Chapter 13. Storyboarding

Key Points

• The purpose of storyboarding is to elicit early "Yes, But" reactions .

• Storyboards can be passive, active, or interactive.

• Storyboards identify the players, explain what happens to them, and describe how it happens.

• Make the storyboard sketchy, easy to modify, and not shippable.

• Storyboard early and often on each project with new or innovative content.

Perhaps no requirements elicitation technique has been subject to as many interpretations as has "storyboarding." Nonetheless, most of these interpretations agree that the purpose of storyboarding is to gain an early reaction from the users on the concepts proposed for the application. In so doing, storyboards offer an effective technique for addressing the "Yes, But" syndrome. With storyboarding, the user 's reaction can be observed very early in the lifecycle, well before concepts are committed to code and, in many cases, even before requirements are developed. Human factors experts have told us for years that the power of storyboards should not be underestimated. Indeed, the movie industry has used the technique since the first flickers on the silver screen.

Effective storyboarding applies tools that are both inexpensive and easy to work with. Storyboarding

• Is extremely inexpensive

• Is user friendly, informal, and interactive

• Provides an early review of the user interfaces of the system

• Is easy to create and easy to modify

Storyboards also offer an excellent way to ease the "blank-page" syndrome. When the users do not know what they want or have trouble envisioning any solution to the current problem, even a poor storyboard is likely to elicit a response of "No, that's not what we meant , it's more like the following," and the game is on.

Storyboards can help speed the conceptual development of many different facets of an application. Storyboards can be used to understand data visualization, to define and understand business rules that will be implemented in a new business application, to define algorithms and other mathematical constructs that are to be executed inside an embedded system, or to demonstrate reports and other hard-copy outputs for early review. Indeed, storyboards can and should be used for virtually any type of application in which early user and stakeholder feedback could be a key success factor.