I attended a local AIGA Salon where we discussed the topic of storyboarding for dynamic and interactive media. The discussion was insightful and meaningful – covering the new challenges that we face as designers and artists when it comes to creating interactive work.

What Constitutes a Storyboard?

The term “storyboard” can be used to define a variety of processes used to flesh out a final interactive piece. These can range from simple sketches on a napkin to flowcharts and functional prototypes. The purpose is to provide your project team members with a sense of how the final experience will work. The key to storyboarding is not in any single scene, but how each scene fits within the context of the overall deliverable.

The common challenge mentioned in the salon was how to comfortably fit storyboards into the design process, and most importantly how to identify what should be represented in your storyboards. At my company, storyboards play a vital role in the design and development process. Ignoring this step leaves a chance that the experience will feel incomplete and disconnected.

Storyboard Elements

I personally like to incorporate film storyboarding techniques in my own boards. Interactive Design is so closely related to the film industry that for me it makes sense to pull from a lot of their visual cues. Techniques that represent pan-and-scans, camera shots, scene changes and movement all lend themselves very well to interactive work. If you’re interested in honing your storyboarding skills then I’d recommend the book, From Word to Image: Storyboarding and the Filmmaking Processes.

When it comes to my storyboards, I also prefer to focus on specific elements or use cases instead of trying to capture the entire view in full detail. Otherwise it becomes very difficult to get a sense of how the different views can work together. Instead, I break down my project into a bunch of predetermined linear flows. From here I can focus on creating boards that illustrate details of each of these features.

Even a smaller microsite is made up of many predetermined linear elements. For example, a single-purpose campaign site with only a few pages and emailing functionality might include:

• Site preloader/initialization sequence
• Emailing entry, validation and confirmation funnel
• Navigation interactivity and transitions
• Scene transitions

Breaking these out let’s me put detail into those elements in a way that delivers a more meaningful portrail the entire experience.

My Storyboarding Process

My first step in creating my storyboards is to go straight to paper and rapidly and repeatedly sketch out ideas. This way I don’t get caught up in the details of any single direction. For me it’s about getting out of my head about good or bad ideas and testing different possibilities. After a few of those exercises I’m able to go back and explore the better ideas to pick ideas that are worth exploring further.

The key to storyboards is to share ideas quickly. Not to create masterpieces. It might take some time at first if you aren’t used to creating them, but once storyboards becomes a natural part of your process, you’ll really begin to see the pay off.