Storyboarding / User Journey Mapping

The 1 Line Description

Storyboarding maps out each step of a user’s interaction with your product.

When to use it

During customer discovery, to help clarify what you need to prototype.

Key Ideas

It's well worth spending a couple of hours on this.

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Stories are an effective and inexpensive way to capture, relate, and explore experiences in the design process. They’re valuable during both Find and Form.

For Find – Storyboarding helps you uncover problems / pain points users currently experience.
For Form – Storyboarding helps ensure everyone on the team is unified on the experience a concept will provide.

N.B. you don’t need to be an artist to start drawing – this shouldn’t be high fidelity!

Instructions

Decide the experience to focus on (e.g. expensing a transaction).
Either print the board below, draw a grid on a whiteboard / paper, or fold a piece of paper three times vertically.
Draw a sequential narrative of how this experience currently works (Find) or could work (Form). Remember to consider the emotions a user or character has at each stage (i.e. their reaction to success or pain points)
Hang any storyboards to a wall, and ask people to share what they’ve drawn. Capture any feedback on post-its and add these to the relevant board.
Give everyone 3 dot stickers and ask them to vote for their favorite storyboard and/or stages of the experience that they like.
Consolidate the most voted stages into a single, best-in-class storyboard.

Resources:

Author

Fanni Fejes

Former Product Coach

Tools & Templates

Easy Agile Plugin for Jira

Most Common Mistakes

Using the horizontal axis for prioritizing epics. (I.e. putting the most important epics on the left) ... Part of the magic of the User Story Board is that it forces a structural appreciation of the users journey (from left to right on the board) in engaging with the product.