What is:
Storyframing?
Design professionals are often surrounded by people from outside the field who are unfamiliar with methodologies and terms we use in our daily work. Based on this challenge, storyframing is a method that combines wireframes with storyboards. This makes design proposals with abstract wireframes more tangible for non-designers, while remaining simplified enough to understand the ideas.
Here is a brief outline of why I created Storyframing and how it can be useful to design professionals and their environment.
Species Diversity
Things look different from other side.
Our work environment is often characterized by stakeholders with a variety of different roles and disciplines. While an interdisciplinary team with different competences and perspectives is generally a good thing, it presents designers with the challenge of ensuring that everyone involved is talking about the same thing. Professionals from other disciplines are often not used to our way of thinking and the methods we use. Participants may have different levels of expertise, imagination, abstraction, interests, and different perspectives.
Storyframing is particularly useful for milestones and key presentations with non-design stakeholders to achieve a common understanding of the concepts before turning the proposals into final work.
Design
Management
Development
Management
Engineering
Development
Marketing
Product-Owner
Something in between
Storyframing fills the Gap between too abstract and too detailed.
While creating drawings in combination wireframes may seem like a time-consuming extra step in the design process, I found that the time I invested in creating the proposals saved me from unnecessary setbacks and discussions later in the process.
Everyone involved had the same understanding of the concept after a first loop with storyframing. Most of the questions that came up were about „what to execute“ rather than „how to execute“. This made the finalization of the concept much faster and smoother than usual.
Abstract
Detailed
Training the next generation of designers.
Storyframing is the subject of my lecture
as part of the Information Design program at the Hochschule der Medien, Stuttgart. The goal of the course is to prepare the students with a skill set for everyday use in the workplace, making it easier for them to present their prototypes to achieve common understanding within their environment.
In addition to building prototypes, students learn to train their analytical skills, write user stories, and create proposals for solving usability problems based on a real project. The outcome of the course is a important piece for the students design portfolio, where they have gone through the whole process from problem analysing to prototyping and present their work in a final presentation.
