Storyboarding is a big challenge out our organisation too: Daniel Brigham's comment on version control is a biggie. It'd be great to have a platform that would have the following attributes:
1: VERSION CONTROL !!!! The amount of times I've had customers send me back old versions of a sb because they couldn't be bothered to read their mail (or are deliberately playing silly buggers to sneak in changes) is uncountable
2: OFFLINE/ONLINE HOSTING & SECURE SERVICE: I recognise the value of the cloud, really I do! BUT Our company has a massive focus on security and data protection, thus we aren't allowed to host sensitive information on some of the more interesting platforms as mentioned above, having a secure hosted version is important.
3: VISUAL/DESIGN CONTINUITY: Nothing makes a customer go 'eh?' like a badly drawn / executed storyboard. Making design impact, particularly when emphasising transitions or animated elements is important. Powerpoint does it quite well in some cases, but it'd be great to have a sketching tool integrator to bring things to life.
4: INTEGRATION WITH OTHER TOOLS/RECOGNITION THAT STORYBOARDING IS ONE PARTOF AN OVERALL DESIGN PROCESS: So you've got your sb. Signed off. Great! BUT exporting the storyboard to a different format is sometimes a challenge (avoiding the obviously crappy ppt import features in Captivate and storyline). Often stuff gets lost in translation in team projects so you end up with time spent on stuff you hadn't had in mind. Perhaps a side-by-side comparison where you can see what's going on? Anything in this regard need would have to be half dev tool half storyboarding.
2: OFFLINE/ONLINE HOSTING & SECURE SERVICE: I recognise the value of the cloud, really I do! BUT Our company has a massive focus on security and data protection, thus we aren't allowed to host sensitive information on some of the more interesting platforms as mentioned above, having a secure hosted version is important.
It's not a traditional storyboarding tool, but in today's fast-paced environment we do more wireframing in the actual authoring tool than we do old-school storyboards, and something like this may also help facilitate the storyboarding/wireframing/versioning issues...
Thanks for the response!
Not sure this is quite the kind of thing I had in mind. More like a CEM/LME?
For my work storyboarding is a process that is inherently visual and whilst some degree of 'wireframing' does take place, it's about perhaps 10% of the total storyboarding effort.
I know that it is quite an old thread and I hope it's not rude or improper to post this comment but I have been working on a web-based collaborative storyboarding tool in the last 2 years. It is not perfect and it probably won't fit all use cases but it has some nice capabilities as well as offering a new way to create storyboards and track their progress. Some of the supported features:
Curriculum builder where one can assemble a sequence of Courses/Modules/Lessons and reorder them at will. This structure is then used as the entry point to each storyboard.
Templating system that is used to insert slide templates into a lesson thus providing some basic level of reuse.
Capability to create your own storyboard format by assembling blocks such as Content, Notes, Media Requests and Guidelines (much more to come).
Control the number of characters allowed to be entered in a Text Content block. Useful to prevent a 100 words sentence turning into a 500 words one.
Assignable Media Requests with workflow system.
Threaded commenting system where you can comment on different parts of the storyboard. Each thread has its own workflow. Allows the use of @mention which triggers an email to the mentioned person.
Incremental workflow for the slide to indicate the state that it is in (open, storyboarding, reviewing, in production, etc).
Capability to view the storyboard state at any point in time and even compare between two versions.
Notification system (by email) where a user can chose to watch a slide and be notified when comments are being added.
Storyboard filter that displays only certain type of information. E.g. a user can chose to only see the text content while another can chose to see both content and production notes.
Activity stream showing what has been happening in a project
Dashboard showing a PM the status of each slide of a storyboarded lesson along with the number of comments remaining unresolved. From the dashboard, you can drill down strait to the storyboard. Ideal to see the state of your project at a glance.
A view showing all the Media Requests in the project, their states and their assignees.
While you can add a mockup to each slide, it doesn't yet support attachments but you could use hyperlinks to point to where the attachment is stored thus still having everything in one place. Same with complex flow, while it doesn't yet support defining navigational flow, you could add an hyperlink to the slide to show where to go next.
I think that it can do everything a typical word storyboard can do plus a lot more :-)
In the new year, I intend to start a closed Beta program for a few months. My dream would be to find dedicated beta users that could help me find the best fit for such a tool while tolerating its present weaknesses :-) Would even be better if I could find a few beta users that would be willing to work together with me as a team (e.g. ISD, SME, Copy Editor, Gfx, etc) to mimic the complexity of collaborative content creation of a fake lesson.
So, if you are truly interested in participating to the closed beta program, contact me via the forum in-mail system and we will get in touch. I think that this tool could alleviate many existing pain points and especially for teams geographically dispersed.
30 Replies
Storyboarding is a big challenge out our organisation too: Daniel Brigham's comment on version control is a biggie. It'd be great to have a platform that would have the following attributes:
1: VERSION CONTROL !!!! The amount of times I've had customers send me back old versions of a sb because they couldn't be bothered to read their mail (or are deliberately playing silly buggers to sneak in changes) is uncountable
2: OFFLINE/ONLINE HOSTING & SECURE SERVICE: I recognise the value of the cloud, really I do! BUT Our company has a massive focus on security and data protection, thus we aren't allowed to host sensitive information on some of the more interesting platforms as mentioned above, having a secure hosted version is important.
3: VISUAL/DESIGN CONTINUITY: Nothing makes a customer go 'eh?' like a badly drawn / executed storyboard. Making design impact, particularly when emphasising transitions or animated elements is important. Powerpoint does it quite well in some cases, but it'd be great to have a sketching tool integrator to bring things to life.
4: INTEGRATION WITH OTHER TOOLS/RECOGNITION THAT STORYBOARDING IS ONE PARTOF AN OVERALL DESIGN PROCESS: So you've got your sb. Signed off. Great! BUT exporting the storyboard to a different format is sometimes a challenge (avoiding the obviously crappy ppt import features in Captivate and storyline). Often stuff gets lost in translation in team projects so you end up with time spent on stuff you hadn't had in mind. Perhaps a side-by-side comparison where you can see what's going on? Anything in this regard need would have to be half dev tool half storyboarding.
Just a thought, but have you ever look at Articulate Online? I haven't used it much but from what I have it seems pretty solid - https://www.articulate.com/products/ao-features.php
It's not a traditional storyboarding tool, but in today's fast-paced environment we do more wireframing in the actual authoring tool than we do old-school storyboards, and something like this may also help facilitate the storyboarding/wireframing/versioning issues...
Thanks for the response!
Not sure this is quite the kind of thing I had in mind. More like a CEM/LME?
For my work storyboarding is a process that is inherently visual and whilst some degree of 'wireframing' does take place, it's about perhaps 10% of the total storyboarding effort.
Hi everyone,
I know that it is quite an old thread and I hope it's not rude or improper to post this comment but I have been working on a web-based collaborative storyboarding tool in the last 2 years. It is not perfect and it probably won't fit all use cases but it has some nice capabilities as well as offering a new way to create storyboards and track their progress. Some of the supported features:
While you can add a mockup to each slide, it doesn't yet support attachments but you could use hyperlinks to point to where the attachment is stored thus still having everything in one place. Same with complex flow, while it doesn't yet support defining navigational flow, you could add an hyperlink to the slide to show where to go next.
I think that it can do everything a typical word storyboard can do plus a lot more :-)
In the new year, I intend to start a closed Beta program for a few months. My dream would be to find dedicated beta users that could help me find the best fit for such a tool while tolerating its present weaknesses :-) Would even be better if I could find a few beta users that would be willing to work together with me as a team (e.g. ISD, SME, Copy Editor, Gfx, etc) to mimic the complexity of collaborative content creation of a fake lesson.
So, if you are truly interested in participating to the closed beta program, contact me via the forum in-mail system and we will get in touch. I think that this tool could alleviate many existing pain points and especially for teams geographically dispersed.
Thanks and I hope to be hearing from some of you,
Yves
For storyboarding I use the web app - MakeStoryboard.com