Example Reflection – Visualization

Challenge & Selection

I am a student of IT Engineering and my/our challenge is to make a place in our competitive  field. We are a small team of 3 members who love programming and are very keen to learn  new languages of programming. We have gained sufficient knowledge and are ready to step  up our game and enter the corporate world. We want to make websites and apps for the  small companies or businesses as we are now capable of it. But it is not that simple to be  honest. There is too much competition and nobody likes to work with newbie freelancers  like us. So, our challenge is to achieve our first big break by locking a project with a  company. We have discussed about several design thinking tools and we decide to use the  Visualization tool. Visualization is about using pictures. It pushes us beyond using just  language. It allows us to reflect in a non-verbal way. We selected visualization because we  want our client to visualize what they will get as an end product by working with us. We  want them to achieve confidence in us by visualizing our work.

Application

So let me tell you this story about how I applied it. We made an appointment with a hotel  owner and we were going to present him our idea of a mobile app. He wanted to hire a  company to develop such app and we went ahead and arranged an appointment. We made  a prototype before some days of meeting. We listened to his requirements in the project.  We understood what he wanted and instead of making him understand what we think we  presented out prototype as a visual representation. We made him walk through our  prototype and made him understand how we are going to approach it. Our prototype was  different from his requirements and so we explained him how we are going to change it  according to his requirement. It was hard to tell what he was feeling about our  presentation.

So after finishing the presentation he said that he was not going to give us the project  before but after the presentation he changed his mind because he now has clear  understanding about what he will get. He also made us keep our original features in  prototype because he was quite impressed by it.

Insight

What we have learned from applying this tool is that people from non-technical background  doesn’t fully understand what we say in words. It makes much more simpler for them to  match our thinking if we use visualization to speak for us. They can quickly gain a picture of  what they will get as an end product. I talked with the client and he said the same. He said it  was easy to reject us because we were newbies and were not reliable. But he said that our  work speaks for us and that is the reason we got the project.

Though many companies prefer to make a model after acquiring the project we as a  newbies have to be one step ahead to make out client believe in us by our work.

Approach

We got quite good response with the visualization tool and we would like to improve how  we use the visualization tool by adding variations in different prototype. We would also love  to use old work as an example in new similar projects.

Apart from Visualization I think storytelling can get quite effective as we gain some  experience. We can share how we worked with other companies under particular  circumstances and achieved what client wanted.

