Nuts and Bolts: Storyboarding Basics

Careful planning is a key to making dynamic and effectiveinteractive courses. Storyboarding and creating mockups of your program willhelp you organize your thoughts and ensure that your ideas flow logically,without gaps or overkill. But storyboarding has many other benefits as well.

It will help manage costs and expectations, and it will ensurethat client specifications are met. It’s also a quick, inexpensive way to testdrive and experiment with your ideas. Furthermore, one of the biggest flaws ineLearning is click-along linear navigation. Storyboarding can help overcomethat by providing a good way to lay out and visualize branching decision makingand simulations, showing consequences of actions. 

How?

While you can storyboard in a number of ways, even bysketching on a sheet of paper, I tend to prefer PowerPoint as a storyboardingtool. Using the slide sorter view gives me a “bird’s eye view” so I can see thewhole program at once, not just a screen at a time. This helps me notice that sixconsecutive screens are text heavy, or there are no opportunities forinteraction for a long while. 

Using the “Notes” format (click “View,” then “Notes Page”)gives me room below each slide for capturing ideas about navigation, multimedia,and narration, and space for providing guidelines for developers or graphicartists. Additionally, I frequently print the screens out, tape them to a wall,and live with them for a few days. Often something new will pop out at me – sometimesa problem, but more often, some better idea.

Other ways?

PowerPoint is my preferred tool, but it’s not the only oneout there. I know some designers who like to use Word in landscape mode, witheach page representing a screen. Others use commercial storyboarding tools.Depending on the authoring tool, you might be able to begin storyboardinginside that. I have a colleague whose work is more team-based than most ofmine, and she prefers to distribute large Post-it Notes and have the team workthat way. Colors can help to differentiate contributions from different people,indicate different modules, or denote different elements. A friend loves towork with markers on his office wall (he covered the wall with whiteboard paint,available from https://www.ideapaint.com/), while another uses a freestandingsheet of thick glass mounted in a frame so team members can work on both sidesat once. Other colleagues swear by iPad apps like Autodesk SketchBook Pro. Stillothers prefer to work in text-only; this means using a table format, but I havetrouble visualizing a program without some, well, visuals, even just simplesketches and stick figures.

Think of storyboarding as an investment

An effective eLearning program grows out of careful identificationof learners, articulation of performanceobjectives (learning objectives are for the designer; performance objectivesare for the learner and organization), and an approach that supports theinstructional goals. While it’s tempting, especially when working with a toollike PowerPoint, to just open a new slide show and start adding content, thetime spent in specifying outcomes and identifying ways of supporting learnersuccess and ultimate workplace performance will pay off in ease of developmentand reduction of rework and piloting time. 

If you are working to transform an existing classroom programto an online format, this phase of development is a good  time to examine what’s working – or not – withthe classroom sessions, and ensure that the new program provides opportunitiesfor learning, rather than just parroting the content of the classroom program. Beingmindful of the principles of good instruction, and especially the newconsiderations of multimedia that eLearning demands, will help to ensure thesuccess of your program.

Want more?

In most cases, choices about how to go about storyboardingare a combination of designer preferences and stakeholder needs. Examples ofseveral storyboard types can be found at https://flirtingwelearning.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/15-elearning-storyboard-templates/

(Some material adapted from Bozarth, J. (2008). Better than Bullet Points: Creating EngagingeLearning with PowerPoint. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.)