The Story Behind Storyboarding
A Little History on Storyboarding
Picture the classic tale “Three Little Pigs.” What immediately pops into your mind? In a nutshell, you may recall:
- Three little pigs are looking to build houses to get away from the big, bad wolf.
- The first house, made of straw, gets blown away by the wolf.
- The second house, made of sticks, gets destroyed by the wolf.
- The third house, made of bricks, still stands despite the wolf huffing and puffing with all his might.
- The pigs live happily ever after.
When the tale is broken down into simple steps, it becomes a sequence of events — the perfect storyboard. At least this was the case for Webb Smith, the animator and screenwriter known to create the first modern storyboard that involved visual sequences, according to Satyam Maitrai.
In the early 1930’s, Smith wrote for Walt Disney Studio’s short film, “Three Little Pigs,” where he utilized storyboarding. He did this by drawing scenes on separate pieces of paper and attaching them to a bulletin board. John Canemaker writes in his book "Paper Dreams: The Art and Artists of Disney Storyboards,” Smith drew his inspiration from a graphic novel that featured drawings for cartoons such as “Steamboat Willie” and “Plane Crazy.” Ever since, storyboarding would become a staple for other film studios.
Storyboarding Today
Storyboarding has come a long way since old school animation. Not only is it used in film, but it is also used in other industries including:
- Advertising
- Marketing
- UX Design
- Event Launches
- Video Games
- Business
Of course, storyboarding is also used in sprint designs. In the book, “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days,” writers Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowtiz explain how storyboarding can help move a sprint along.
“You’ll use your storyboard to imagine your finished prototype, so you can spot problems and points of confusion before the prototype is built.”
— Knapp, Zeratsky, Kowitz
Storyboarding is an effective way to visualize the user experience and find the kinks that can be tweaked.
Storyboarding for Sprint
When I met with my sprint group to figure out how to start our storyboard for our teen finance app “BizWiz,” we started with an art museum that displayed our solution sketches. By using the gallery, we were able to see what we liked and didn’t like from our previous solutions sketches and ideas. From there, we moved on to the heat map where we voted on what works and what doesn’t. We then created user journey boards, where each member listed the steps of the user experience. After, we wrote a story composition based on the best user journey. Finally, we created our refined storyboard where we created clear images for each step in the story composition.
As someone who recently graduated with a degree in journalism, I’m used to working on projects and assignments where the end result isn’t always crystal clear. When there are necessary, unexpected changes to a story, the journalist needs to figure out how to incorporate them and decide which parts are more important than others. The story you initially pursued could turn into a more complicated or completely different story. When it comes to storyboarding for sprint, the end result is usually more predictable, but the process of getting there can be filled with many changes.
Despite the short deadline, sprint designers have some time to utilize storyboarding to figure out how to reach their goal and forecast which elements could be taken out or kept for an efficient user experience.