Draw It Out

Draw It Out

The next phase of preliminary prototyping is to start developing images. To create a picture, you have to simplify your vision into something you can communicate visually. That’s why drawing and diagramming can be helpful. They force you to focus on how the product might connect with people in the real world.  

 

Word Cloud

Write down all the words that you hope will characterize your product. Aim for at least 10 words and as many as 20. These can be adjectives that describe positive attributes of your product (e.g. fast, cheap, easy, free, fun) or they can be feelings you hope your product will inspire (e.g. calm, safe, confident, informed, knowledgeable). Alternatively, you can include words that describe core values that will guide you (e.g. transparency, accuracy, independence, reliability, trustworthiness). You may also want to create word clouds out of comments you hear from people about their needs, their problems, and their hopes— or about their reactions to what you’ve shown them.

 

You can draw out your own word cloud on paper, or use a simple free online tool like wordclouds.com. If you draw it yourself, use size, darkness, color or frequency to indicate the relative importance of words. In other words, you can make the words that matter most bigger, darker, or brighter, or you can write them more frequently in your word cloud. If you use a tool like wordclouds.com, you can type in your words or upload a Word Doc and then adjust the size, color, shape and style of your word cloud online. You can download and print or share the resulting image file.

 

End Result: A lively visual that conveys some of the characteristics that are important to you about the product you’re developing.

Product Encounter Sequence (PES)

Whatever your product is, it’s only a small part of your user’s life. Before and after a user encounters your product, she has things she needs to accomplish and competing demands on her time, money, effort and skill. The PES map illustrates the path the user takes to arrive at the product. It also can illustrate what the user does after encountering the product.

 

Example: A listener discovers the Atlantic’s new podcast by seeing a Tweet mentioning the most recent episode. He clicks on a link and downloads the podcast episode to listen to later. Commuting home from work later that day, he listens to the first half of the episode. Upon arriving home he clicks subscribe to get the future episodes delivered and clicks the share button to send the episode to a friend interested in the topic. He returns to the podcast later in the week. To draw out that process, I might draw a picture of a Tweet, followed by a car or train commuting, followed by a subscribe button, followed by a share button, followed by a picture of a house (indicating other non-podcast related activities). Each picture can have a short phrase below it captioning that part of the process.

 

End Result: A simple visualization of the process by which someone encounters the product and the context in which he or she may use it.

Venn Diagram

Most new products combine elements of things that already exist. Draw a venn diagram to illustrate how the core elements of what you’re developing intersect. These diagrams allow you to visualize the multiple parts that make up a new whole.  

 

End Result: A quick sketch can illustrate some of the primary principles or ideas behind what you’re developing.

Two by Two Matrix

Draw a two by two grid to illustrate where you’d like your product to fall along two axes. The X axis might be price while Y is quality. Or one axis might highlight frequency of publication while the other depicts the length of the material published. The point is to sketch a quick chart showcasing the characteristics you’re envisioning for the product as a way of noting possible positioning choices. The format was famously used by the Boston Consulting Group for a market growth-share matrix, with growth rate on one axis and market share on the other. For our purposes here, the key element is thinking about how your product might be positioned along two distinct axes.

End Result: You’ll begin the process of thinking about how you’re positioning your product to be distinct in the marketplace and how you’ll communicate that distinction to potential partners, customers, journalists or anyone else interested in what you’re doing.