Example Reflection – Visualization

1. Challenge & Selection

When I graduated in Civil Engineering, I created a company with my architect friend. At the

beginning, we used to make projects for our friends and relatives. However, we reached a

point that we couldn't do more clients, even though we pay more advertising or look for

merchants in the street.     So, I started to search for Design Thinking and its power to help people find solutions to their

problems. One of the Design Thinking tools is the Visualization. It uses images, histories,

maps with an objective to transform ideas into something concrete and reachable. As the

company was going through financial problems, I scheduled a meeting with my partner to

find together solutions and I brought this tool to discuss.      2. Application

To start, I explained how Visualization works and in this moment with my partner, was the

first time we began to map our customers' profiles instead of judgments created by ourselves

or try to find our clients by merchants on the street. Using a blackboard we described each

persona of our clients, going from someone young to the case of someone more old. To

imagine each profile we searched on the internet like Instagram, to create a pattern for their

behavior.    We started the questions before trying a solution, we thought not like we see the world, but

like how your clientes could see by their eyes. For that, in the blackboard I started to do

maps with particulars of each client’s profiles and listing each one’s characters. For example,

how they live, how they pass their day-to-day and the most important was possible to

visualizate where was the wound of each one and how they see how relevant the civil

engineering services are.        3. Insight & Approach

With this powerful tool we could finally see that our judgments of where we may find our

clients was totally wrong. Consequently, this mistake was affecting our sales. The

Visualization tool allows you to see the other side with empathy, so that you can realize

hipotesis before testing them.     Of course, it’s possible to improve the use of this tool in your context because we tried to

create personas based on unknown people. So was just supposed that probably won’t

always be correct. However, we are seeing results. For example, we are making more

projects and spending less in advertising. To improve the use of this tool, we are going to

deliver a form before starting a project, so we can try to understand each profile better and

we will give a feedback form to all clients after each project is finished.

