Comics Make for Good Use Cases

Ever had the feeling that no one actually reads the PRD, personas and use cases you carefully and lovingly craft from the many months of conversation you've had with customers? Ever wished you had more time to read similar documents created by your peers?

Kevin Cheng of kev/null may have an answer for us in the form of comics. Kevin is a senior interaction designer at Yahoo! where he and his colleagues are creating simple, expressive comics to quickly communicate the essential ideas behind features. In a recent interview with Ashlee McKee at UIE, he says a major reason is that they discovered in many projects that "the documentation would either not be read thoroughly enough or each person would interpret the meaning of the requirements differently. Two months later, we were deep in the development process and suddenly realized everyone had different visions of what the requirements actually meant."

He argues that simple comics of 5-8 panels showing how a proposed new feature would be used are easier to create, easier to understand, and more likely to be read than formal use cases. The key is to keep it simple and to concentrate on the user rather than on the interface. Check out Kevin's presentations filled with fun examples of how to put this idea to work.

Comments

[katja]

i have to say, i'm completely in favor of this idea. of course, the implementation starts to get humorous...remember those felt boards in preschool? we could have a set of pre-made, brightly colored felt items and some large black felt boards...little felt users, little felt UIs, with individual felt input boxes...or colorforms! little plastic film UIs...

ok, i'm poking fun: i really do think storyboarding is a great way to communicate complex ideas more quickly and accurately.