Work Guidelines: Storyboarding

Movies, cartoons, and animated features all begin with storyboards that tell who the players are, what happens to them, and how it happens.

• Help gather and refine customer requirements in a user friendly way.
• Encourage more creative and innovative design solutions.
• Encourage team review and prevent features no one wants.
• Ensure that features are
  implemented in an accessible
  and intuitive way.
• Ease the interviewing process
  - avoiding the blank-page syndrome.

Simply put, storyboarding means to use a tool to illustrate (and sometimes animate) to the users (actors) how the system will fit into the organization, and indicate how the system will behave. A facilitator shows an initial storyboard to the group, and the group provides comments. The storyboard then evolves in "real time" during the workshop. So, you need a graphical drawing tool that allows you to easily change the storyboard. To avoid distractions, it is usually wise to use simple tools, such as easel charts, a whiteboard, or PowerPoint™.

There are two distinct groups of tools to use for storyboarding: passive tools and active tools. Passive means you show non-animated pictures, while active tools have more sophisticated capabilities built in.

Examples of passive tools for storyboarding are:

• Paper and pencil
• Post-it® notes
• GUI builders
• Different kinds of presentation managers

Examples of active tools for storyboarding are:

• Hypercard, Supercard
• Bricklin’s Demo-It™ II
• Macromedia Director and other animation tools
• PowerPoint

Caveats and comments:

• Storyboards need to be easy to create and change. If you did not change anything, you did not learn anything.
• Do not make a storyboard too good. It’s neither a prototype nor a demo of the real thing ("realware" perception).