Storyboards as an Engineering Tool for Extraction of Functional Requirements

Abstract

In new product development courses, engineering students are introduced to the tools for addressing the functional or technical issues of the product. Problems arise when they need to empathise with the user to better understand how the product can be used in different contexts. To address this problem, we propose the use of storyboards as a tool to explore user behaviour and to clarify functions of the future product. The study results confirmed that storyboards are a suitable tool for understanding user-product interaction, however, the several problems encountered by the participants were outlined.