Storyboard (Wikipedia)
An encyclopedia article on storyboards: sequential panel sketches originally developed for planning film and animation, adapted across many fields — including software and UX design — as a low-cost way to communicate a sequence of events before building the real thing. Wikipedia articles are continuously edited, so year above reflects the access date (2026-08-19), not a fixed publication year.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- In software development, a storyboard is used during the specification phase: screens the software will display are sketched, on paper or in dedicated tools, to illustrate the important steps of the user experience — cheaper to revise than an implemented interface, and more concrete for stakeholders than an abstract description alone.
- The storyboard is typically modified collaboratively by engineers and the client as they narrow down specific needs, rather than being handed off as a finished specification.
- “Design comics” are a storyboard variant that writes a customer or other character into the narrative — most often used for designing websites or illustrating a product-use scenario.
- Apple’s Xcode ships a dedicated Storyboards system for laying out iOS/macOS app screens and their transitions directly.
- Beyond software, storyboards are used in linguistic fieldwork (eliciting spoken language from an informant describing a depicted situation), architectural-studio client presentations, and increasingly by novelists for outlining plot structure — the same sequential-visualization technique recurring across fields far outside its film/animation origin.