Benefits of storyboarding

- [Instructor] If you're doing all of the design, illustration, and programming work yourself, or if you're working with a team of producers and developers, a storyboard will help you outline and strategize your ideas. It'll also help your stakeholders and partner subject-matter experts on any project understand and review the project's goals and a direction. The management consultant and author of Innovate the Pixar Way, Bill Capodagli, had described storyboarding as an idea landscape, one that can help unleash creativity, improve communication, and identify practical solutions to complex problems. He said the beauty of storyboarding is that ideas from an entire team are harnessed. I love this quote. It says it perfectly. It's all about getting your ideas down on paper, finding creative solutions to help people learn, and gathering feedback and input from your team. That's what this course is all about. Storyboards help us be better communicators. At any part of the project you can reference the storyboard for stakeholder or subject-matter expert approval. One of the most important aspects of the storyboarding process on any project is that you and your team can identify errors and keep a project from going off track at an early stage. Storyboards reduce scope creep. Scope creep occurs when a project grows in a continuous, seemingly uncontrolled pattern. This has happened to all of us, right? This is happening on your projects, reference the storyboard as a way to discuss bringing the project back to a manageable place. Storyboards reveal if a concept works, and they help a designer think through complex interactions and animations. Developing a storyboard can also help your employer, client, or any team member on a project identify if additional budget or resources are needed. It's also a way to visually share your vision for an elearning experience. Keep this in mind. Your brain processes visuals 60 times faster than it does text. Think about that for a second. People are wired to process visuals. It's in our nature. To help illustrate this, let me show you a quick example. Here's a description. There are 24 dots, six in a row and four in a column. The dot in the middle-right section is different than the rest. Here's the visual. Better, right? Visuals help us see and nail home the point in a way that's stickier than text. We should always be thinking about showing versus telling in elearning design and in our storyboards. Think of your storyboard like a blueprint to assure that custom learning design and development stays on track and on budget. So storyboarding is your visual analysis of an elearning project. It's a time to iron out many of the initial issues before they become big problems when you go into development. They'll make your design and development process more efficient, and they can not only help illustrate your ideas but also deliver engaging and visually rich elearning experiences to your audience.