⛺🪵🔥 UX Storyboarding. With useful guides, templates and cheatsheets to design storyboards that visualize and explain customer’s stories ↓
✅ Storyboarding is a visual storytelling technique.
✅ We use it to visualize and explain customer’s stories.
✅ Journey map is an extensive, formal visualization of user’s journey.
✅ Storyboard is a simpler, informal illustration of user’s experience.
✅ Storyboards often describe a fragment of the user journey.
✅ Each storyboard has a scenario, persona, visuals, captions.
✅ Choose the source first: user interviews, tests, analytics.
✅ Start with a story, find characters, the setting and a plot.
✅ Then, pick scenes that show plot from start to finish.
✅ For sketches, add thought bubbles, action bursts, narration.
✅ Label anything that may be an assumption or question.
🚫 Don’t overcomplicate sketches: show 1 activity per frame.
✅ Sketch only 1 storyboard per one path that the user takes.
✅ Storyboards usually include up to 8 panels.
✅ Participants usually have 15–20 mins to complete the story.
✅ Emphasize user’s emotions, gestures and expressions.
✅ Write out steps and connect them with arrows before sketching.
✅ When finished, play back the story to test how clear it is.
Storyboarding might seem like a simplistic way to visualize customer’s experience. Yet because of their simplicity, storyboards are very easy to understand, memorize and relate to. Low-fidelity stick figures work well, as the goal is to form a shared understanding, not a refined artifact.
Most importantly, good storyboarding is always informed by good UX research. It captures real scenarios, with real constraints and real pain points. It creates awareness that might linger for months — and it explains and documents design decisions, albeit unintentionally.
Useful resources
- Storyboards Help Visualize UX Ideas (+ Template), by Rachel Krause, Nielsen Norman Group
- UX Storyboarding Figma Kit, by Lucian Popovici, via Florian Popescu
- Storyboarding Toolkit (PDF), by IBM,
- Storyboarding Toolkit, by Glenn S.
- Storyboarding Workshop Templates (Figjam)
- Storyboarding Workshop Templates, by Merck,
- Storyboarding Toolkit (Miro), by Ben Crothers
- How To Use Storyboards To Test UX Concepts, by Chris Spalton
- UX Storytelling, by Mayya Azarova, Ph.D.
- How To Use Storytelling in UX Research, by Allison Grayce Marshall
