Storyboard

A storyboard shows a sequence of moments as frames, borrowed from film, where it was developed at Disney in the 1930s. In design it shows a person’s experience unfolding: context, trigger, action, outcome.

What it does that a flow diagram cannot

A user flow shows screens and decisions. A storyboard shows the person, and by extension the situation: where they are, what else is happening, what they were doing before, who else is present.

That context is often where the design problem actually lives. A frame showing a technician in a plant room, gloved, holding a torch, phone in the other hand, communicates a constraint that no wireframe carries.

It is also the format non-designers engage with most readily. Stakeholders who will not read a research report will follow a six-frame story about a named person.

Where it earns its keep

Service and multi-channel work, where the experience spans a phone call, an email, a visit and an app, and no single screen holds the story. Also early concept work, where the question is whether the idea makes sense in someone’s day at all.

In practice

Six to eight frames is usually enough. Start before the product appears and end after it is finished with, because those frames are where the unexamined assumptions sit.