Use these visual thinking tools to explore, clarify, and communicate your ideas.
“If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.” — Albert Einstein
The best way to get an idea across is to provide the clearest possible picture of what you’re trying to communicate.
And the best way to create a clear, memorable picture?
Make it visual.
“But…I can’t draw!” you might say. To which I will reply: you can draw. Everyone can.
Here’s what’s more important, though:
Visual thinking is not the least bit dependent on artistic ability.
Neuroscientists have found that roughly two-thirds of the human brain is dedicated to visual processing. Let me say that again: vision and visual processing account for nearly two-thirds of your total brain activity(!).
You have a very, very visual brain.
And your visual brain can do some pretty amazing things. It can help you to…
- Explore, develop, and refine your ideas,
- Understand data, make connections, and draw conclusions,
- Experiment with potential solutions in a way that’s low-cost and low-risk,
- Clarify fuzzy concepts, and
- Communicate complex ideas simply.
Still with me? Great! Here are nine tools to tap into that visual brainpower.
The Mindmap
I love mind-mapping. It’s an easy, organic way to brainstorm thoughts freely without the need to worry about order or structure. It’s also a helpful tool that allows you to visually construct the ideas that are floating around in your brain so you can see, analyze, and make sense of them. I’m a big fan of pen-and-paper mind maps, but also recommend this handy tool to create digital, shareable ones.
The Inspiration Board
An inspiration board (or mood board, style board, idea board, theme board, or vision board) is a way to visually collect and curate bits of visual “stuff” that evoke a desired concept or theme. Thanks to Pinterest, most of us are pretty familiar with the online version. Screens are great and all, but you can gain more insight (and, um, inspiration) by taking your inspiration board a step further. Create a physical or digital collage of ideas—where you can move things around as you wish, add and subtract images, and see how pieces relate to one another and to the whole.
The Napkin Sketch
In 1967, two men walked into a bar, ordered a few drinks, grabbed a cocktail napkin…and made aviation history. One of them had sketched out a simple triangle on the napkin while posing this question: “What if we were to create a small, local airline that connected these three cities?” Voila, the idea for Southwest Airlines was born.
A napkin sketch is any quick, simple, rough visual explanation of an idea. With just a handful of basic shapes, you can translate complex concepts into simple, potent visuals. This book and this book by Dan Roam are great places to start.
The Conceptual Framework
Have you ever drawn a map, graph, flow chart, or Venn diagram? Congrats, you’ve just made a conceptual framework. Conceptual frameworks are analytical tools that help us organize ideas by clearly distinguishing the conceptual blocks that they’re built from. They can take on nearly unlimited forms. In the early stages of developing or testing an idea, creating a visual expression of the major concepts in play is an excellent way to expose areas of fuzzy thinking and to clarify the questions that need to be answered.
The Low-Fidelity Prototype
A prototype is simply a physical representation of an idea created with the purpose of testing and learning. It’s about bringing an idea to life in a way that’s tangible so people can experience it, react, and respond.
Low fidelity prototypes are quick, easy, and cheap to make. They can look like a sketch on a piece of paper, an amalgamation of popsicle sticks and tape, or early wireframes for an app. The lo-fi approach is smart because it allows you to test and learn more quickly and inexpensively. The faster you make your idea tangible, the faster you can start testing it and discovering how to make it better. Scrappy, imperfect-looking prototypes also have the benefit of making it easier for people to give input, offer critical feedback, and build on the idea.
The Empathy Map
An empathy map is a design research and user experience tool. Its purpose is to help you to gain deeper insight into the needs, behaviors, and attitudes of your users or customers. Empathy maps bring together observed behavior (“what did she say? what did he do?”) with inferences based on what users said and did (“what might she be thinking? how might he be feeling about the experience?”). These maps can serve as insightful customer profiles to guide ideation, innovation, and content creation.
The Process Diagram
A process diagram (otherwise known by its even-less-sexy name, “flowchart”) is a visual representation of the phases or steps in a process. A project management staple, process diagrams don’t have to be dry and lifeless—using icons, colors, or other visual signifiers to represent the stages of a process makes it instantly more communicative, friendly and memorable than words and shapes alone.
The Relationship Map
Relationship maps are diagrams of connections. They’re especially useful for understanding complex relational spaces and mapping lines of communication or interaction.
By visualizing the relationships of community and personal networks, customers, stakeholders, and other key players, you can better understand how their interests, needs, and motivations align and evolve.
The Storyboard
A storyboard is a progression of images representing the sequence of a narrative. It’s a series of snapshots that tell a story, from beginning to end. Storyboards originated at Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s, with an animator who realized that audiences would not watch a film unless its story gave them a reason to care about the characters.
The beauty of storyboards is that they allow you to identify all the essential pieces of the story you’re trying to communicate, and then experiment with changes in the storyline—including sequence, pace, and timing. Create rough storyboard “scenes” on sticky notes, and then move them around on a wall or whiteboard. Test a sequence by narrating the scenes out loud. What feels powerful? What’s working? What’s not working? Keep reordering the pieces until you find the sequence that works best and feels right.
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About the Author: Erin Rufledt helps companies develop their strategic messaging and brings it to life with visual design. She’s the founder of Luminary Lab, a communication design company that works with leaders and companies to align their vision, their brand and their marketing to win more business and clearly communicate about the work they do.
