Prototype improvement
Configurable Storyboard Test
A Configurable Storyboard Test is a participatory way to explore how users would actually experience your solution. Instead of showing a finished story, you intentionally leave parts open so users can complete, change, or rearrange scenes. This turns feedback into co-creation and reveals needs, expectations, and scenarios you may not have imagined.
Why Use this tool?
Let users shape the story with you.
This tool goes beyond asking for opinions. By inviting users to modify the storyboard, you uncover gaps, assumptions, and real-world behaviors that don’t surface through observation alone. It’s especially useful when you want to understand context, decision points, and alternative paths users would naturally take.
what you should know
Start With: A concept or solution that can be expressed as an experience
End With: User-modified storyboards, comments, and new learning
Time Needed:
• Preparation: short
• Execution: 45 min – 1 hour
• Analysis: medium
Difficulty: ⭐ ⭐⭐ ☆☆ (3 out of 5 – requires facilitation and synthesis)
People:
• 2–6 users (participants)
• 1–2 facilitators
A quickguide to start
1. Define your learning goal. Be clear about what you want to understand (e.g., decision moments, reactions, missing steps).
2. Choose the experience. Select one specific situation where the solution would be used.
3. Invite users to modify it. Ask them to complete, change, or reorder the story to reflect how they would live the experience.
4. Discuss and capture insights. Have users explain their changes and reasoning.
5. Refine your solution. Use patterns and surprises to improve the concept or create new storyboard versions.
helpful tips
- Design the storyboard unfinished on purpose, that’s what unlocks learning.
- Encourage users to change anything: words, actions, order, or even what happens outside your solution.
- Run multiple short sessions instead of one long one to compare different scenarios.
RACU meets AI
Storyboard Test
How Can AI Make RACU Easier ?
AI can be your creative partner and research assistant, ready to help you move faster and think deeper at every step of the RACU process.
For each RACU tool, we’ll share a ready-to-use AI prompt. Just copy the prompt into your favorite AI tool (like ChatGPT or Copilot) and it will guide you through the method step by step.
The AI becomes your facilitator, asking the right questions so you can build your thinking as you go. No need to fill out a blank form, the prompt starts the conversation and adapts to your answers in real time.
PROMPT – COPILOT, CHAT GPT
You are a facilitator helping me complete a Research & Discovery Card for a design thinking challenge.
Guide me step-by-step by asking the following questions one at a time, and wait for my answer before moving on. You can ask follow-up questions if needed to clarify or improve my responses.
Start with general context:
1. What is the challenge, project, or topic you’re working on? (Briefly describe the scope or goal.)
Then go into Research (existing data):
2. What existing information do we need to gather to better understand this challenge?
3. Where can we get that information? (e.g., internal reports, dashboards, previous research, public sources)
4. What specific questions will this data help us answer?
5. Who on the team will be responsible for gathering this information?
Then move to Discovery (new research):
6. Who should we learn from? (e.g., users, clients, collaborators, stakeholders)
7. Where can we find or reach them?
8. What topics, needs, or behaviors should we explore in the research?
9. What discovery methods could work best for this challenge? (Examples: interviews, shadowing, observation, journaling, immersing yourself in the experience, etc.)
10. How many people should we involve or study?
11. When will this research happen?
12. Who on the team will lead or coordinate this discovery work?
At the end, summarize my answers as a Research & Discovery Plan with two sections:
- Research (existing data)
- Discovery (new fieldwork)
Use bullet points and keep it simple enough to copy into a worksheet.
