A Picture is worth a Thousand Words

My professional path has allowed me to work with many industries and type of customers - looking at just my recent year and it has taken me into classic manufacturing, automotive, defense as well as apparel. Something that has been a signature of my work across all these customers is the fact that I’ve been very visual in the way that I’ve been communicating. I’ve been using mockups to illustrate my ideas from pre-study, architectural reviews, scoping workshops, concept discussions, down to developer input and user stories. What I can say is this – independent of industry or audience, these artifacts are always appreciated and well received.

Engineers, spare part catalogue editors, configuration managers,   pattern makers, buyers, controllers, designers, .... I can continue this list ... managers, project sponsors, project owners, project managers, business developers, SW architects, SW tester, and SW developers, .... what do they have in common? Well, they want (and need) to be able to understand at least to some extent the IT solution that will affect them or that they will be responsible for.

Here is a small prezi on the topic that might give you some more food for thought. Enjoy (and don't miss the movie clip at the end)!

As you might understand by now I’m quite clear on my view on this topic. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you should stop writing all nice diagrams, charts, boxes, and lanes that you do today (as long as they have a good purpose ;). But the audience for those artifacts is limited to experts, and unlike what you might think even techies at the IT-side find visual illustrations of a topic useful.

If you haven't used mockups before there is one trap that you will fall into: your audience will look at the mockup as something finished and fully covering – end users expect the solution to look and behave as the mockup and developers will try to realize every little inch of the picture without questioning. To mitigate this behavior, it is very important to apply some expectation management. The purpose of the mockup, its usage and “how to read it” should be clear to the audience (and preferably repeated as often as the mockups are shown ;).

It feels great to be understood and even better for the audience at the receiving end to actually understand. So try it out!

One last thing regarding mockups - They don't replace human interaction and verbal communication. It's a complement to that and all your current tools to make yourself understood.

Robert Wallerblad

www.infuseit.com