The Communicative Power of Visualization

Author: Yareli Thomas

Challenge

As a user experience designer within an organization that builds web applications, I work with a broad range of stakeholders that include

clients representing a diverse set of vertical markets, sales and marketing professionals,  project managers, project owners within an Agile software development framework,  backend and front-end developers.

In order to build successful web applications, we must start by building a shared understanding of the users and their contexts. Often neither written nor spoken language alone is suﬃcient for that to happen across the diverse knowledge domains represented by all stakeholders.

Visualization is a perfect tool that allows me to translate concepts across disciplines without losing the fundamental meaning to the jargon of each represented profession. By leveraging story boarding, journey and ecosystem maps, ﬂow charts, or simple diagrams, I facilitate the process in which all stakeholders build a shared understanding of the problem at hand in order to collaborate on an optimal solution.

Application

In working with a client on a new web application, I begin with a discovery process. Sometimes I facilitate a discovery workshop that allows all stakeholders to spend time with our team to build a shared understanding of the problem, and to start co-designing a solution. Activities that are part of a discovery workshop include creating user personas,  drawing journey maps, ecosystem maps, or story boards.

User personas, a tool I use frequently, while not entirely visual (there is a lot of written information included in them), contain one important visual element—a sketch or a photo of a person. Humans have an emotional response to faces of other humans. Having a visual representation of a person’s face, even if roughly sketched with a few strokes to indicate the eyes and the mouth, allows stakeholder to relate to the user for whom they’re building a product. Personas are, in my opinion, empathy building tools that can transform how stakeholders approach the problem at hand.

Drawing and viewing a graphic representation of a user’s ecosystem or a journey the user travels in life while encountering and interacting with the product or service gives all stakeholders an opportunity to take a step back, assess their own understanding of the ecosystem within which they’re building a product, exchange insights, and build a shared understanding with the team that will be building the product. No written requirements documents share the breadth and depth of the needed knowledge quite so eﬀectively as visualizing it with tools such journey maps, ecosystem maps, or story boards. Below is an example of an ecosystem map.

Insight & Approach

Ultimately, I think, it’s all about visual story-telling. We start talking about the situation at hand; we tell the story of the people involved and the contexts in which the story occurs. And while doing that, we document the story visually. We draw sketches of the characters, we use symbols to indicate actions. It’s a simple and powerful way to build a visual representation of all the actors in the story, all the actions they undertake, and all the events they are subject to.

Visualization techniques allow us to overcome language barriers (implicit or explicit) and to get at the meaning of what we try to convey in a very direct, experiential way. They are also a great way to oﬄoad cognitive eﬀort of trying to keep many moving parts in memory; instead we visualize the pieces through drawing and diagramming, and we move the pieces around until the visualization represents everyone’s understanding of the subject matter.

Sometimes the greatest challenge is to get participants fully engaged. People who are unaccustomed to visualization techniques may feel inadequate and shy about getting up and drawing. I’d like to experiment with diﬀerent activities and ways to encourage involvement. Perhaps some simple warm-up exercises could be leveraged at the onset of a workshop to give the participants a taste of what’s coming. It is also possible that diﬀerent groups will require slightly diﬀerent ratio of visual and verbal story-telling. Maybe at times, instead of insisting on everyone drawing, I could encourage participants to talk, and draw diagrams myself until they feel more comfortable stepping up to pick up the marker. I believe that meeting people where they are is often a more eﬀective way of getting desired outcomes than forcing them out of their comfort zone too soon.

