Storyboarding / User Journey Mapping

The 1 Line Description

Storyboarding maps out each step of a user’s interaction with your product.

When to use it

During customer discovery, to help clarify what you need to prototype.

Key Ideas

It's well worth spending a couple of hours on this.

Stories are an effective and inexpensive way to capture, relate, and explore experiences in the design process. They’re valuable during both Find and Form.

  • For Find – Storyboarding helps you uncover problems / pain points users currently experience.
  • For Form – Storyboarding helps ensure everyone on the team is unified on the experience a concept will provide.

N.B. you don’t need to be an artist to start drawing – this shouldn’t be high fidelity!

Instructions

  1. Decide the experience to focus on (e.g. expensing a transaction).
  2. Either print the board below, draw a grid on a whiteboard / paper, or fold a piece of paper three times vertically.
  3. Draw a sequential narrative of how this experience currently works (Find) or could work (Form). Remember to consider the emotions a user or character has at each stage (i.e. their reaction to success or pain points)
  4. Hang any storyboards to a wall, and ask people to share what they’ve drawn. Capture any feedback on post-its and add these to the relevant board.
  5. Give everyone 3 dot stickers and ask them to vote for their favorite storyboard and/or stages of the experience that they like.
  6. Consolidate the most voted stages into a single, best-in-class storyboard.

Resources:

Read more about story mapping:

https://www.aha.io/roadmapping/guide/release-management/what-is-user-story-mapping

https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/story-mapping-visual-way-building-product-backlog