The Visualization Tool as Meta Language

Challenge

In my company, we are developing technical products. As an engineer, I sometimes have the  feeling of speaking another language than my business colleagues. For the technical design of  a product, the technical and economic aspects of the product must be taken into account. This  presents the challenge of developing a concept in an interdisciplinary team by speaking the  same language. Words within the different domains can have different meanings, are too  domain specific or describe techniques, that are not known to the others. Therefore, I decided  to use a design thinking tool to meet the challenge.

Selection

The visualization tool seemed to be the right tool. Instead of the spoken business or technical  language we used a meta level language, the language of visualization. Unique Maya already  introduced different ways how to visualize what one is thinking, including drawings, photos,  videos and PowerPoint slides. Especially the PowerPoint slides were, what I was already used  to. But for the workshop I created, my decision was that every non-digital visualization should  be allowed, so that we are able to pin them to the wall and relocate them as needed. With  this tool each party is forced to simplify their expressions in a form of a visualization that they  feel comfortable.

Application

The first workshop took way longer than we planned. The business economists draw  customers, how the customers interact with our product, what the product outputs and at  which point in the process of interaction the customer needs to pay for our service. While we  (engineers) draw how the actions flow through our architecture, where data flows into which  direction and so on. It was fun to stand in front of a large picture of our product and to directly  interact with the specifications being made by the business economists. Afterwards I  transferred our drawings into a PowerPoint slide, which served as our first specification of  interfaces and architecture.

In further workshops the economists began to bring pictures form talks with customers into  our workshops. Some of the pictures could directly being pinned to our product wall. This and  that we got used to the process of drawing those pictures made our workshops faster and  therefore more efficient. But never the less, over the development phase of the product some  readjustments of the product design were still needed.

Insights

This tool helped me to think about, what really matters. For example, on programming  framework can be used for many different functions, but if I need to draw a picture of that  framework, only the most important function matters. Furthermore, interacting with my  business colleagues by using visualizations helped to understand, what they are trying to solve  and sometimes what our misunderstandings where. The result, a large picture of the product,  even helped us developing the product. Having a visualization instead of a written  specification makes the task more comprehensible.

Approach

The visualization tool is now accepted and the most used tool when we specify our functions  with the economists. It is now also being used by the economists to clear the specifications  with our customers, which has the positive effect that we can use those visualizations directly  in our later process.

The problem with the simplification of using a visualization for our specifications is, that they  can more easily being interpreted in a manner, which can fast be fulfilled but might leak in  quality. For this, I think about additionally using the story telling tool, to define stories, which  need to be fulfilled by the product. That can be stories, how a customer uses the product or  stories of customer experiences which should not take place.

