Storyboards for Buy-In
Getting Buy-In with Storyboards
It's been a struggle to get people at Focus Brands to understand that importance of digital when it comes to a customer's experience with our brands. Executives know that digital "is a thing" but they don't really understand how our customers interact with it. This is a problem when it comes to (a) getting a budget and (b) developing a worthwhile customer experience in this modern era.
Storyboards are a great way to generate empathy, but making them artistic and fun helps bring in stakeholders to actually engage with the storyboard instead of filing it away. Kat Lee of Square had shown me a great example of using a story to generate empathy from stakeholders and across an entire company. This inspired me to do something similar at Focus Brands to try and get buy-in from executive stakeholders.
We used data recently collected from a research design project Georgia Tech HCI students had delivered to us. Taking that data, our interaction designer, Anna Stenstrom, created rough storylines that showed the customer's pain points, thought process, and the contexts in which they encounter our brands. This work was done in a collaborative tool called MindNode.
After building the stories (6 total), Anna created rough sketches. Although Anna was working on sketching for career development, we decided that the storyboards should be done by professional illustrators so we enlisted the help of our brands.
The brands have several graphic artists working for them so we convinced the brand of the importance of using this as tool for more PR around the office, but more importantly to get their higher ups to understand customers and the digital space. After a couple of meetings they jumped on board and gave us a resource.
The project was delayed several times and with turnover the project moved from artist to artist like a hot potato. Finally, the storyboard landed in the lap of Dominic Prestera, an incredible illustrator who loved the idea. It took him a few weeks because of other priorities, but once it was delivered it was incredible.
The plan is to take this one step further and print out large scale versions (4 ft wide) and post them on the walls around the office in high traffic areas. We also added a short description of the project along with the key findings for more context.
The prototype storyboard in the main entrance of the Focus Brands lobby.
Placing a poster near the restroom to grab as much attention as possible.