Reflection – Visualization

Challenge & Selection

The visualization tool is one of my favorite ones, and it is the most used one on my field; it is a  tool that helps expressing an idea not only by words, but in any visual application you can find.  I am a product designer and I currently design wrist watches for a big company in Brazil, and I  am in charge of four brands. We work with the lead time of one year, approximately, and we  deal directly with our supplier from China. The communication is the biggest challenge, I  believe, since we talk only by email and we both are speaking in a non-native language. We  often prepare briefings with a detailed description of how we want the watch to be, including  the functions, size and visual details; but it is always hard to make them understand exactly  what we want, and it causes delays and long discussions over small details.

Application

Considering our cultural barrier, we have decided to implement the Visualization tool in our  briefings, hoping to help our suppliers understand the projects as soon as possible. We started  adding more images and videos, sending draws when they had questions and looking for  samples of materials to send them. We tested different ways to show them what we wanted  and inspire them to create with us, considering their expertise.

As a second step, we analyzed the e-mails sent to them, noticing that we used to send short  and objective e-mails, since we receive around 60 emails per day. But it was not working,  because we had to wait till the next day to receive a reply, considering the time zones, and in  most times we did not received all the answers we wanted.  So we tried to build better e- mails, longer ones. We started using topics and different colors to show them the different  subjects we were talking about and how they should address all of them on the same email.

Insight & Approach

We noticed that they started to understand the projects better when we added images and  color codes in e-mails, but then we discover that sometimes the same word we used for  something with one supplier meant a completely different thing for another supplier! This  discover helped us making a “dictionary” for our suppliers and what type of features each one  can present us, therefore being able to direct projects to a specific supplier that can achieve  what we expect with faster understanding.

Another surprise was that they started to suggest more solutions when what we asked was not  possible, since now they could visualize better our final objective. We learned that we can  trust them more as they showed more creativity and knowledge on technologies we have not  even heard about!

For the future, we are hoping to present them the tool of Co-Creation in the annual meeting  we have, since it is easier for us to understand each other in person. We have a better  relationship with our suppliers now and we think they would be thrilled to be part of our  projects as co-creators!

