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Storyboards for the Workplace
A Powerful Framework
Storyboards provide a powerful framework to organize thoughts and explain concepts.
Visual cues found in storyboards clarify the context and minimize confusion.
Their unfinished and rough “look” invites conversation. This conversation encourages interaction
among colleagues and customers while lightening the mood. Here are some things that Storyboards
can do for your organization:
- Focus on solving the problem, not fishing for random solutions
- Collaborative and iterative – invites conversation
- Lets you test an idea before heavy R&D cost
- Fun and easy, yet professional
Fleshing Out A New Product Or Feature
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Product development focuses on two arenas: creation and innovation. Both are expensive and eat up time.
Rather than build a product prototype or invest in a new process, your organization can share a storyboard. Storyboards are a rapid, lean method that gauges professional and consumer interest. The first framework uses a
Problem – Solution
– Benefit storyline.
- Problem: What is your customer experiencing a problem with?
- Solution: The service or product you are offering to completely resolve the problem.
- Benefit: What will the customer say they achieved or solved with your solution?
Pro Tip: This also works great for project managers to echo back what they heard,
or to figure out where people are not on the same page.
Framework Templates:
Framework Examples
Explaining Test Results And Other Analyses
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Customers often interact in amazingly creative ways to products and services rather
than following your carefully designed plan. By visually showing the process of
what you think is happening, it helps share a hypothesis with others and shed a
light into what happened during a test. These insights can lead to new products
or fundamental changes in your business model. The book
Lean Startup by Eric Ries talks
about this in length. The framework for these is:
This – Then That – Result.
- This: What did the user start doing?
- Then That: Then what did they do?
- Result: Consequence of user actions.
Framework Templates
Storyboard Examples
Explaining A Process
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Work and life are full of processes, and as a general rule people do not like reading
long, boring checklists. Process storyboards are helpful to educate people and to
look for opportunities to reduce steps. The framework for processes explanations
is:
When – Steps – Success
- When: What are the common needs for this process?
- Steps: What are the big key steps?
- Success: How do you know when it worked?
Framework Templates
Storyboard Examples
Difficult Conversations And Mentorship
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A reality of working with people is the periodic difficult conversation. Using storyboards
allows the author to more easily predict how the other person will respond due to
the conversational nature of the storyboard format. More time spent planning
increases the chance of a successful resolution. Other times a more senior person
will mentor someone while walking them through a difficult conversation to help
them see both sides of a situation. The framework for this is:
Context – Approach – End Goal.
- Context: Why is the conversation happening?
- Approach: Key bullet points and tone.
- End Goal: What does the other person say after hearing your argument?
Pro Tip: Sharing your storyboard with a third party often helps tone down the approach
from confrontational to collaborative.
Framework Templates
Storyboard Examples
