Story boards

Like an outline for a paper, flowcharts and story boards save time and improve the quality of the final product by assisting us in the planning and preparation stages of a project. They help us plan what we are going to do so we know where a project is going. Then they keep us focused on the final goal.

Story boards are used primarily in film making to design individual shots before filming. They are also common in comic strip, animation, TV commercials, and multimedia design, but can be used for many other sorts of projects. Whereas a flowchart focuses on movement through a system, a story board or "content flowchart" allows far more detailed illustration of the contents of each element The story board should contain a sketch of the visual aspect of the screen, information which will be present, descriptions of animations, interactions (e.g. dialog boxes), sounds, and any other media. Although story boards were originally linear, the addition of branching diagrams from flowcharts makes them useful for non-linear multimedia development.