Visualize Through Storyboarding With Instructional Design Services

By Marissa Velazquez


For any eLearning course, instructional design services should include the creation of a visual storyboard as part of the plan. With a great storyboard, you will inevitably save plenty of money, time as well as avoid surprising or disappointing your clients when they finally get to view the results. With a visual storyboard, you are creating a bridge between what has been envisioned and what will finally be.

The storyboards aid designers working on training and evaluation materials with a means of communicating with clients, industry experts and the developers. A storyboard provides the best opportunity for one to collect, organize and review content, provide visuals, give instructions, explain animation and write the narration. There are different storyboard formats available but all of them adopt the elements of content, visuals, narration, graphic designer requirements and developer instructions to communicate more effectively.

In a storyboard, content is important especially to the industry expert who seeks to view and understand the message for perusal even before it is presented to the client. The expert is expected to evaluate as well as approve any content related to the project. This way, any information included is checked for validity and ensure that at the end of the day it help in building skills of the learner.

In storyboarding, a picture is really worth a thousand words. Such visuals ought to include graphical elements that are to be presented on any page including color of font and size. Other visuals that help in telling the story and worthy of consideration include text placement, drawings, images, navigation and background.

For eLearning projects that seek to include the use of closed captioning and voice over talent, it is crucial to add narration that will help industry experts and developers evaluate the piece. Industry experts are solely tasked with approving or disapproving the content used in the narration. The developers, on the other hand, work with designers to ensure that narration works well with the on-screen elements.

Whether the images come directly from the client or are been developed by graphic designers, it is important to ensure that they go along with the storyboard's theme. Some graphics and images can easily be changed by adding simple elements like drop shadows and other such elements. Other images however, may require the designer to replace the background to something that is relevant to the set theme.

For developers, storyboards essentially indicate what they should know about building or programming the course. The instructions contained also provide the experts and approvers with a snippet into how the final product will work and look like once complete. The notes written by developers explain the various navigational buttons including any other elements that are built into the course.

To instructional design services storyboards are very important as communication tools. Apart from telling the story, they also help clients, niche experts as well as approvers to understand and visualize what the end product will be. Through storyboards, designers can communicate narration to voice over talents, visuals to the graphic designers and technical information to the developers in other words, relay to all parties involved in lifting the vision from a page and bringing it to life on a learner's screen.




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