Storytelling in Design

Chapter 8. Storyboarding for Product Design

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Storyboarding for Product Design

One Document to Capture It All

Over the last few years as I’ve been coaching and mentoring teams on UX-related matters, one of the UX tools that I’ve been the strongest advocate of is experience maps. Experience maps, also called customer experience maps, visualize and capture the full end-to-end experience that a user goes through in order to complete a goal.

The benefit of an experience map is that the process of working through one, and the finished result, help you understand the full end-to-end experience and force you to think beyond the page or view that you’re working on. Experience maps are also about more than what happens on the screen. They cover the offline aspects and, if done well, show how everything is intricately linked and how a change on one end will impact something somewhere else. The more the products are services we design need to work on any device used anywhere and at any time, the more we need to be able to dip into a specific point in a user’s journey and understand what matters then and there. This is another thing that experience maps are really great for.

One of the most, if not the most, famous experience map is the Rail Europe Experience Map, which was developed as one part of an overall diagnostic evaluation for Rail Europe, Inc (Figure 8-1). The company wanted to get a better understanding of its customer’s journeys across all touch points in order to define ...