1. Challenge     I work in an academic library. Our key goal is the provision of library services and resources to  university staff and students. However, we also offer a library membership option for community  members (not affiliated with the university). Recently library staff have been complaining that our  current internal procedure for signing up community members takes too long, has too many  steps and delays the process of becoming a member. The challenge we faced was “how might  we make our membership sign up process more streamlined”.    To address the challenge we asked 6 staff members to participate in a workshop. Our first step  in the workshop was to identify the main problems associated with the current process. Once  we had done this we would then use the tool of visualisation to help identify potential solutions.    2. Selection    Visualisation is a key design thinking tool for several reasons, but the key reason I believed  visualisation would be a great tool to use in our workshop was because of its ability to engage  all participants and ‘put everyone on the same page’. Visualising information, data, and ideas  has the potential to help make ideas more accessible and easier to understand. Ideas can seem  obvious to the person who has them, but the same idea can often seem convoluted, weird or  confusing to others when they hear it.     Visualising ideas enhances the opportunity for others to also understand, comprehend and ‘be  on the same page’. I believed visualisation would be a great tool for our workshop to assist in  generating ideas in order to solve the process problem we were hoping to solve.    3. Application    We began the workshop by spending time identifying where the major problems in our current  process were (we did this via a journey mapping activity). Once we had identified the problem  areas I then asked all workshop attendees to spend 10 minutes visualising what they thought a  better process would look like. Attendees were asked to pair up (3 groups of 2) and were given  3 coloured marker pens, and 2 sheets of A3 paper for the visualisation activity. The groups were  encouraged to visualise their idea of an optimised process however they chose.    At first some groups were apprehensive about using visualisation as a tool because of their  perceived inability to draw. I anticipated this, so to help alleviate their anxiety I demonstrated a  visualisation using only stick figures and basic shapes. The example helped to show how a  simple visualisation could easily convey an idea, and provided confidence to all attendees. After  all visualisations were complete, each group was given two minutes to present their  visualisation to the rest of the workshop attendees, speaking aloud their idea as it was  represented in their visualisation.

4. Insight    After the visualisation presentations I noticed that no two groups visualised ideas were the  same. This was great because it helped to ignite a much more creative discussion centered  around solutions. Having the three different visualisations available for everyone to see meant  that workshop attendees could easily reference both their and others ideas when suggesting a  better process for our membership sign up service. For example, it was easy for attendees to  pick ideas from different visualisations and combine them together to make a more optimal  streamlined process. The immediacy of visualised ideas made this much more effective than if  people simple spoke their ideas aloud.      5. Approach     If I was to run this workshop again one thing I would do differently would be to supplement the  visualisation presentations with the tool of storytelling. During the visualisation presentations I  simply asked the groups to linearly walk through their visualisation. This worked fine, but I  believe it could have been enhanced more, and made to be more engaging, if the groups  presented their visualisations in the form of a story.     Taking the listeners on a journey by building suspense, talking about the inherent tensions and  detailing a clear sequence of events from the perspective of the actual user, storytelling has the  ability to ‘create a cause’ and make a situation relatable by giving it life and character. It also,  like visualisation, helps to level people's expectations and put everyone on the same page. So,  if I were to run this workshop again, or a similar workshop, I would look to supplement the tool of  visualisation with storytelling.

