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Winter 2008 |
Volume 48, Number 2 |
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Storyboarding Multimedia and E-learning
According to Wikipedia, Walt Disney Studios created the first storyboards in the early 1930s, for the animated short The Three Little Pigs. Since then, storyboarding has been used to design movies, websites, software applications, and even—with a nod to fellow STC RMC senior member Al Kemp—white papers. This article concentrates on storyboarding for multimedia CBT, or e-learning. In this context, storyboarding tends to be more sequential than storyboarding for websites or software applications. Where the latter form of storyboard emphasizes visual layout, branching, and hierarchy, multimedia storyboards depict images, motion, audio, data, and mouse and keyboard action simultaneously. Why storyboard?The goal of a good storyboard is to represent abstract concepts such as flow, structure, and emphasis in non-linear media in a linear document. An effective storyboard conveys the content you plan to cover, and your approach to covering it, so it can easily be understood by the diverse group of people who will use it:
The storyboard gives the reviewer a reading experience as close as possible to the actual dynamic multimedia experience—the sights, sounds, movement, interactions, and general learning approach—on a static piece of paper. A simple storyboardFigure 1 shows a storyboard page for a CBT Marc wrote about air pollution. Plenty of off-the-shelf storyboarding tools exist, but this example was developed in Microsoft Word. While not a favorite of technical communicators, Word, through its table feature, does an adequate job. For this example Marc set up the document in landscape layout to resemble a typical computer screen, and then simply copied and pasted a blank form into each new page of the document. Using Autotext entries can make this process even more efficient. In this example, each page represents one “screen” in the CBT, and each Word file covers one module (1-2 hours of e-learning). We generally try to keep a single Word file to 100 screens or less. If your training is graphically intensive, the files may become too big to email. In this case, you can distribute them through a website, project wiki, or FTP site—or just divide your training into smaller chunks. The template includes the following regions:
Some Closing Tips
Developing a storyboard before jumping full-speed into development is an investment of time that will pay off, by giving your clients, SMEs, and developers a clear idea of what you plan to do… before you do it! About the authorsMarc Lee has 10 years of experience developing CBT for government agencies and private businesses. For projects that required storyboarding, the template shown above has successfully conveyed his instructional approach and gained approval for the next phase. John Endicott has used storyboards to create training for a diverse spectrum of clients, including New York Life, the NASD, and Hewlett Packard. He takes an iterative approach to the technique, working closely with developers to fine-tune a generic format until it meets the needs of the project at hand. Please feel free to contact the authors if you have questions about this technique and how it might apply to your own job. Marc Lee
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Just as no builder would dream of breaking ground on a skyscraper without a detailed blueprint, a technical communicator preparing an online training course needs to plan what it will cover. A common medium for that plan is a storyboard. In this article, we introduce the concept of storyboarding, describe its goals, show an example storyboard template, and describe some best practices for storyboarding.
