Storyboarding 🎞️ Prompts

Purpose: Storyboarding (also known as experience mapping) visualises a user's journey with a product or service by mapping their goals, emotions, actions, and touchpoints across time. 

Design Thinking Phase: Empathise and Define 
Time: 45–60 min session + 1–2 hours analysis 
Difficulty: ⭐⭐ 

When to use: When aligning stakeholders on the end-to-end user journey When identifying pain points in multi-step experiences  When exploring early product concepts or redesigning features

What it is

Storyboarding is a collaborative UX method used to visually represent a user's interaction with a product or service over time. It combines narrative thinking, visualisation, and journey mapping to reveal a complete experience — including emotions, context, goals, and touchpoints — at each step of the journey.

📺 Video by NNgroup. Embedded for educational reference.

Why it matters

Storyboarding helps UX teams and stakeholders understand the complete ecosystem of user interaction. It brings user research to life, aligns teams on shared narratives, uncovers CX gaps, and primes ideation with real behavioural context — beyond just static personas or analytics.

By grounding solutions in detailed emotional and behavioural journeys, teams stay user-centred instead of feature-driven.

When to use 

• During early discovery to clarify current-state experiences
• After usability testing to visualise pain point insights
• In cross-functional workshops to ideate around user flow improvements

Benefits

• Rich Insights: Helps uncover user needs that aren’t visible in metrics.
• Flexibility: Works across various project types and timelines.
• User Empathy: Deepens understanding of behaviours and motivations.

How to use it

1. Define your target user type and experience scope (e.g., onboarding, account recovery).
2. Collect data from interviews, analytics, usability tests, or prior mapping activities.
3. Create a horizontal map with steps/phases through the journey, such as “trigger”, “search”, “engage”, “complete”.
4. For each step, capture:     
   • User goals
   • Key actions/interactions
   • Emotions (e.g., confident, lost, frustrated)
   • Touchpoints or channels used (e.g., mobile, email, chatbot)
5. Use simple sketches, sticky notes, or digital tools to visualise the flow sequentially.
6.  Review with stakeholders and annotate problems or opportunity areas.

Example Output

Here’s a fictional storyboard output for a user retrieving a forgotten password:

• Step 1: Trigger — User tries to log in and realises they've forgotten their password. Emotion: Frustration.
• Step 2: Action — Clicks “Forgot Password”. Receives reset email. Emotion: Hopeful.
• Step 3: Barrier — Email goes to the spam folder and is missed. Emotion: Confused, annoyed.
• Step 4: Resolution — Finds the email, resets password successfully. Emotion: Relief.

Common Pitfalls

• Too generic: Avoid generic “happy paths” — highlight real friction points and emotions users feel.
• Tool over process: Don't focus on beautifying slides over gathering behavioural insight.
• No follow-through: Ensure learnings are translated into design actions, not just documentation.

10 Design-Ready AI Prompts for Storyboarding – UX/UI Edition

How These Prompts Work (C.S.I.R. Framework)

Each of the templates below follows the C.S.I.R. method — a proven structure for writing clear, effective prompts that get better results from ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, or any other LLM.

C.S.I.R. stands for:

• Context: Who you are and the UX situation you're working in
• Specific Info: Key design inputs, tasks, or constraints the AI should consider
• Intent: What you want the AI to help you achieve
• Response Format: The structure or format you want the AI to return (e.g. checklist, table, journey map)

Level up your career with smarter AI promptsGet templates used by UX leaders — no guesswork, just results.Design faster, research smarter, and ship with confidence.First one’s free. Unlock all 10 by becoming a member.

Prompt Template 1: “Map an End-to-End User Scenario for Storyboarding”

Map an End-to-End User Scenario for Storyboarding

Context: You are a Senior UX designer preparing a storyboard for a first-time buying flow on an e-commerce platform.
Specific Info: The flow includes product search, filtering, cart, checkout, and confirmation. Known frictions from past research include drop-off on filtering and frustration over shipping costs.
Intent: Generate a detailed experience map that outlines behaviours, emotions, and touchpoints per stage.
Response Format: Provide a table with five columns — Step, Goal, User Action, Emotion, and Touchpoint.

If anything about the user type, goals, or device context is unclear, ask clarifying questions before proceeding.
Then, suggest a follow-up workshop activity to validate or refine the map.

Prompt Template 2: “Identify Emotional Peaks in a User Journey”

Identify Emotional Peaks in a User Journey

Context: You are a UX Lead evaluating a banking app's fund transfer experience across mobile and desktop.
Specific Info: User interviews have surfaced moments of anxiety during confirmation steps and delight on successful notifications.
Intent: Highlight emotional highs and lows across the journey to focus design improvements.
Response Format: Return a sequence diagram showing phases, labelled emotions, and their intensity.

Ask if more emotion data or journey segmentation is needed. Suggest a way to validate the emotional map with real users.

Prompt Template 3: “Generate Storyboard Frames for a Critical Flow”

Generate Storyboard Frames for a Critical Flow

Context: You're a product designer illustrating the support request process for an internal IT service dashboard.
Specific Info: The flow includes opening a request, status tracking, and follow-up surveys. Current pain point is inconsistent response time.
Intent: Generate six visual frame descriptions representing the user's journey.
Response Format: Give each frame a title, visual layout description, and emotional annotation.

Confirm if accessibility considerations should also be included. Suggest next actions to bring this into a design critique.

Prompt Template 4: “Craft Hypothetical Scenarios Based on Edge User Types”

Craft Hypothetical Scenarios Based on Edge User Types

Context: You’re mapping out a storyboard for an accessibility-first redesign of an airline check-in interface.
Specific Info: The personas include a low-vision user, a first-time flyer, and someone with limited English fluency.
Intent: Create distinct user flow stories that highlight context-specific challenges per persona.
Response Format: Provide one paragraph storyboard summary per persona.

Check if exact device platform (mobile, kiosk, etc.) needs refining. Recommend next validation method.

Prompt Template 5: “Extract Journey Mapping Themes from Interview Notes”

Extract Journey Mapping Themes from Interview Notes

Context: You are processing notes from 12 remote interviews related to a meal-planning mobile app.
Specific Info: Users mentioned issues planning meals, surprise subscription cuts, and confusing notifications.
Intent: Cluster recurring themes by journey phase to prepare for storyboarding.
Response Format: Return a phase-by-phase list with themes, example quotes, and linked emotions.

Ask if demographic tags or previous personas should be applied. Recommend follow-ups to test clustering robustness.

Prompt Template 6: “Audit Your Current Experience Map”

Audit Your Current Experience Map

Context: You're reviewing an existing storyboard for a customer onboarding flow in a B2B SaaS platform.
Specific Info: Initial map has seven steps with surface-level observations but lacks emotional and behavioural depth.
Intent: Identify gaps and give suggestions to enhance clarity and strategic value.
Response Format: Provide annotated feedback on what to add, merge, or revise per step.

Ask if quantitative usage data should be added. Recommend a small workshop format to crowdsource revisions.

Prompt Template 7: “Translate Feature Ideation into Updated Storyboard Segments”

Translate Feature Ideation into Updated Storyboard Segments

Context: You're in a design sprint, and three concepts emerged for checkout flow enhancements.
Specific Info: One idea adds Apple Pay, another shortens address entry, and one sends better confirmation emails.
Intent: Update the current storyboard to include these ideas at the right touchpoints.
Response Format: Describe revised flow and where each new feature fits, with expected user emotion change per update.

Clarify any backend constraints or platform limitations. Recommend how to prototype the changes visually.

Prompt Template 8: “Create a Multi-Device Experience Map”

Create a Multi-Device Experience Map

Context: You’re mapping a learning management experience across mobile, desktop, and tablet.
Specific Info: Students check grades on mobile, submit tasks via desktop, and use tablets in class.
Intent: Show cross-device interactions and user mood over time.
Response Format: Provide a device-synced timeline with interactions, touchpoints, and context switches.

Request clarification on target user type (student/educator). Suggest one visual method to present this clearly to stakeholders.

Prompt Template 9: “Use Storyboarding to Prepare for Usability Testing”

Use Storyboarding to Prepare for Usability Testing

Context: You’re about to run usability tests for a new car rental booking sequence.
Specific Info: Test goals include understanding mental models during location selection and upsell offers.
Intent: Use a storyboard to frame tasks and detect emotional triggers ahead of test protocol finalisation.
Response Format: Return a storyboard frame outline with proposed tasks, likely emotion trends, and testable assumptions.

Ask if participant persona details are confirmed. Suggest how to integrate this into a test script or scenario.

Prompt Template 10: “Compare Current-State vs Future-State Experience Maps”

Compare Current-State vs Future-State Experience Maps

Context: You’re working on a service blueprint redesign for a municipal digital service (licensing applications).
Specific Info: Known delays and offline forms make the current flow frustrating. Future concepts include real-time chat and progress dashboards.
Intent: Visually compare current and proposed journey flows for buy-in.
Response Format: Provide two side-by-side tables comparing step, action, emotion, and pain/opportunity.

Clarify if legal constraints shape the current flow. Recommend a storytelling format to pitch change to stakeholders.

Recommended Tools

• Miro (for real-time collaborative mapping)
• Figma or FigJam (for visual prototype-to-storyboard flow)
• UXPressia or Smaply (purpose-built journey mapping platforms)
• Otter.ai or Dovetail (for extracting storyboard themes from research transcripts)

Learn More

• NNGroup: UX Research & Design Articles
• Interaction Design Foundation – Topics
• Google Design Sprint Kit