Dean Peters Storyboarding
What Is It
Stories add a human element to design and data analysis activities. They foster empathy and let designers walk in the users’ shoes, increasing understanding of needs, activities, interests, and pain points.
Why Use It
Visually document use cases, scenarios, and system interactions. Explore new ideas and scenarios, expressed more effectively than text alone.
When to Use It
When exploring new ideas or potential applications or when visually exploring and refining a mature idea.
How to Do It
- Gather documented use cases, scenarios, etc.
- Describe individual scenes and moments, using plain text and arrows to depict the sequence.
- Make simple drawings of the described moments. Sketch a sequence of scenes that depict interactions between the user and the system.
- Write brief descriptions to accompany each scene, detailing what the user is trying to do, how the user is feeling, and other contextual information.
- Review the storyboard with the team and stakeholders to gather feedback.
- Iterate through the process until the storyboard clearly represents the use case in question.
Key Concepts
Scene Sequencing — Breaking a use case into discrete moments shown in temporal order so interactions, decisions, and handoffs become visible. It exposes gaps and dead-ends that prose user stories tend to hide.
Emotional Annotation — Capturing how the user feels at each scene alongside what they're doing. This surfaces friction and delight moments that drive prioritization decisions a feature list alone can't reveal.
Empathy Through Narrative — Using a protagonist and story arc to make the team experience the user's context first-hand. It counters solution-bias by anchoring design choices to lived user needs rather than internal assumptions.
Fidelity Restraint — Deliberately keeping sketches rough so the team focuses on flow and meaning rather than visual polish. Low fidelity keeps the artifact cheap to revise and invites broader critique.
Happy Path vs. Edge Cases — The storyboard typically depicts the ideal flow, but mature use requires boarding failure states and exceptions. Naming which path you're drawing prevents teams from mistaking the happy path for full coverage.
PM Applications
- Build a narrative companion to a PRD that shows the target user journey scene-by-scene, giving engineers shared context beyond acceptance criteria.
- Run a discovery sprint workshop where the team storyboards competing solution concepts to compare them before writing any user stories.
- Create executive-facing artifacts for roadmap reviews that convey the user problem and proposed experience without diving into technical detail.
- Map an end-to-end onboarding or checkout flow during backlog refinement to identify missing steps before slicing it into stories.
- Pair with personas to dramatize a specific JTBD, validating with users in discovery interviews whether the depicted journey matches reality.
- Use in sprint reviews or design critiques to walk stakeholders through how a feature will feel in context and capture targeted feedback.
Benefits
- Blends visual thinking, creativity, and a flexible structure for describing / designing / testing procedures & use cases
Common Pitfalls
- Drawing only the happy path and shipping it as if it were complete coverage, leaving error states and edge cases undesigned until they surface as production bugs.
- Over-investing in artistic polish so the team treats the storyboard as final and resists iterating, defeating its purpose as a cheap exploration tool.
- Skipping the emotional annotations and reducing scenes to a flowchart, which strips out the friction insights that justify prioritization decisions.
- Storyboarding from internal assumptions rather than actual user research, producing a confident-looking narrative that validates the team's bias instead of reality.
- Building the storyboard solo and presenting it as finished, missing the cross-functional alignment that comes from collaborative sketching with engineering and design.
- Letting the storyboard become a one-time artifact that's never revisited as the design evolves, so it drifts out of sync with what's actually being built.
Combine With
Personas to focus the storyboard PAINstorming to learn more about what the user experiences
Assets
- PDF: Download
- Markdown Template: template.md
Metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| ITK Phase | UNDERSTAND |
| Difficulty | Intermediate |
| Group Size | 4+ people |
| Time Required | 60+ minutes |
| Source | itk.mitre.org |