Visual Communication: How Good Designers Present Information
Visual communication is extremely powerful. It is key to communicating ideas, whether those ideas are related to a web page visual, a software prototype, or a concept that is not in itself visual, such as a plan of action or a web of relationships.
So much gets lost in verbal communication and email. Whether your team collaborates in person or through remote methods, the original vision for the project can easily be miscommunicated.
This is a frequent problem in product design, as our podcast with Adam Richardson earlier this year covered. Leaders need to have a grip on both external and internal communications, and visual communication is a part of that.
People remember visual language more easily than verbal
Think about simply looking at web content: what feeling do the logos and images evoke? How do they fit in with the content? In this blog post you’re reading, do you see things that create emphasis on certain points like colored text, boldface, italics, and other modifiers? Or is it a wall of 12-point Times New Roman?
Chances are that you do, and you’re more likely to remember the more salient points of the article because of those visual cues.
People are busy and they forget things. If your designer gives a presentation about how they plan on building a new app and how they plan on getting users to interact with it. Without some sort of visual cue, both you and the designers are likely to forget quite a bit of what exactly was said by the next morning.
The need for clear visual aids applies to every conversation throughout the product development process.
Visual communication tips for designers
When verbally communicating in a meeting or development call, it’s a good idea to stop every 10-15 minutes to actually map out your ideas. Recording or writing them down is a good first step so that they’re not forgotten, but to preserve perspective you must create a deliverable right then and there.
We recommend creating a deliverable right after a productive conversation with a client. Don’t wait until later in the day or the next day after the various perspectives discussed have been lost in day-to-day life.
Review the conversation and create a deliverable with a visual presentation such as a click model, wire frame, relationship chart, or journey map with context. This way, you’ll have something to refer to when things inevitably change in the design process. If you’re able to draw a visual aid on paper or digital program during collaborative sessions or crucial conversations, that’s even better!
Starting with a visual model helps both designers and clients remember context and build upon consistency. User experience for most people is very visually-oriented, after all.
Learn more
Nick Comito is a UX designer at Praxent and is happy to work with you at any stage of your project from design and inception to user research and testing. Praxent can craft a custom solution for your app and software development projects as we stay on top of UI and UX trends to ensure a great user experience.
If you are actively seeking a software solution to deal with a problem or expand on an idea, schedule a free consult with our design team and we will walk you through the process personally.