Think Visually and Design Conceptually

It seems like everybody wants to think like a user experience designer these days. Consider this excerpt from IDEO President Tim Brown’s June 2008 Harvard Business Review article:

“ … Unaffordable or unavailable health care … energy usage that outpaces the planet’s ability to support it, education systems that fail many students …

“These problems all have people at their heart. They require a human-centered, creative, iterative, and practical approach to finding the best ideas and ultimate solutions.”

It’s flattering, but it also hides a dirty little secret: even designers don’t always think like designers. I think it’s time to review a couple of things UX professionals should be doing particularly well.

Thinking visually

If you have any doubts about the deep response we bald apes have to visual stimuli, consider how much subjective information is packed into this combination of 12 lines:

Whether you’re Christian or not, it is impossible to take this geometric shape at face value. Instead, it instantaneously produces within the individual a complex tangle of cultural influences, personal beliefs, historical perspective, and emotion. Thinking visually is one way to harness the great power of the visual, to explore sophisticated connections that remain hidden in linear, textual data.

Ours is a visual world, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean the environment supports thinking visually. Dave Gray is the founder of XPLANE, a visual thinking consultancy, and he says that we’re a visually illiterate society. If that’s true, we had to work pretty hard to get so ignorant. I say that because people were using visual communication for 24,000 years or so before the first written composition showed up:

Gray says that while we might be quite sophisticated in our understanding of visual information, we are generally weak as visual communicators. People tend to think that the ability to draw with a marker on a whiteboard is binary, that you can either do it or you can’t. Dan Roam, another visual communication expert, breaks that myth down in his book Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. Roam says that when it comes to thinking visually, people fit in one of three categories:

Black Pen people

“They show no hesitation in putting the first bold marks on an empty page. They come across as immediate believers in the power of pictures as a problem-solving tool, and have little concern about their drawing skills – regardless of how primitive their illustrations may turn out to be.”

Yellow Pen people

“They’re often very good at identifying the most important or interesting aspects of what someone else has drawn … These people tend to be more verbal, usually incorporate more words and labels into their sketches, and are more likely to make comparisons to ideas that require supporting verbal descriptions.”

Red Pen people

“These people are least comfortable with the use of pictures in a business context. When many images and ideas have been captured on the whiteboard, the Red Pen people … redraw everything, often coming up with the clearest picture of them all.”

Dave Gray and Dan Roam fine-tune their Black Pen clients’ visual thinking and help raise Yellow Pen and Red Pen clients’ visual literacy. Effective visual facilitators and visually literate participants can attack all sorts of business problems.

But thinking visually isn’t exclusively a group exercise; we can each use the powerful aspects of visual thinking for our day-to-day challenges. The creation of anything visual, for example, is an act of exclusion rather than inclusion. To create this article, I wrote many more words than I needed and then I edited the piece back to the version you’re reading. But with visual thinking, there is nothing drawn at first and you decide what to add, one element at a time. This makes each element significant and influential, which forces you to create a hierarchy and all but ignore everything that isn’t of the highest importance. Roam advises: “Find ways to cut ruthlessly from everything our eyes bring in – we need to practice visual triage.”

We can also use visual thinking’s ability to mirror our natural approach to problem-solving. The brain, even for the most focused of humans, doesn’t work in a linear fashion. It jumps around; it backs up; it goes sideways. Visual communication can be just as non-linear when necessary. It’s rarely a straight line to innovation or inspiration.

Designing conceptually

I don’t have much patience for designers who concern themselves only with how things look and I loathe organizational structures that wall off team members according to limited and arbitrary definitions of responsibility. Designers need to understand and in some way be accountable for the overall solution because a user’s experience doesn’t stop and start at specific moments. Many organizations still ask designers to do little more than “just make it look pretty” and any designer that accepts that limited role feeds the status quo. The status quo won’t get it done if you believe, as I do, that the design of products and services for human beings is dictated by these three points:

These points put a lot of pressure on the definition of problems while positioning visual design as a subset of something much larger and more significant.

Designing conceptually is about addressing the major user experience issues for a product or service before tackling the pixel-level design elements. When designers get involved in defining and displaying a project’s overall concepts it improves deliverables by creating a context for design elements and it maximizes the value of the rest of the team by aligning their efforts.

Designing conceptually will only get more important as Agile and similar iterative development approaches gain popularity. The illusion of the waterfall process has been that one can complete all major design before development starts. Iterative development is much more realistic, but UX teams have struggled to reconcile a holistic user experience with design work executed in stages. For my current project, I researched and displayed the major concepts driving our solution and helped the rest of the team first understand, then improve a handful of diagrams. The effort has already paid for itself with the alignment of requirements, UX, and development team members.

An overall conceptual design should be flexible enough to respond to the fluctuations of each iteration. It will likely get tweaked as the project becomes more fully realized. For the detailed design work inside each iteration, you might consider using Lisa Reichelt’s washing machine model. In “Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good,” she connects iterative Agile practices to iterative user-centered design practices (Agile’s user stories align with UCD’s personas and scenarios, for example.)

The intent of conceptual design is to inform incremental design work, rather than to create a complete solution that gets cut up into iteration-specific portions.