In Your IA/UEX Toolbox: Comic booking?

Google’s new Chrome comic by Scott McCloud is getting a lot of attention as an interesting way to explain a product. Comic booking hasn’t traditionally been a skill of people in the technology world but the GOOG’s big thumbs up for the medium could change that.

I started reading comics and graphic novels when I was a wee tyke of 6. My grandparents got me a dozen or so Batman and that sparked what became a life-long obsession with the medium. If you want to find me around town there’s at least a 40% chance I’ll be in Borders #1 reading graphic novels (sorry major local corporation) or at Vault of Midnight spending some of my non-existent income (hurrah locally owned small business!). Graphics and Illustration are a powerful, powerful way to communicate ideas and I’m continually drawn (ha!) to them as a source of story and exposition.

I’m surprised how little traditional comic booking is used in fields like UI design or Information Architecture. I took a UI Design Course in graduate school with Tom Brinck. Storyboarding was one of the skills we practiced but, as taught, it was so dull and lifeless. Screen mockup after screen mockup accompanied by explanatory text. The focus was squarely on the application and the various states it occupied. Everyone once in a while we were encouraged to write about the user did to get here (“Mary clicks the save button and…”), but it hardly bore resemblance to the rich communication in a comic.

The focus in these storyboards was the application, but we don’t write applications for the sake of the application. We write applications for users. I didn’t connect comic books and story boards until another class – Networked Cities at UM’s school of Art and Architecture – where the the professor Malcolm Mccullough, had us create a little comic describing a product we had designed. “The focus,” he’d say, “is on the use.” Not the application, not the user in a void, but on the interaction between the two. The focus is on the use.

Comics books can be useful for more than storyboard replacement. Google used a comic to both explain how a user would interact with Chrome and as a pitch rationalizing why this different interaction was necessary. Apple uses comic-style elements in their product instruction manuals, but you could go further and replace all those textual descriptions with illustrations and user stories explaining “how we pictured this product in your life” instead of “how to accomplish specific task X”. I’ve heard of some companies using comics internally to explain style guides (not just “use yellow for highlights” but “here’s a person encountering yellow as a highlight…”).

If you want to add comic booking to your skillset, I highly recommend buying McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Making Comics (both links are through McCloud’s Amazon referral account so he’ll get a little coffee money from the purchase).