How to draw UX Storyboards

CHEAT SHEET

What is a UX Storyboard?

UX in comic book form
A UX storyboard tells the story of a
particular person using your product,
in the form of a comic strip.
Show the customer’s world
Unlike screen mockups, UX storyboards
show the customer’s world, not just
what’s on the screen.
What storyboards can do for you
Clarify vision with stakeholders.
Visualize customer behavior patterns.
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
AI art tools like Bing Image Creator
(bing.com/create), let you create art
by typing in text prompts that describe
what you want to see.
Do the hard parts by hand
AI doesn’t draw text or user interface
elements well. So add speech
balloons, words and buttons manually,
using tools like Google Slides.
Or use other art resources
Alternatively, you can use stock art
from Canva, or hire a storyboard
artist on Upwork. I don’t recommend
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
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for a
better way to validate your product concept,
check out our training programs for product
teams.
We’ve helped hundreds of product teams
find product market fit fast, and we can help
you too. Learn more at:
Meet our storyboarding colleagues
Pavel Samsonov
Pavel, product designer
at Amazon Web Services,
has used UX storyboards
as a core part of his work for many years.
Pavel helped us understand the power of
storyboards to clarify product vision, and to
explain why the roughness of storyboards is
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