A method to explore strategies to communicate user experience through storyboards: an automotive design case study

Abstract An engaging user experience is an increasingly important design characteristic in the automotive industry. Compared with physical design characteristics (form, material, mechanical design, appearance), automotive designers find UX (user experience) challenging to communicate during the early stages of the design process without investing in expensive prototypes and/or models. This paper presents the development of a method to explore strategies to communicate UX through the medium of storyboards early in the design process. The method enables links to be drawn between the design tool of storyboarding and the attributes of theoretical UX outlined in theoretical frameworks. By applying this method in a case study of a storyboard created by Ford Design Asia Pacific, we identify how the theoretical attributes of UX are manifested, and we also highlight certain attributes of UX that are difficult to convey during the early phases of automotive design. This research thus contributes a method relevant to practice that assists with effectively communicating UX in early-stage automotive design where higher fidelity prototyping is unviable. Additionally, it enables the study of storyboard outcomes in the design process to assess the degree to which the intended UX is communicated. In doing so, it contributes a first step toward formalizing the analysis of UX in concept design, which in turn opens up this highly subjective area to further research in the automated analysis of conceptual design and even generative design.