Models as the Best Supporting Actor

The nature of modeling is to simplify, abstract from the reality, in which process, of course, you will lose some trueness of the originality. If we consider that creating personas, journey maps, mental models and ecosystems is the means for us, designers to make sense of the reality, integrating these models is a way to maximizing the learnings through impactful storytelling.

Due to the fact of lack of context, or information overload, models themselves do not perform well in delivering an impactful story. When being asked to create a research finding deck, designers normally excel in creating great visual components, clear navigation from slide to slide, but we tend to neglect the power of words, in both written format and verbal format. Therefore, in order to create a compelling narrative, we need words, in the first place.

From my personal experience, I find that starting by jotting down the entire story line is very effective. With the knowledge from the research process and the modeling exercises, you have a lot in your mind, so that you need to get them out in a linear format. After a couple rounds of deleting or reconstructing, you will have a complete story with the characters, the setting, the plot, the conflict and the resolution. Next step, you break the story line into slides by adding emphasis to those transitioning moments, writing a profound headline of each slide. The models we made earlier won’t come to play until the last step — mapping different aspects of the models to better support the headlines or even re-creating some of the models to do so.

Now, everything starts to act as an integral part to telling the whole story: the characters become the users, represented by the personas; the setting is the ecosystem; the plot is the journey map and mental model; the conflict becomes the insights which leads to the How might we; lastly you have your future state as the resolution.