Storyboarding in UX Design: My free AI-powered GPT that draws for you

The tool lives on chatgpt.com. It’s 100% free, regardless of how many drawings you will need. Below is the direct link to access the UX storyboarding tool on OpenAI’s platform. A special thanks to my insightful colleague Debra for her expertise on the storyboarding process.

Access the storyboarding tool here

The custom GPT expects your input to follow a specific format, divided into three parts: a description of the person, their action, and the scene. Each part adds crucial detail to help the tool generate an accurate and meaningful sketch.

• Where are people: ...
• Who is in the scene: ...
• What are they doing: ...

Start by setting the scene. Is it a living room, a bustling coffee shop, or an office space? You can even include objects, layout, or atmosphere if it matters to the product you are building. These elements ground the sketch in reality and ensure it aligns with the user journey you’re visualizing.

Next, describe the people involved. Are they young or old? Professionals, students, or parents? Add traits that are relevant to your product, like their roles, jobs, or demographic data.

Finally, explain the action. What are the characters doing now? Are they scrolling on a phone—if so, what’s on the screen? Are they entering a store—if so, which one? Are they in a room—what type of room? Actions are the focal point of the sketch, so aim for precision.

Traditional storyboarding can take hours, especially for someone like me who can’t draw. Maintaining visual consistency across frames is also a challenge. With this tool, I can generate a storyboard frame in seconds, removing the repetitive, time-consuming task of manual sketching. This frees up my time to focus on what truly matters: the collaborative, strategic aspects of storyboarding.

Storyboarding isn’t widely used in design meetings, and I believe that’s due to the “lag effect”—the time it takes for someone to draw the team’s idea. This tool eliminates that slowness, allowing your team to spend more time discussing the various aspects of the customer journey. It also reduces confusion - “What is that drawing about again? I don’t get it.” -- said Karen. All drawings are now clear and consistent.

Professional-grade tools are not often free. But thanks to ChatGPT and DALL-E, you can generate unlimited sketches in this custom GPT.

A UX storyboard contains more than just thee drawing. It typically includes three things: a specific scenario, the visual, and a caption.

1. Scenario: Each storyboard starts with a user story. It outlines the persona involved and a short description of the storyline. Example: "Fitness enthusiast John seeks a user-friendly app to track his daily workout routines."
2. Visuals: That’s where the tool comes in. The visuals represent each step in the scenario. As mentioned above, these images should include relevant details—like the user's environment and actions.
3. Captions: Accompany each visual with a caption. You can keep captions concise since you have the image as the primary element.

Journey maps provide a detailed visualization of the entire customer journey, capturing actions, emotions, tools, roadblocks... In contrast, storyboards are informal and illustrative. Here is an analogy to illustrate my point: if customer journeys are Figma files, storyboards are Balsamiq files.

Storyboards can be used at various stages of the product design process:

• Storyboards fuel the ideation process. As you brainstorm solutions, storyboards help visualize how users might interact with them while in the real world. This will help address pain points without introducing new issues, before moving on to design and development.
• Using storyboards to turn research data into visual narratives can help you make research insights less dry. This is specially useful when you have problem-related insights or to highlight key themes. Storyboards can illustrate what users say and do, bringing the empathy stage to a new level.
• Storyboards can enhance journey maps too. Showing images of users at different stages using your product, even in sketches, will help non-designers imaging what the solution could be.