With storyboards, you can also chronologically convey each element, stage, or shot to visualize your project ideas.

Storyboards can help you visualize different projects, like sales pitches, animations, and movie storyboards. In this article, we’ll discuss UI storyboards, particularly, and give some storyboard examples from which you can take inspiration.

If you’re looking to get stuck into creating your first one already, we’ve made a step-by-step guide to storyboarding for that.

Use this menu to explore specific sections of the article:

1. What is a UI storyboard?
2. Types of UI storyboard
3. How do you make a UI storyboard?
4. Some tips for making a great storyboard
5. Four UI storyboard examples
6. Wrap-up

Let’s start with the basics.

1. What is a UI storyboard?

A UI storyboard is a visual representation of the user interface of your website or product. The storyboards make it easy to visualize user interaction with your product.

This simplifies your work as a UI designer because your visual user story gives you a clear idea of how to create your product. It also saves you time because you avoid the trial-and-error cycle in the product creation process.

If you want to learn more about them, we’ve created a full beginner’s guide to storyboards.

Besides this, there are other benefits of storyboarding, which include:

Identifying key design elements

By visualizing your user’s experience, you can overcome personal biases and prioritize the critical design elements that will solve the user’s pain points.

Helping you pay more attention to your product

With your design on paper or a digital storyboard, it is easy to note mistakes, problem areas, or gaps in your user story. It is also easy to note different scenes that make your storyboard clearer.

Boosting your creativity

Visual representation has also been proven to encourage creativity, especially since humans process visual art or data 60,000 times faster than we do text. As a result, you are more likely to develop a better product.

Ensuring a good presentation

Explaining your digital product ideas to your clients is easy, since they can see them on the storyboard. Again, this is way easier to comprehend than the text-only script.

2. Types of UI storyboard

You can use different storyboard styles to visualize your UI storyboard. Here are the three popular methods you should familiarize yourself with, as well as some storyboard examples to go with it:

Traditional storyboarding style

This is the most popular storyboarding method.

It was the storyboard style used for animated films like Mickey Mouse and other Walt Disney productions in the past, but it is used to date. The method consists of the drawing of rough sketches, as shown in this example:

Source: StoryboardThat

As you can see in this storyboard example, the creator uses stick-figure sketches. You can also see the character’s emotions. The captions make the design easy to understand.

Digital storyboarding style

This style of storyboarding is more modern and uses special storyboarding tools.

Digital storyboarding software allows you to start from a basic design, but you can also use pre-designed templates.

Then you can add more modern elements like a voiceover or motion, which is very common in UI storyboard examples.

Here’s one of these at work:

Source: Sara Eldebissy on Behance

This is a storyboard of the off-bucket app project.

The storyboard follows the main character, who gets a challenge idea and sends it to a friend. The friend receives the challenge, accepts it, and they both meet up to do the challenge. The whole thing is a great example of flat design at work.

Thumbnail storyboarding style

Much more old-school, these storyboards are done on paper.

However, unlike the traditional ones, these are not hyper-detailed storyboards. Here’s an excellent thumbnail storyboard example:

Source: Cheryl Platz on Medium

This specific storyboard is a rough sketch representing a multi-environment, connected-device scenario for Windows Automotive.

Most thumbnail UI storyboard examples are rougher sketches of traditional storyboards drawn in small sizes. They only take a maximum of two sheets of paper. You can use a thumbnail storyboard as a draft before you make a refined traditional storyboard.

Your choice of UI storyboard style is determined by your personal preference, a project’s need, or the client’s requirements.

3. How do you make a UI storyboard?

Before making your storyboard, ensure you have a project script and understand the user scenario you want to create.

That defines your entire storyboarding process and makes it easy to decide the type of storyboard to use.

Once you have that, you can get down to making your storyboard, which you can do by following these steps:

Segment your script

First, divide your story into different stages. That makes it easy to develop sequence ideas.

Use your script to get this step right, and add notes and scene ideas. The notes and ideas should be details that help you create a quality storyboard and product later. For instance, you could note website design best practices if you’re working on a website.

Create panels

Then for each stage, create panels that represent an individual shot or scene on a blank storyboard. They can either be rectangular or square. Here’s an excellent example of panels:

Source: G A R R on Behance

The specific panel style shown in the storyboard example above is rectangular. Also, note that the panels are separated by white spaces. This differentiates the panels and also makes the panels look neat.

Sketching

The next step is sketching your panels. How you do this depends on the UI storyboarding style you chose.

You don’t need to create complex sketches. As long as they represent your idea, you should be fine.

Also, remember the notes you made on your script earlier on? You can refer to them whenever you get stuck in this stage.

Arrange panels and add scene details

The final step is arranging your panels in chronological storyboard format and filling in the details for each scene. If you use the digital storyboard style, you can arrange panels on the storyboarding software, like in the following example:

Source: GraphicMama

But for the hand-drawn storyboard, you will have to pin your panels to a poster board.

Once you’ve arranged your scenes, you can add descriptive captions, titles, numbers, or other guiding details. If you are the design project lead, you could develop a style guide to help your team members master each project’s voice and tone.

Second opinions

When you’re done with your storyboard, share it with at least one other person and request feedback.

It could be a production team member or other colleagues. Then, you can modify your sketches or panels to match the input. If you were pitching to a client, you can present it to them afterward.

A good storyboard will result from the excellent execution of every step. That’s because, with storyboards, each step determines how well the next works out.

4. Some tips for making a great storyboard

Storyboarding is an engaging and rewarding process, but only if you do it right. To help you get it right, here are some of our best tips borrowed from various UI storyboard examples:

Fully understand and consider your user focus. Be clear on who your audience is, and adjust your tone, setting, and storyboard outlook to match this. That will make it easier to create good user scenarios.

Ensure your scenes are arranged chronologically. That prevents disjointed scenes and smooth transitions between shots and scenes. For instance, if you’re working on a storyboard with multiple characters, have scenes that explain how and why they need to be together.

This Heartline app storyboard is a great example. It explains how the characters are related through descriptive scenes and captions. There are also multiple close-up sketches that show more product details, making the story easy to follow.

Source: Chelsea Hostetter, Austin Center for Design on Miro

Next, ensure your storyboard is easy to understand. The best way to do this is by ensuring your sketches outline the problem and the solution your product is solving. For instance, say you are designing a plane booking platform.

You need to show the problem users are having with booking planes and how your product solves that. Also, use simple language for your scene details to make your storyboard more comprehensible.

Finally, invest in storyboarding software to streamline your process. You are also more likely to create a beautiful storyboard with the help of software because you have ready-made UI storyboard templates.

5. Four UI storyboard examples

So far, you already understand the UI storyboarding concept and what makes a good storyboard.

We’ve all overheard conversations, walking down hip streets of the world’s tech capitals, discussions about the great ‘UX’ of a product, or the poor ‘UI’ of a website. Is it a secret language you will never be privy to? Are these people just using slang to look cool?

Well, okay, probably yes to the latter, but a determinate NO to the rest. If you’re keen to learn what exactly UX and UI mean and how they differ, you’ve come to the right place. Below is a breakdown of what we’re going to cover in this article.

Read on to learn what the terms UX and UI even mean, which of the two areas of design are better paid, and how to become a UX designer or UI designer.

1. What are UX and UI in the first place?

First things first: What do UX and UI actually mean? The people you have eavesdropped on are actually discussing two professions that, despite having been around for decades, and in theory for centuries, have been defined by the tech industry as UX and UI design.

UX design refers to the term “user experience design”, while UI stands for “user interface design”. Both elements are crucial to a product and work closely together. But despite their professional relationship, the roles themselves are quite different, referring to very different aspects of the product development process and the design discipline.

Before we consider the key differences between UX and UI, let’s first define what each term means individually.

What is user experience (UX) design?

User experience design is a human-first way of designing products. Don Norman, a cognitive scientist and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group Design Consultancy, is credited with coining the term “user experience” in the late 1990s. Here’s how he describes it:

“User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

– Don Norman, Cognitive Scientist & User Experience Architect

Clear, right? Well you might note immediately that despite what I implied in the introduction, the definition has no reference to tech, no mention of digital, and doesn’t tell us all that much about what a UX designer actually does. But like all professions, it’s impossible to distill the process from just a few words.

Still, Don Norman’s definition tells us that, regardless of its medium plenty of non-digital UX (and there’s lots out there!) UX Design encompasses any and all interactions between a potential or active customer and a company.

As a scientific process it could be applied to anything; street lamps, cars, Ikea shelving, and so on.

UX and the digital world

However, despite being a scientific term, its use since inception has been almost entirely within digital fields; one reason for this being that the tech industry started blowing up around the time of the term’s invention.

You can learn all about the fascinating history of UX design in this article.

Essentially, UX applies to anything that can be experienced—be it a website, a coffee machine, or a visit to the supermarket. The “user experience” part refers to the interaction between the user and a product or service. User experience design, then, considers all the different elements that shape this experience.

What does UX design involve?

A UX designer thinks about how the experience makes the user feel, and how easy it is for the user to accomplish their desired tasks. They also observe and conduct task analyses to see how users actually complete tasks in a user flow.

For example: How easy is the checkout process when shopping online? How easy is it for you to grip that vegetable peeler? Does your online banking app make it easy for you to manage your money?

The ultimate purpose of UX design is to create easy, efficient, relevant, and all-round pleasant experiences for the user.

We’ll answer the question “What does a UX designer do?” more thoroughly in section four. For now, here’s what you need to know about UX design in a nutshell:

1. 1. • User experience design is the process of developing and improving the quality of interaction between a user and all facets of a company.
      • User experience design is, in theory, a non-digital (cognitive science) practice, but used and defined predominantly by digital industries.
      • UX design is NOT about visuals; it focuses on the overall feel of the experience.

What is user interface (UI) design?

Despite it being an older and more practiced field, the question “What is user interface design?” is difficult to answer because of its broad variety of misinterpretations.

While user experience is a conglomeration of tasks focused on the optimization of a product for effective and enjoyable use, user interface design is its complement; the look and feel, the presentation and interactivity of a product.

But like UX, it is easily and often confused by the industries that employ UI designers—to the extent that different job posts will often refer to the profession as completely different things.

If you look at job ads and job descriptions for user interface designers, you will mostly find interpretations of the profession that are akin to graphic design, sometimes extending also to branding design, and even frontend development.

If you look at “expert” definitions of User Interface Design, you will mostly find descriptions that are in part identical to User Experience Design—even referring to the same structural techniques.

So which one is right? The sad answer is: Neither.

UI and the digital world

So let’s set the record straight once and for all. Unlike UX, user interface design is a strictly digital term.

A user interface is the point of interaction between the user and a digital device or product—like the touchscreen on your smartphone, or the touchpad you use to select what kind of coffee you want from the coffee machine.

In relation to websites and apps, UI design considers the look, feel, and interactivity of the product. It’s all about making sure that the user interface of a product is as intuitive as possible, and that means carefully considering each and every visual, interactive element the user might encounter.

A UI designer will think about icons and buttons, typography and color schemes, spacing, imagery, and responsive design.