Database Reference
In-Depth Information
theworldwhichtheycanuseas-isorrevise fortheirownpurposes.Experienced teams use
them to think about what they will add to push the envelope, guided by the Cool Design
principles.
5.2 STORYBOARDING
Storyboards help the team work out how specific user activities and situations will be
handled by the new design. They sketch the sequence of events as a story, drawing each
step to show users, screens, and their interactions on each platform. A storyboard ensures
that the work and life of the user are supported by the new product. Storyboards work
through different cases, tasks, and situations to define how the new design will support
them. They work much like storyboards for a movie, which show what happens in each
scene without going into too much detail about any scene. It's easy to break the users' ex-
istingpracticebyjumpingfromthebignewideatolow-leveluserinterfaceandimplement-
ation design without con-sidering the impact it has on the flow of the user's activities. As
soon as designers start focusing on technology, technology and its problems become their
central design concern. Storyboards work against this tendency.
Storyboardsalsolimitthelevelofdetailatthispointinthedesignprocess.Astoryboard
cell can only hold so much; a drawing of a UI within a cell can only describe so much de-
tail.Thepreliminaryinteractionpatternssuggeststructureandfunctionwithoutpushingthe
team into too much detail. All this helps keep designers from diving down into the small
detailsoftheirdesignbeforetheoverallproductstructurehasbeensettled.Especiallywhen
a design addresses multiple platforms, the team needs to see the overall coherence of the
activity as it moves across time, place, and platform before being caught up in the many
details of each platform's UI.
Figure 5.3:
A storyboard working out the steps of one interaction with the system. The story is fed by the
consolidated Sequence models and by the vision. Elements of the screens drawn in storyboard cells are sug-
gested by the initial interaction design patterns.
Storyboards encourage the team to use story thinking, designing the whole flow of life
to show how the user will move through time and place to get their activities done. Then,
