained new perspectives: for example, real-world constraints we hadn’t thought of, or considerations we will have to keep in mind in the future.

In the coming week, we plan to visit our client and speed-date with their employees. Through this session, we hope to gain an ‘expert’ perspective, which will help us identify weaknesses, as well as select the more promising solutions to pursue.