By Wednesday afternoon, you’ll be able to feel Friday’s test with customers looming ahead. Because of the short timeline, it’s tempting to jump into prototyping as soon as you’ve selected your winning ideas. But if you start prototyping without a plan, you’ll get bogged down by small, unanswered questions. Pieces won’t fit together, and your prototype could fall apart.
On Wednesday afternoon, you’ll answer those small questions and make a plan. Specifically, you’ll take the winning sketches and string them together into a storyboard. This will be similar to the three-panel storyboards you sketched on Tuesday, but it will be longer: about ten to fifteen panels, all tightly connected into one cohesive story.
This kind of long-form storyboarding is a common practice in movie production. Pixar, the film studio behind movies like Toy Story and The Incredibles, spends months getting their storyboards right before committing to animation. For Pixar, the up-front effort makes sense: It’s much easier to change storyboards than to re-render animation or re-record voice tracks with super-famous actors.
Sprints have a shorter timeline and smaller scale than a Pixar production. But storyboarding is still worthwhile. You’ll use your storyboard to imagine your finished prototype, so you can spot problems and points of confusion before the prototype is built. By taking care of those decisions up front, you’ll be free to focus on Thursday.
Slack’s storyboard showed how their prototype would work, following the customers as they read about the two products (Slack and Gather) in a news article, then clicked through to the websites, and, hopefully, signed up for the service.
At a glance, this storyboard might look like the world’s most boring (and poorly drawn) comic strip. But for the Slack team, it was a masterpiece. The storyboard contained all of our best ideas, stuck together in a story we could all understand, and we hoped it would make sense to customers, too. When we looked at the whiteboard, we saw this:
When you’re finished, your storyboard will make just as much sense to your team as Slack’s storyboard did to them. Next, we’ll dive right in and talk about how to make one, and as we go, we’ll show you how Slack put theirs together.
First of all, somebody needs to be the storyboard “artist.” We put the word “artist” in quotes because the job doesn’t require artistic talent. In this case, the “artist” is just someone willing to write on the whiteboard a lot. (It might be another good time to give the Facilitator a break.)
First, you need a big grid with around fifteen frames. Draw a bunch of boxes on an empty whiteboard, each about the size of two sheets of paper. If you have a hard time drawing long straight lines (and who doesn’t), use masking tape instead of a marker.
You’ll start drawing your storyboard in the top left box of the grid. This frame will be the first moment that customers experience on Friday. So . . . what should it be? What’s the best opening scene for your prototype?
If you get it right, the opening scene will boost the quality of your test. The right context can help customers forget they’re trying a prototype and react to your product in a natural way—just as if they had come across it on their own. If you’re prototyping an app, start in the App Store. If you’re prototyping a new cereal box, start on a grocery shelf. And if you’re prototyping business communication software?
In real life, Slack was getting lots of great press. Many of their new customers discovered the service by reading an article about it. So Merci suggested we use a fake New York Times article for our opening scene. The article could be about “new trends in office software”—giving us the perfect opportunity to introduce our two prototypes, Slack and Gather. Here’s how we drew it on the storyboard:
The fake news article is a useful opening scene. We used the same method in our sprint with Blue Bottle, when we opened with a (fake) New York Times article about three (fake) up-and-coming coffee companies.
But there are lots of ways to open your storyboard. Flatiron Health wondered if existing users of their software would change their workflow for a new clinical-trial tool. A news article wouldn’t have made much sense. Instead, Flatiron’s opening scene was an email inbox—the place research coordinators would receive notifications from the new system. For Savioke, the opening scene was checking in to a hotel and forgetting a toothbrush. The trick is to take one or two steps upstream from the beginning of the actual solution you want to test.
How do customers find out your company exists? Where are they and what are they doing just before they use your product? Our favorite opening scenes are simple:
• Web search with your website nestled among the results
• Magazine with an advertisement for your service
• Store shelf with your product sitting beside its competitors
• App Store with your app in it
• News article that mentions your service, and possibly some competitors
• Facebook or Twitter feed with your product shared among the other posts
There are other possible opening scenes. Your prototype might begin with an everyday routine: a doctor’s folder of paper reports, an engineer’s email inbox, or a teacher’s classroom newsletter. If you’re testing a new kind of store, you might start the moment people enter the front door.
It’s almost always a good idea to present your solution alongside the competition. As a matter of fact, you can ask customers to test out your competitors’ products on Friday right alongside your own prototype.
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Once you choose an opening scene, you only have nine hundred more decisions to make before you’re done with your storyboard. Just kidding . . . kind of.
Storyboarding is a simple process, with a ton of tiny decisions along the way. Those tiny decisions can be tiring, but remember—you’re doing your future self a favor. Every decision you make now is something you won’t have to think about when you build your prototypes.
Once you’ve selected an opening scene, the storyboard “artist” should draw it in the first frame (the “artist” will be standing at the whiteboard while everyone else gathers around). From there, you’ll build out your story, one frame at a time, just like a comic book. As you go, you’ll discuss each step as a team.
Whenever possible, use the sticky notes from your winning sketches and stick them onto the whiteboard. When you come to a gap—a step in the story not already illustrated by one of the solution sketches—don’t fill it in unless it’s critical to testing your idea. It’s okay if some parts of your prototype don’t work. You can have buttons that don’t function and menu items that are unavailable. Surprisingly, these “dead ends” are generally easy for customers to ignore in Friday’s test.
If you decide the gap does need to be filled, try to use something from your “maybe-later” sketches, or from your existing product. Avoid inventing a new solution on the spot. Coming up with ideas on Wednesday afternoon isn’t a good use of time or effort. You will have to do some drawing, of course: filling in gaps when necessary and expanding on the winning sketches so that your prototype will be a believable story. Remember that the drawing doesn’t have to be fancy. If the scene happens on screen, draw buttons and words and a little arrow clicking. If the scene happens in real life, draw stick figures and speech bubbles.
Making your storyboard will likely take up the entire afternoon. To make sure you finish by 5 p.m., follow these guidelines:
Work with what you have.
Resist inventing new ideas and just work with the good ideas you already came up with.
Don’t write together.
Your storyboard should include rough headlines and important phrases, but don’t try to perfect your writing as a group. Group copywriting is a recipe for bland, meandering junk, not to mention lots of wasted time. Instead, use the writing from your solution sketches, or just leave it until Thursday.
Include just enough detail.
Put enough detail in your storyboard so that nobody has to ask questions like “What happens next?” or “What goes here?” when they are prototyping on Thursday. But don’t get too specific. You don’t need to perfect every frame or figure out every nuance. It’s okay to say: “Whoever builds this tomorrow can decide that detail.” And then move on.
The Decider decides.
Storyboarding is difficult because you already spent a lot of your limited decision-making energy in the morning. To make it easier, continue to rely on the Decider. In the Slack sprint, Braden was the “artist” drawing the storyboard, but Merci made the decisions. It was extra work for her, but it kept us fast and opinionated.
You won’t be able to fit in every good idea and still have a storyboard that makes sense. And you can’t spend all day arguing about what to include. The Decider can ask for advice or defer to experts for some parts—but don’t dissolve back into a democracy.
When in doubt, take risks.
Sometimes you can’t fit everything in. Remember that the sprint is great for testing risky solutions that might have a huge payoff. So you’ll have to reverse the way you would normally prioritize. If a small fix is so good and low-risk that you’re already planning to build it next week, then seeing it in a prototype won’t teach you much. Skip those easy wins in favor of big, bold bets.
Detail from Savioke’s storyboard, showing the robot delivery at the guest’s door.
Keep the story fifteen minutes or less.
Make sure the whole prototype can be tested in about fifteen minutes. That might seem short, especially since your customer interviews will be sixty minutes long. But you’ll have to allow time for your customers to think aloud and answer your questions—not to mention starting up the interview at the beginning and winding it down at the end. Fifteen minutes will take longer than fifteen minutes. And there’s another, practical reason for this limit. Sticking to fifteen minutes will ensure that you focus on the most important solutions—and don’t bite off more than you can prototype. (A rule of thumb: Each storyboard frame equals about one minute in your test.)
Once you’ve incorporated all of the winning sketches, the storyboard will be complete. And you’ve finished with the hardest part of the sprint. The decisions are made, the plan for your prototype is ready, and Wednesday is a wrap.
