How to Use a Storyboard ‘Comic’ to Help Design Your Web Site (Video)
That one-day crash course I’m teaching on B2B Web design had an unexpected highlight with participants: We did an interactive session on “design comics,” which are a quick way of plotting out web experiences and including a human touch. And then we showed how to put together PowerPoint comics based on the session, like the one below:
This was a big hit, so I thought I would share the technique with our Cisco.com audience.
You can use design comics in a couple of ways. With our class we did one example where we storyboarded a future web site idea. We did another example, shown in the team picture below, where we documented a current experience that needed improving.
That’s me (far left), co-instructor Marilyn Salzman (far right), and some members of the class with a story about online registration.
So, how does the technique work? It’s pretty simple. Here’s a seven-minute video I put together with Janet Wallin from Cisco (playing “Mary” in the video) showing how to plot out a storyboard and then make a PowerPoint video:
P.S. Here’s a closeup of one of the sheets from the class, showing a slightly different notation style than we used in the video:
P. P. S. I should mention also that we have a couple of additional runs of our course ahead as part of the Nielsen Norman Usability Week conferences in London (May 23rd) or San Francisco (June 20th).
Technorati Tags: Cisco Design Web-Design CustomerExperience
Posted by Martin Hardee at 08:04AM PST
Karen Aug 7, 2009
Thank you Martin for pointing me to this video. I’ve distributed this to members of our UX team for review. We are looking to employ this method to document user scenarios that illustrate our users needs and/or problems followed by conceptual models that provide potential resolution. ~Karen