The Value of Storyboards in the Product Design Process

Summary

Storyboards help product designers communicate product-user interactions, context, timing, and intended experiences with clients, design teams, experts, and future users. Their value depends on matching visualisation style to the design phase: sketchy and open storyboards invite comments during exploration, while detailed and polished storyboards support judgement, decisions, or persuasion.

Important Keywords

Storyboards: sequences of images used to show product use, interaction, context, and time.
Product design: the design process in which storyboards help communicate and evaluate product ideas.
Interaction design: design attention to how users act with and respond to a product.
Visualisation style: the way storyboard drawings represent users, products, context, and actions.
Design process: the stages of developing and refining product ideas where storyboards can support communication.
Product-user interaction: the actions and responses between a person and a product shown through storyboard scenes.
Context and time: the setting and temporal sequence that storyboards make visible.
Communication: using storyboards to share design ideas among designers, clients, and other stakeholders.
Visual scenario: a story of use represented through images.
Simulation: creating a coherent narrative of interaction so a concept can be imagined and assessed.
Sketchiness: low-polish visual style that encourages feedback and iteration.
Walkthrough: stepping through a storyboard or scenario to discuss what happens and why.

Important Concepts

Storyboards provide a common visual language that people from different backgrounds can read and discuss.
Product design storyboards differ from cinema storyboards: they focus on understanding interaction in context and over time rather than pre-visualising production.
Readers can both empathise with the visualised interaction and step back to analyse it from their own expertise.
Visualisation style affects response: rough sketches invite suggestions, while glossy detail can imply finality.
Different design phases call for different storyboard uses, from analysis and synthesis through simulation, evaluation, and decision-making.
Storyboards are visual scenarios: sequences of images showing product-user interaction across time and context.
They support communication, concept generation, interaction exploration, and evaluation with users.
Storyboard work can be understood through analysis, synthesis, simulation, and evaluation phases.
Storyboards should include context, actors, goals, action, system response, and relevant emotional or social cues.
Sketchy storyboards are often better early because they signal incompleteness and invite critique; polished storyboards may be mistaken for final designs.

Examples

An analysis-phase storyboard explores the emotional experience of having dinner, using details such as a phone, table setting, abstracted faces, and hearts symbolising love in meal preparation.
In synthesis, rough storyboard pages can be spread on a table or wall to support team discussion of concept ideas.
Simulation-phase storyboards compare two concepts for communication between mother and child.
Evaluation uses sequential flipbook cards in a walk-through with users, such as a workstation concept for radiologists.