Storyboard Toolkit
A reusable kit that lets anyone build a product storyboard without starting from scratch.
My role
Product Designer
Duration
2-3 weeks
Scope
Design tooling · Self-initiated · Workflow improvement
Adopted by
5 teams · 938 total insertions
product overview
A drag-and-swap kit that lets non-designers build storyboards on their own
Teams kept rebuilding product storyboards by hand, and non-designers couldn't make them at all. I built a reusable set of storyboard parts so anyone could assemble one without design skills. It reached 5 teams and 938 component uses, 935 of them from a team I never worked with directly.
Early Observation
Teams kept asking for my old storyboards, years later, and they rebuilt their own storyboards from my old files
For years, team members kept reaching out for the link to storyboard work I'd made long ago. The same request came up again and again, across different teams and projects. Instead of starting fresh, people copied my old storyboard files and reworked them by hand — swapping in their own scenes, screens, and characters. Each person did this alone, from whatever version they could track down.
PROBLEM
Designers had to rebuild the storyboards from scratch every time, while non-designers had ideas to show but no way to show them
Every product pitch started from a blank page — scenes, characters, devices, screens, redrawn each time. The same work repeated across teams and projects, and nothing looked consistent. Building a storyboard took design skills most people didn't have, so product managers and others waited on a designer's time to visualize an idea.
A character design for a storyboard from another designer. There was a limited set of assets, but I used this as a reference to create my own set of visual assets.
Research
And people outside design were already making storyboards
I searched Figma files across the company and found non-design teams already building their own storyboards. I talked to several of those non-designers about what they were trying to say and what made it hard. And I found my old iPad storyboard drawings being passed around and reused as informal templates.
Storyboards was created by non-designers
Design solution
One kit of ready-made, swappable storyboard parts
Six characters is enough
More characters means more to draw, more to keep updated, and more to scroll through. Six covers the roles most product stories need. They sit together on one page of the library, so you see all six at once instead of hunting through a list.
Scene pieces you combine
Instead of one finished drawing per scene, the kit has separate pieces: screens, devices, speech bubbles, props. They sit grouped by kind so you can find what you need, and you place them yourself. That means you can build a scene I never planned for.
Change a face by picking one
The face does most of the work in a storyboard, and it is what people change most. Every character shares the same set of expressions, so the face is a dropdown in Figma's properties panel. A dropdown, not switches, because a character can only hold one expression at a time.
Poses that show what's happening
If the character just stands there, the caption has to explain the whole frame. Poses like pointing, on the phone, or arms crossed let the picture do that work. Pose is a dropdown too, for the same reason as the face: a character holds one pose at a time.
Outfits so you can tell people apart
When two characters look the same, readers lose track of who's who. Sleeves, collar, and logo are separate on and off switches rather than one dropdown, because they combine. A character can have long sleeves, a collar, and a logo at the same time, so each one had to be its own control.
Colors you can change
If I locked the colors, every storyboard would look like it came from one team. Teams can match their own product or deck instead.
A finished frame
Every part of this scene came from the kit — the characters, their faces and poses, the desk, the laptop, the speech bubble. Nothing was drawn for it. You pick the pieces and arrange them.
Templates, because starting was the hard part
People weren't stuck on drawing. They were stuck on the empty page. Starter layouts for the common cases — product vision, user journey, internal pitch — sit at the front of the library, so the first thing you see is something to edit rather than a blank canvas.
Impact
Both design and non-design teams adopted the kit — 938 uses across 5 teams
The kit reached 5 teams, with 938 component uses in total. 935 of those came from one team I never worked with directly — Sales Vision & Strategy — who made it their main tool for sales and vision decks. It spread on its own. Designers stopped starting from a blank canvas and reused shared parts and templates instead. Non-designers built presentation-ready storyboards without a designer. I shipped it in both Figma and PowerPoint so everyone on the team could use it.
reflection
The kit gave people a new skill, not just a shortcut
People who couldn't communicate an idea visually could now do it on their own, without a designer in the loop. The kit didn't just save time — it changed who could do the work.