Storyboarding for AI-driven Products - Part 2: How to Draw Components of the Storyboard

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the importance of the storyboard and why it’s superior to a mere list of requirements for designing AI-driven products. In this article (Part 2 of the series), we review the storyboard's components and best practices for drawing them.

Creating a storyboard for your AI project is meant to be simple. However, like many other “simple” things, a storyboard, while not complicated, is actually fairly sophisticated.  I dedicated the entire Part 2 of my fourth book, “$1 Prototype” (https://a.co/d/96rMq0R), to explaining the process in detail and giving many fine examples from real-life applications. For the purposes of this article, I will provide a quick review of the material in my $1 Prototype book and focus on the specific adjustments you need to make to your storyboards to make them work best for AI projects.

As an example, let’s use the new storyboard for the “Mood Tracker” mobile app that we created in Part 1:

A typical storyboard is made up of five components:

1. Establishing shot

2. Things

3. People

4. Faces

5. Transitions (which we’ll cover in the next installment)

6. Conclusion (aka “The Money Shot”)

Let’s review each of these components.

Establishing Shot

The establishing shot is your openning slide – it is the way you set the scene and place the protagonist and the reader into the environment where the story happens. It’s always worth spening just a bit more time on this first panel. In fact, if you are stuck on drawing your storyboard, my advice is to simply focus on the establishing shot and spend as much time as you need to really immerse yourself into the situation. You will naturally move on to the next panel when you are ready. 

 In our “Mood Tracker” storyboard, we open the story at the Cafe du Nerd:

Here are a few more of the examples of the establishing shot:

Things

Things include inanimate objects in your storyboard: buildings, furniture, gadgets, etc. Things are not hard to draw — if you can draw a box and a circle, you can draw almost any gadget known to man:

Take a moment to practice and see if you draw a computer and a phone. (And if you really want a challenge, try drawing a bicycle – it’s harder than it looks!)

People

People are important. People and their actions are what make the storyboard go. However, they are kind of a pain to draw for most folks, even if you’ve been specially trained in figure drawing.

That is why I highly recommend drawing stick-figure people. Stick figures are easy and fast and do not interfere with the meaning in any way. In fact, they often make it easier for the reader to put themselves into the story’s action. As discussed in Part 1, Quality is a double-edged sword.

If you want to get fancier with person drawings, you can try the box or starfish variations shown below:

Starfish, in particular, is easy and fun to draw and has become a perennial favorite of sketch note artists working live with large poster boards. When drawing in starfish style, keep your hand loose and make wide sweeping strokes. Add the head at the very end. With a bit of practice, you should be able to duplicate a variety of dynamic business-relevant poses. Whatever style you choose comes down to personal preference. Any embellishments are strictly optional: if you prefer to, ahem, stick to basic stick figures, they work just fine.

Faces

After people, one of the hardest things to draw is facial expressions. An excellent tip from Ken Cheng’s book, “See What I Mean” (https://a.co/d/hlazeCI), is to add eyebrows to your stick-figure faces. Eyebrows help quickly and easily distinguish between subtle variations of expressions such as surprise-good vs. surprise-bad and satisfied vs. indifferent:

Conclusion (aka “The Money Shot”)

Arguably, the most important panel is the last one: the Conclusion. The conclusion is where the Hero/Heroine rides into the sunset with the Girl (or a Couch) of their dreams. The conclusion is also where the projected benefit of the AI-driven solution is revealed so the reader can evaluate if the story “holds together” and is likely to produce the desired outcome. Recall the initial incarnation of the “Mood Ring” app in Part 1 and how the rest of the class (acting as project stakeholders) felt that the “I feel better” outcome pictured in the Conclusion did not really follow from the rest of the story:

 In contrast, in our later version of the “Mood Ring” story, the “payoff” of two people finding a romantic connection after striking up a casual conversation in a coffee shop fits in well with a standard modern liberal democratic Western narrative of how a heterosexual couple is supposed to hit it off:

Note that this scenario so familiar to us might look quite foreign to people from other cultures, as “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari (https://a.co/d/h3sRWYC) points out so eloquently. In your storyboard, be sure to carefully consider the culture and people you are designing for (see our earlier article “WMD (White Male Default) Bias in AI” https://www.uxforai.com/p/wmd-white-male-default-bias-ai)

One of my favorite examples showcasing the importance of dialing the appropriate “Natural Bang” in the Conclusion panel is a storyboard I once made for an online Bill Pay company. The Product Manager insisted that the Conclusion panel be the protagonist “overjoyed beyond measure and dancing a jig” after he paid his bills online. 

I disagreed. 

I told him that it’s much more realistic that the hero of our story is “simply satisfied with how our online service reduced the hassle of bill paying,” so “now he has time to go outside and play frisbee with his dog” – a much more realistic scenario. The rest of the team approved. To my utter astonishment, the ad for the new bill pay service featured the protagonist smiling and nodding at the computer, with the camera next showing him outside throwing a frisbee to his dog.

If you found this article useful, here are some next steps:

1. Please vote for my UX for AI workshop at the next SXSW: https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/151357 

2. Attend my next UX for AI workshop at UXStrat Boulder, CO, on September 9th to practice drawing storyboards and doing other exercises, such as Digital Twin, which is essential for success on your next AI project. Register here: https://strat.events/usa/tickets 

3. Look for Part 3 and Part 4 of this series coming later this week.

Thank you for reading!

Greg

P.S. Our fabulous full-day workshop coming up on September 9th, 2024, at UXStrat in Boulder WILL sell out like our previous workshops at UXStrat 2023, UX Copenhagen, UXLx in Lisbon, and Rosenfeld Media workshop online. If you found this article useful, don’t miss out on key learnings you will need in your next project and get your ticket now: https://strat.events/usa/tickets 

P.P.S. And please remember to vote for my session at SXSW: https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/151357. Thank you!