Reflection - Visualization

Design Thinking for Innovation

Challenge

I am a Product Designer at a startup that works with AI and Machine Learning. I

design digital products for enterprise clients. Like most designers who design for  enterprise clients, we too face some difficulties while pitching new feature ideas or

trying to redesign existing features to make them easier and more efficient. We have a  trade marketing platform that helps client ensure their market visibility by giving

insights on their share of voice in the market. For example, the clients want to ensure  that they have more visibility than their competitors in the retail outlets through  banners and posters. This particular challenge was about optimizing our efforts and  maximizing the resources the clients already have.    Selection

This particular problem needed an interactive prototype as well as an animation to  communicate the idea to the client. As a designer, I use visualizations all the time  when explaining ideas to other stakeholders so the selection was easy.     Application

As already mentioned, we have a trade marketing platform that gives the users (who  are mostly top management of our client organization) insights on their share of voice

in the market. This platform also lets them manage their field force. So the workflow  looks something like this:

1. The field force goes to retail stores and inspect the condition of banners and

posters provided by our client organization (Let's call them xCash), as well as

provide new if necessary.

2. They capture photos with their smartphones and upload them to our platform  3. Our AI model automatically detects from the photos how many xCash banners

and posters are there in the outlet

4. Our platform gives xCash management detailed insights.

But whenever xCash starts providing new banners or posters, our team needs to  annotate them to teach the AI model how to identify the new materials. It cost both

parties money as well as time. So I came up with an idea to annotate the new banners

right inside the mobile app the field force is using but it was hard to sell to the clients  because they were not sure how it will work. So I created an animation explaining the  process as well as an interactive prototype for them to try it out and get an idea of how  easy and effortless it was. The xCash management was very happy when I presented

the concept and we started building it in the app.    Insight

An image is worth a thousand words and that is definitely true in this case. Sometimes

just pitching the idea verbally or in written form is not enough. The same idea that  was hard to sell ended up being loved by the same people with the help of  visualization. It made communication easier and clearer.

Approach

Though I knew the power of visualization, sometimes I ignored it in the primary  stages where the concept is still forming. This experience helped me understand that

I should use visualization more often, at the concept level, to better communicate with

people.

