Storyboards are a series of frames showing the repeating blueprint or architecture of a topic.

They are used to develop a story in fields as diverse as filmmaking, website design, architecture and business strategy.

visual sequencing”.

Each frame refers to the thought structure that follows a distinct series of steps. Just like the horizontal frames of a cartoon, a series of steps leads to the destination.

While the fields that storyboarding is used in seem widely different, take a look at the similarities.

In film: the story, development, dialogue, plot, sequence, flow are all depicted with frames capturing each moment of development.

In architecture: the experience of space, light, orientation, balance and development of experience can be laid out. It’s a way to consciously plan and build the experience of people who will be using a man-made space.

This is often called way finding…and occurs not only in physical spaces but also in virtual spaces. Websites, web-media can use these principles from architectural way finding to build a user experience that is intuitive, and natural.

This has profound value when designing information for web development, software development and instructional media. The same storyboarding principles can easily be used to help plan the flow of information, navigation and user experience.

Finally, in business—storyboarding is used to display thinking. This is highly valuable for group problem solving, strategic planning and project management.

In all these areas, people are able to experiment. The creative, visual process allows a group to plan, think and brainstorm together. Ideas are placed on storyboards—and then the whole group has a chance to continue thinking, discussing, adding, changing, deleting and improving.

The process encourages group to talk, engage, discuss and create together. The final outcome is one that everyone helps create. This generates an entirely deeper level of buy-in and commitment to the final decisions.

And that is one of the profound benefits of storyboarding to manage a project, design a solution and support results-driven innovation.

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