Attended a great panel about changing your concepting process to save time, money and frustration. …And hopefully create a better end product.

Hosted by two people from Intuit (tax software), they shared with us how they take storyboarding very seriously and don’t start actually building until they have come to a good customer solution.

While building a new mobile tax filing app (Snap Tax – it looks pretty sweet) their team spent a year storyboarding and going back and forth with research groups. A interesting point they made is “Pity Begets Honesty” meaning the cruder the drawings the more honest the customer will be about their thoughts on it. If they brought the customer a working shiny prototype the customer won’t tell them it’s bad – they will suppress their real feelings.

The major benefit of spending a larger amount of time storyboarding is not wasting hours developing. Sketching stick figures and UIs takes a lot less time than diving into code and trying to figure out complex technical issues which may ultimately not be the right solution.