How to draw UX Storyboards

CHEAT SHEET

What is a UX Storyboard?

UX in comic book form Show the customer’s world What storyboards can do for you
A UX storyboard tells the story of a Unlike screen mockups, UX storyboards Clarify vision with stakeholders.
particular person using your product, show the customer’s world, not just
Visualize customer behavior patterns.
in the form of a comic strip. what’s on the screen.
Test the end-to-end user experience.

UX STORYBOARD CHEATSHEET gamethinking.io 1

 How to create a UX storyboard
A woman with short black hair,
wearing a beanie, wants to get out of
the house.
She opens her phone and decides
to try to find a geocache in a nearby
park.
Following a hint, she looks for the
geocache behind a tree...
And finds it! She logs her find on her
phone and goes home, satisfied.

Pick a person, place, time Tell the story in words Add simple illustrations
Start by imagining a typical customer Before you draw anything, write out the Add illustrations & captions. Keep the
using your product in a typical setting. story in words. Describe the character art style simple. Stick figures are fine
Get specific. and the setting. as long as the meaning is clear.

Place them in a situation that gives Write a short paragraph describing Zoom in or out to focus on what
them a reason to use your product. each key moment of the action. These matters. If the exact text is not
And pick a time period to illustrate. will be the frames of your storyboard. important, show it as squiggly lines.

UX STORYBOARD CHEATSHEET gamethinking.io 2

 Drawing storyboards with AI
How are you
feeling now?
A little better.
Thanks.
Stick figure art
by Cherstva,
available only
on the Canva
CANVA Premium Plan.

Art by an
illustrator that
I hired through
BING Upwork.
I asked for an
PROMPT: Simple black and white line Add speech balloons and other extra art style with
drawing of a patient lying in a hospital elements by hand, since they are hard UPWORK sketchy lines.
bed, with two nurses. to generate by AI.

Not an artist? Let AI help Do the hard parts by hand Or use other art resources
AI art tools like Bing Image Creator AI doesn’t draw text or user interface Alternatively, you can use stock art
(bing.com/create), let you create art elements well. So add speech from Canva, or hire a storyboard
by typing in text prompts that describe balloons, words and buttons manually, artist on Upwork. I don’t recommend
what you want to see. using tools like Google Slides. storyboarding software — it’s overkill.

UX STORYBOARD CHEATSHEET gamethinking.io 3

 Here are the juicy details
For best results using AI tools, write prompts that use these elements in this order:

[perspective] This part is optional. Try full body, half body, from above, from below, closeup.
[art style] See below for examples of prompts that produce different art styles. Black and white is best.
[character] Describe the person, age, hair, and what they’re wearing. Be specific to get consistent results.
[setting] Describe the room or environment.
[action] Describe what person is doing.
[expression] Avoid emotion words like “happy”. Use “with a smile on her face” instead.

Here are three prompts I typed into Bing Image Creator, showing three art styles. Similar prompts work in other AI art tools.
Experiment with wording until you get what you want. Note that I omitted [perspective] and [expression] in these prompts.

sketchy simple black and white sketchy simple black and white line black and white line drawing, with
stick-figure line drawing of a young drawing of a young shading of a young
woman with short hair sitting at a woman with short hair sitting at a woman with short hair sitting at a
kitchen table looking at her phone kitchen table looking at her phone kitchen table looking at her phone

UX STORYBOARD CHEATSHEET gamethinking.io 4

Accelerate your product team Meet our storyboarding colleagues
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for a
Pavel Samsonov
better way to validate your product concept, Pavel, product designer
check out our training programs for product at Amazon Web Services,
has used UX storyboards
teams.
as a core part of his work for many years.
We’ve helped hundreds of product teams Pavel helped us understand the power of
storyboards to clarify product vision, and to
find product market fit fast, and we can help explain why the roughness of storyboards is
you too. Learn more at: a virtue. To learn more about his work, go to

pavelsamsonov.com
gamethinking.io/programs
Marice Sy
Marice is a product designer
at Geocaching. She helped
us test and develop our
storyboard prompts, and
added the important idea of including the
character’s expression in the prompt. To
learn more about her work, go to

meetmarice.com

UX STORYBOARD CHEATSHEET gamethinking.io 5