Create Storyboards on your iPhone with StoryPages
by Bill French on 10/03/10 at 5:00 am
Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.
I’m not really an artsy kind of guy. I recall liking art class as a youngster, but not because of the activity of making art. I was looking for anything to do besides math and history. In the age of the Internet, however, I’ve learned to love communications: charts, spreadsheets, data, and pictures. They all play a role in helping me carry out consulting projects without ever leaving the comfort of my home in Keystone. This is one reason I was attracted so quickly to Roambi 
and why I decided to explore the business possibilities with StoryPages from SpinThought.
Storyboarding is relatively new to the business field, but I’ve noticed a number of firms [literally] tearing a page from the playbook of screenwriters and film producers to more effectively communicate ideas, plans, and new programs. A former Facebook executive, Netanel “Net” Jacobsson writes…
“Since most businesses are like a developing story, wouldn’t it be easier to use the storyboard as an example of visualizing you business plan? We all love stories, whether they are fiction or not, on TV or not, true or false. As a matter of fact, most good businesses have a good story to tell. Why not try to tell that story as you see it develop over time on a storyboard?”
It’s not surprising to see this trend emerging in funding, marketing, and operational settings. A recent 3M research study reveals people process images 60,000 (sixty thousand) times faster than with words alone. Instant problem solving with visual thinking, organizational charts, process maps, and diagrams help you create faster deeper understanding. If this isn’t enough data to compel a business to use visual idea modeling, consider that an an average of 80% of the population respond favorably when they must make a decision.
I didn’t want to do a review of this iPhone app without experiencing how I might use it in a business task, so I waited and watched for a moment when I was away from the office and needed to tell a story, however simple my first test might be. It wasn’t long before I was contemplating a client’s social media initiative while out of the office. I wanted to capture certain issues that I saw with the client’s blog content since the client had recently asked me to point out potential quality problems.
In just a few minutes in a coffee shop (without wifi I might add), I created this storyboard and emailed it as a compiled PDF. This validates my feeling that there are many cases where mobile professionals and managers might be able to benefit with this tool.
One of the nice features about this app is the way it leverages iPhone photos which can be used as the background of a drawing. In the case of my blog review for my client, I captured screenshots of problematic issues in their content strategy using iPhone’s Safari browser. The ability to capture zoomed ares of the web pages made it easy to focus on the areas I wanted to express details about.
I imported each of the screenshots into StoryPages and then used different colored pens to circle the areas that need improvement. The only drawback to this is that the screened images are made to look like backgrounds and are intentionally less colorful than the actual image. I would like a foreground image feature.
The use of photos in business is underutilized. With StoryPages and a camera, it’s possible to document real-world situations and script them with typed and/or drawn notes. Imagine the many possible use cases: quality assurance, business process documentation, and successes and failures. Capturing reality and annotating it to tell a story is so much more effective than other methods of communicating such as texting and email. StoryPages provides a framework for streamlining the process. I was also able to use StoryPages with Dragon Dictation, speeding up the process of adding annotations.
Another area that could be improved has more to do with the issue of drawing objects on a small iPhone screen and the difficulty of using the tip of your finger. While I can see a better drawing experience on Apple’s forthcoming iPad. One way to improve the tool for iPhone is to provide a library of business objects that can be pulled into the drawing space. Simple flowchart objects, images, and diagramming templates would make it easier to tackle some likely business storyboarding tasks. And for what it’s worth, the camera is not a bad interface for doing some of that in an ad-hoc fashion. The app doesn’t rule out a quick sketch on paper that you shoot and import straight into a storyboard pane. It’s also quite easy to trace over images and/or color objects with storyPages drawing features. It’s also possible to remove the background image after tracing over it – a very useful feature for creating clean and simple diagrams.
Mobile storyboarding is a new idea, but it’s one that seems to bring some new opportunities to help people understand things that might escape them in traditional mediums.
