User Experience Storyboard (APPL)

The goal is to design a user's experience related to the design opportunities for the course project.

This graded activity will allow you to refine your loose ideation sketching skills while crafting a storyboard that describes your proposed user experience.

A storyboard is a series of panels that depict key scenes, actions, visuals, and annotations that define the highlights of a user experience. Imagine a comic strip with explanations adjacent to each panel. According to wikipedia, storyboarding was developed by animators at Walt Disney studio. Storyboarding is now applied to the design of almost any user experience, ranging from movies, to games, to consumer products, to instructional design. Sketching a storyboard before using software to make presentation slides, even when preparing technical presentations or a thesis defense, is an effective and efficient way to design a clear, understandable experience for your audience. The course instructor uses storyboards when developing class lectures (hopefully your knowledge of this does not undermine the perceived value of storyboarding!).

In addition to developing a storyboard, you will also have the opportunity to practice brainstorming techniques with your team and apply lessons from your user-experience analysis, which is underway simultaneously.

To start
Review the project brief materials to refresh your memory. Have a brainstorming session, or multiple sessions, with your project team to enumerate ideas for the project. Focus on developing key experiences or scenes for the overall adventure.

Document the results of the brainstorming activities so that each team member can individually use the brainstorming materials to develop their own user-experience storyboards.

Generate user-experience storyboard alternatives
Using the team brainstorming as raw material, work as an individual to explore, in storyboard form, a number of alternative user experiences. A few template variations for thumbnail storyboards may be helpful (style1, style2, style3). The space above each panel is for a caption while the space below allows you to add explanatory annotations.

If you are having troubles with figures in your story board, you can always take pictures of small wooden mannequins and use prints as underlays. A number of pictures in different poses are available for this purpose.

Prepare your submission
Pick your top storyboard and prepare it as a web pages(s) for submission. Prepare the materials in a professional, easy to read format. Some examples from a previous year are online (example 1, example 2, example 3).

Information about web-authoring software was provided in the description of the human-use experience analysis. A scanner is available in the 2.744 project space. There is also a multimedia software facility on campus.