A web tool for generating a storyboard
Instead of reading a paragraph of text about a user journey I thought it would be interesting to explore storyboarding. I wanted to design a tool teams could use to generate a sequence of images to accomplish two things:
Build empathy by showing a more visual representation of the user's environment
Clearly identify brand opportunities to inject into the product at the right moments
Testing models
Before turning to Claude to help me build this, I opened up Midjourney to test out generating styles. Midjourney feels more creative and fluid to work within, but I had problems trying to develop a sequence of images that would tell a clear story. I used this prompt in the early explorations:
A rider is getting a ride in a Lyft car and they are going to an interview. They see that they are running 10 minutes late for this interview and are increasingly becoming frustrated.
I couldn't quite get the content of the images to work with Midjourney so I started testing out Imagen 4 but within the UI I was building. Some of my prompts were more playful and ridiculous to test out the model outputs. Over-shoulder, mid, wise, and close-up angles told the model the crop of the image.
With some prompting I got the character to stay the same throughout the sequence and I made it editable to alter the crop types of each image.
I moved the settings to the right of the panels and added another model, Flux, to test alongside Imagen.
Toggling between models made the differences more obvious. Imagen is a lot more consistent between characters and looks more refined. Flux often sends images with some strange proportions.
I'm still refining this tool and hoping to get it live soon! I'm hoping it will help teams build empathy and better imagine the users world and environment.