Storyboards and their impact on Mobile App Development

Storyboard is an important tool to effectively deliver your ideas in a visual form, especially for mobile app development projects. It is a linear sequence of drawings and illustrations, arrayed together for representing the shots/ideas of the final product or to visualize a story. It allows the developers and engineers to step into the shoes of a user and to have an idea about the usage of that application. It also helps customers to get a feedback on the engineers understanding of task at hand.

The concept of storyboarding has long been used for screenplays to depict sequence of a particular scene and how the actors will be expressing their emotions in that particular scene.

Storyboarding helps you to analyse major goals and guides you through the development process. It is a powerful approach to design visual representations of business process and how it will map on the mobile screens. It also capture screen transitions, and how transitions between screens are going to work.

You do not have to be a great in drawing or illustrations this isn’t right. All you have to be is a good and effective communicator who can share his ideas and imaginations visually. Simple stick figure diagrams are good enough.

Scenes, Transitions and User Experience

A storyboard is a composition of two major things- a scene and a segue. The individual screen is called a scene whereas transitions between screens are segues which represent how a user will navigate between screens. It is these scenes and segues which helps the engineers to build the User Experience desired out of an app.

Clarity, authenticity, simplicity, and empathy are the key features of a good storyboard. Here are a few benefits that story-boarding bring to mobile app development:

• An approach that is totally human-centered and humans become the heart of the app development process
• It helps Developers and engineers to understand the various scenario of a user’s experience. Story-boarding forces them to think about user flows in the application which they might miss otherwise
• Story-boarding also reveals your prioritization, This can help you save money and time both
• Critiques at this stage from the team and the client are easy to handle and set the correct tone and direction for the project
• Story-boarding is based on iterative approach and designers can now test multiple design concepts and come up with a unique solution
• With a compelling and unique storyboard depicting how your product is a solution for a specific problem/need, you are more likely to address your ideas effectively
• It can be of great help through design sprints and design hackathons

Essentially storyboards are a source of communicating with the stakeholders. Do share your thoughts and experience too on this topic that might help anyone.