Interactive Demo Storyboard: How to Visualize Your Product Demos

Interactive demos give your prospects a front-row seat to experience your product in action, at their own pace and time.

They don’t have to make the extra effort of signing up or wait for a sales rep to respond to their demo request. Interactive demos offer frictionless access to your product.

But not all product demos make buyers tick and drive ROI.

Wondering why?

Your interactive demo storyboard makes all the difference. A storyboard outlines the exact flow of your demo from the opening slide to the final CTA.

In this article, we’ll share a practical, no-nonsense playbook for storyboarding winning interactive demos.

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What is an interactive demo storyboard?

A product demo walks viewers through your product’s interface allowing them to click on different hotspots and see your product in action. An interactive demo storyboard is a visual layout outlining the sequence and flow of this demo—think of it as a sequential arrangement of all hotspots, branches, and CTAs.

A good product demo storyboard allows people to effortlessly engage with and explore your product without feeling overwhelmed or confused. So, they get hands-on access and a clearer understanding of how your solution can meet their needs.

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Why you need to storyboard your interactive demos

Ever looked at a blueprint of a building? It helps in clearly visualizing how the structure should look like and helps in planning the exact dimensions for construction.

A storyboard is your demo’s blueprint. It defines exactly what your showcase will look like and how it’ll appear for the end-users.

Here are a few key reasons why you should create an interactive demo storyboard 👇🏻

Get a clear vision and direction: Storyboards present a visual roadmap for the entire demo. They offer clarity, ensuring that the final product aligns with the intended message and goals. By laying out each step in advance, you can identify and eliminate distractions to create a cohesive flow.
Build a compelling product narrative: A visual breakdown helps in crafting a logical and engaging narrative to highlight key product use cases and benefits. A well-structured narrative can also make the demo more impactful by keeping viewers engaged from start to finish and making it easy to retain information.
Document product changes: As products evolve, storyboards serve as a tool to track and update changes in your interactive demos over time. This structure offers a quick way to modify your demos in line with your latest features—without losing anything in translation.
Save time and money in the long run: The storyboarding process can help you identify potential issues early and avoid time-consuming revisions. A well-planned storyboard also streamlines the production process, reducing the need to constantly edit or recreate the output.

The bottom line: without a full-fledged storyboard, you’re setting viewers up for confusion and compromising your messaging. If the user experience is confusing and the narrative is broken, your product story would inevitably lose its impact.

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A tried-and-tested recipe for creating interactive demo storyboard

Want to design a seamless storyboard to create high-impact interactive demos? Here’s our step-by-step framework for getting the best results.

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🎯 Decide each demo’s purpose and audience

“Know your audience” is boilerplate advice. But you can only produce an impactful demo when you know:

What bothers your audience the most
What are their primary use cases or jobs-to-be-done
What’s their skill level or experience with a solution like yours

These questions will help you narrow down different target personas for a demo. For instance, Techie Tom might be a 30-year-old software developer who values advanced features, while Casual Carl could be a 50-year-old who just wants user-friendly basics.

By documenting your target personas, you can tailor the tone, language, and content to each persona’s preferences.

⚡With Floik’s Smart Call-to-Action capability, you can let end-users choose their own adventure and explore what resonates the most with them.

You can create branches within a single demo and nest multiple demos for different personas. Viewers can select the option that best fits their requirements and experience your product from the most relevant perspective.

Besides identifying your target audience, you should also define a demo’s main objective—a specific purpose you’re creating it for. You can create product demos for so many objectives, like:

Embedding on your homepage or a landing page
Sending a personalized pitch to each prospect
Introducing a new feature or enhancement
Creating a sales leave-behind after discovery
Uploading on third-party review platforms

You can tailor your storyboard to a specific purpose and ensure that every element of your demo, from visuals to narration, aligns with your intended outcome.

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💡 Identify the aha! moments to highlight

An "aha! moment" is when a new user realizes your product’s actual value or use cases.

It's that instant when the light bulb goes on, and something that was previously confusing becomes clear.

These moments are compelling because they make users feel like your product can help them achieve specific goals, triggering a rush of dopamine.

Integrating aha! moments in your product demos can turn passive viewers into engaged prospects. Once they experience an aha! moment, they’ll be more motivated to try your product and talk to your team.

Here’s how you can identify and highlight aha! moments for your product demos:

Revisit user feedback: One of the best ways to identify these moments is by listening to your existing users. Their feedback sessions and honest reviews can reveal moments when they truly understood the value of your product or a particular feature.
Resolve key pain points: Think about the primary challenges your product can solve. The moment your product offers a clear and convenient solution to a difficult problem can be a significant aha! moment for viewers.
Find your biggest differentiators: Highlight features or benefits that set your product apart from the competition. When viewers realize they can't get a particular capability anywhere else, that's a potential aha! Moment.

Here’s an example demonstrating what an aha! moment looks like in the journey of a new user 👇🏻

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🍿 Decide the length of your demo

Not all interactive demos are created equal.

If you're introducing a complex feature to a tech-savvy audience, a longer, in-depth demo can work well. But if you want to capture the interest of cold prospects through outreach, a shorter, snappier demo would be more effective.

So, once you’ve established your demo’s purpose and key moments to highlight, you can determine its length.

As a best practice, you should keep your demos 10-15 steps long.

Longer demos can feel tedious to click through, and shorter ones might not convey your entire message. Hit the sweet spot with 10-15 steps!

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🪜 Define your structure and write the copy

Now, it’s time to do the real heavy lifting.

Based on all the legwork you’ve done so far, start outlining your demo’s structure. Here are a few things to consider when defining the structure:

Main themes to cover: Decide whether you want to cover a single topic in the demo or look at multiple themes. If you want to go for more than one theme, make a note to divide your demo into two paths.
Length of each demo: Outline the expected length of each demo within your showcase. Whether you’re creating a single product demo or building a versatile one, decide the number of steps in each beforehand.
Key CTAs to add: Your CTAs could be anything from signing up for a trial, exploring a feature, or even sharing the demo with others. The key is to make the CTAs relevant to your demo's purpose and appealing to the viewers.

Then start creating a step-by-step storyboard for your interactive demo. Every step is an opportunity to introduce an unaware user to your product’s potential. So, think from their perspective and write a crisp description of the message to convey.

While writing the final copy, remember to prioritize clarity over cleverness to make a reader-friendly and engaging demo.

Your goal is to guide viewers through your demo effortlessly. So, avoid jargon or overly technical language—unless it's appropriate for your audience.

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📝 Document the flow of steps

Before diving straight into the demo creation process, spend time documenting your demo’s flow. This ensures that your demo progresses logically, is easy to follow, and effectively communicates the intended message.

This documentation ensures that each step in the demo builds upon the previous one. It’s a litmus test for preventing confusion or information overload.

Besides, having a clear flow streamlines the production process. It gives your team a blueprint to work with complete alignment. And you can keep collecting user feedback on this documented storyboard until you get it right!

Use tools like Notion, Google Docs, Coda, or Canva to jot down the step-by-step flow of your interactive demo storyboard.

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🪄 Create, edit, & ship your demo

Once you've prepared the groundwork with a well-defined storyboard, it's time to bring your demo to life! And this is where Floik gives you an edge.

Floik is purpose-built to create winning product demos in a few minutes. You just have to toggle the browser extension and record your screen and show your product in action.

Then, you can work with an intuitive editor to refine this demo, customize it per your branding, and make it more impactful. With Floik, you can:

Add voiceover: Record your own voice or generated AI voiceover in 20+ languages to add more context to your demos.
Create branches: Segment your demo into different paths with smart CTA and let users choose which demos they want to check out.
Polish up the output: Trim out any bloopers or errors in your original recording to create a neat showcase.
Design mobile-friendly demos: Make demos for your mobile apps or websites and repurpose content with freeform crop.
Zoom into details: Apply the pan-and-zoom effect to highlight the crucial details and remove any distractions.
Customize the look: Replicate your branding with your own logo and primary color across all showcases.

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Once you’re happy with the final output, it’s easy to publish and roll it out. You can simply copy a link to share it with anyone, or copy a smart embed code to upload on a website or landing page.

What’s more, Floik brings you granular insights about each product demo’s performance. You can get a pulse of your users to see what’s working well and what’s not working.

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