Planning the design and production of your products is essential for any manufacturing business. There are many tools to help you sneak a peek at how customers will react to your upcoming products and help you create a business plan that will ensure the highest sales. One such way is storyboarding.
A storyboard can help you predict the outcome of your product. It'll help you visualise the users' experience with the product. A decent storyboard will also tell you how your client base will interact with your product or offered services.
Despite its usefulness, a storyboard is an underutilised tool in the industry. But with the help of this complete guide to industrial design storyboarding, you might be able to revolutionise your whole business process.
What Is A Storyboard?
Storyboarding is a revolutionary technique that has existed in many industries for visualising projects. In fact, Alfred Hitchcock used to use storyboards to precisely plan out his films. And he used to do it with precision. Everyone has their method to conduct an operation. So, storyboards mean something different to each individual.
However, there's a general definition for storyboards. It's basically a visual representation of the phases of your product or service. Storyboards are there to help you plan out the process of designing and manufacturing your products. Any industrial design storyboard depicts how your customers will react to your product and how they'll interact with it through a series of ordered drawings.
While the process is widely popular amongst filmmakers and animators due to its ability to pre-visualise an interactive media sequence, it has its place in different industries. The word itself comes from the idea of pinning down separate images describing a story on the board. That way, you don't have to change the whole thing but just modify a single image to alter the productions developed.
How Storyboards Help In Product Design
Disney first developed the process of storyboarding back in the 1930s. Back then, storyboarding was a process used only in the film and television industry. Its popularity in that particular industry was thanks to its ability to communicate the scenes, shots, camera movements, and the entire plot with the whole team.
But now, various other industries are slowly opening up to the idea of storyboarding to ensure a better production phase. Especially in manufacturing, storyboarding has become quite popular.
With the advanced UX storyboard, a manufacturer can visually explore the user experience. The storyboard will depict how the general populace will react and interact with the service or product. It can also show the manufacturer what the customers expect from the said product.
Finally, the UX storyboard will help the seller understand the buyer's motivations behind purchasing that particular product.
The Benefits of Storyboarding
As any experienced business owner, you would like to know what benefits you can gain from using a storyboard. While there's a long list of perks that storyboards have to offer, here are some of the most important ones.
Visual Benefits
If you present your plan through images, anyone would better understand it compared to when you try to make them know it through words alone. Using only words to describe your project can be pretty inefficient and hard to understand.
But storyboards can solve that issue. No matter what your plans are: your actual product, its specialty, functions - every type of information, you can better express it with pictures. And others would no longer have to visualise all that information in their head because the storyboard will do it for them.
Better Insights of Stakeholders
The best thing about storyboarding is that it puts everything into perspective. It'll hold up the entire picture of your project, the ins, and outs of it in clear sight.
This will let the stakeholders have a clear view of what they're investing in. The stakeholder will be completely aware of how the project will go, the selling points of said project, and how the customers will react to it.
This will also benefit your planning phase. Seeing how the product will be will allow you to create an effective manufacturing process that will reduce cost and increase efficiency.
Improved Team Collaboration
If a company is a machine then its employees are the cogs. All of them have to work together in harmony for the highest possible efficiency. But, without properly explaining their tasks for individual projects, that can be difficult to achieve. With storyboarding, your employees will have both written and visual instructions to guide them through their tasks.
You can simply show them the storyboard, and understand their part in the process with ease. It's even scientifically proven that people understand instructions better when they receive visual, verbal and written instructions at the same time.
Quicker Creation Phase
Storyboards help you put down specific and realistic timelines for every one of your project's checkpoints. You can consider each picture as a checkpoint and see what type of work you've to do.
After you've seen what exactly you've got to do, you can make an educated decision of whether you'll be able to finish the project within the timeline or not. Moreover, the client will be able to stay in the loop by going over the general outlines of your project.
When to Use A Storyboard In Industrial Designing?
If you're still skeptical about using storyboards in the industrial product design process, you might want to know when to use your storyboard. Some may even ask if this creative process will help suit their products.
Well, we're here with the answers to all of your questions about when to use a storyboard.
During the Building Phase
A UX storyboard will show how a developing or an existing product will do in the market. It shows their necessity, their implantation in the user's daily lives.
Moreover, it'll also show how your client base will interact with the product you bring out. Finally, this designing tool will show the stakeholders and the creators precisely what's so special or boring about their product.
When Discovering A New Product
When working on a completely unknown and new product, a storyboard can come in handy. It can summarise and explain the whole big picture in front of you and show you what benefits your clients the most and what problems they may face or are facing.
A storyboard can help you in understanding what you're working on and building the product with ease.
With a storyboard, you can use it to keep yourself updated as to the ins and outs of that particular industry. It'll help you keep track of the preceding products' problems and their success. That way, you can keep track of what your customers expect and what you need to give them.
Final Words
Efficiency is a huge factor in succeeding in any industry. The manufacturers usually do everything that they can to gain maximum efficiency. But for that visualizing how their products will function, and their design is a must.
And it can be done with storyboarding. We at Pro Dev provide such services. With our 3D CAD virtual models, you can create a visual representation of your ideas. We even use 3D printing technology to create prototypes for a better understanding of how your customers will interact with your product. So, Contact Us now to learn more about how we can help visualise your projects.
