How Can Storyboarding Help Visualize UX Design?

Most people associate storyboarding with movie/video-making, animation, and comic-book writing. But storyboards are a much more versatile way for planning and visualizing any project. Storyboards' advantage is combining visual and textual directions, creating perfect planning and presenting tools for a project. 

One of the areas where storyboarding helps you smoothly plan your work is UI/UX design. It will help make work easier and faster. Moreover, using storyboarding software application like MakeStoryboard, will make your life even easier with the right combination of features and tools.

So, How Does Storyboarding For UX/UI Design Help?

UX/UI design requires one to precisely and accurately visualize what the end-user will be doing and going through at each step. Trying to do so by guesswork, relying on your memory, and a bunch of notes on your notepad will confuse you and fill the end-product with fatal mistakes. 

Using a visual representation of the screen or page the user would be encountering at each point, supplemented by textual guides, is a much more practical alternative. 

Here is how storyboarding helps:

• Using storyboards ensures the exact visual of the UI is in front of you at all times, preventing an "out of sight, out of mind" situation.
• You can avoid errors, discrepancies, and gaps this way.
• It improves your research and user testing quality when you have everything at your fingertips.
• It prevents your internal bias from making its way into the user interface allowing you can to catch it in time and make necessary changes.
• Using storyboards, you get to put yourself in the user’s shoes and get an authentic experience of the dilemmas they face... Placing yourself in the user’s shoes allows you to you prioritize the correct elements to deal with during the UX/UI design.
• Visual representation is much more conducive to creativity and brainstorming than any other form of media. Therefore, you will be able to develop much better solutions utilizing storyboards.

Now, Why Use Storyboarding Software For UX/UI Design?

Traditional storyboarding with a pencil and paper may work pretty well for those creating simple videos, but UX/UI design requires more. Moreover, a story writer can get away with rough sketches, but in UI design, you need to understand how another utterly different person will react to something in the future. 

So, it would be best to view things more realistically, i.e., using actual pictures and elements to create the boards. 

In this situation, a storyboarding software like MakeStoryboard will help you more, and here is how:

• The most obvious point is the storyboarding application will simplify your job. This makes it faster, and smoother than actual drawing and writing, as with the digitization of any manual process. With a range of tools at your disposal, the quality of the storyboard will also be significantly better.
• You will be able to add authentic images from your existing user interface or put one together using the web design app you might be using. Original photos will help your audience create an accurate understanding of what the end-user will be visualizing.
• Mistakes are much easier to correct on a storyboarding software. You do not have to go back and erase everything and then start right back from the top, with a few quick presses to buttons on the app. You’ll be correcting critical errors and issues.
• Using a storyboarding app will allow you to instantly make changes and try out new ideas when you are presenting. You do not always have to keep producing new boards then schedule another meeting to show the new ideas to your audience.
• The app will also allow you to collaborate and communicate with the rest of the team while developing the board, instead of after. With a user-friendly and collab-positive software app like MakeStoryboard, you can significantly improve team performance and productivity in this manner.

What Are The components of Storyboarding for UX Design?

When you are storyboarding for UX/UI design, you need to be mindful of three components to create a perfect storyboard. They are:

• User scenario

• Action visuals

• Explicit Captions

The user scenario refers to the circumstances that brought the user to the specific screen or page of the URI you are working on. For example, say the user made a purchase. Then the scenario would go from adding the item to the cart, checking out, and making the payment.

The action visuals refer to the actual screens or pages the user would be encountering and the elements they would interact with to move to the next step. The designer needs to add each consecutive page or screen to the board to play out the scenario.

Lastly, explicative captions will supplement the visuals and explain what the user did and what changes came about as a result.

The Step-by-step Guide of Storyboarding for UX Design

If you want to take full advantage of the facilities offered by storyboarding software like MakeStoryboard to do your UX design, here are the crucial steps to follow:

1. Conduct thorough customer and market research to gather all the data you need for planning and designing
2. Define the user action scenario you want to create the structure around.
3. Lay down the basics of the design you want to implement in a stepwise form.
4. Create visuals to go with said steps.
5. Use fitting captions to explain happening in and between each visual.
6. Run yourself through the process to ensure UX design works.
7. Make any necessary changes to improve and refine the design.

To Conclude,

A storyboarding software like MakeStoryboard equips you with all the tools and features you need creating stunning, one-of-a-kind UX/UI designs while expediting your entire working process.