A practical guide to design visioning - Part 3
Communicating vision to make an impact + case studies
This is the final article in a 3 part series on design visioning. In the first article I covered the basics of what design visioning is and why it’s important. In the second article I shared some useful visioning tools and techniques, as well as how to make visioning a priority in your daily work. This article will go over how to communicate visioning to make an impact and share a few case studies.
Communicating Vision
During a few of my early visioning projects at MySpace in 2008 and Sony in 2010, I naively thought making the time to do the work would be the biggest hurdle; once it was done, people would naturally gravitate to it and creative sparks would fly. Rookie mistake!
Later at YouTube when we started a full fledged visioning team in 2014, I learned how to get my audience to engage with the work throughout the entire process — not just with the output. Collaboration and inclusion throughout the project became critical to its success. You know that old saying “If you build it, they will come…”? Well, not exactly. You need your audience to feel like they were part of building it with you to get them invested and excited about the outcome. Here are a few techniques I’ve picked up over the years:
- Workshop your ideas early and often: Set up sharing sessions as early as you can in your process. Go beyond your immediate design and cross-functional teams — reach out to anyone and everyone across the company for their reactions and point-of-view. Put your work in front of your legal team, recruiting, marketing, and any other team you can engage with. After all, they’re important consumers of the vision for your company and product.
- Get creative about capturing eyeballs and feedback: Set up a table in your cafe or common area to grab people individually for a few minutes during breaks and lunch. The more exposure you create for your work, the more it will become part of ongoing conversations and eventually it can even become a reference point for strategic debates. You can set up office hours in your design studio, print out storyboards and display them in a prominent common space, or even find a spare monitor/TV to display a slideshow of early ideas.
- Bring your ideas to existing well attended forums: It’s great to formally present your vision work when it’s all packaged up and done, but scheduling a special visioning share-out can often result in 3 people showing up. Your colleagues mean well, but they’re busy! And if they haven’t seen visioning work yet, it probably doesn’t sound like a priority. So that means you have to go to where people are already showing up. Grab time on the agendas of standing team meetings, project team syncs, and eventually larger sharing forums like a teamwide meeting or even an all-hands.
- Create a destination for your work: It’s easy to forget that even though you see your work all the time, your audience may not remember what the project is, what it’s called or how to get back to it. A destination can be as simple as creating a deck with an internal shortlink, or building an internal microsite, or even putting up a physical board in your work area to make your ideas as easy to access as possible.
- Share externally: Whether it’s a blog post, a local meetup, sharing with family/friends, or even a conference talk, bring your work to a wider audience. Obviously not everyone can share early visioning work with the larger community, but when you can — do it! You’ll gain a valuable external perspective that doesn’t have to account for any internal institutional baggage.
By the time your visioning work is ready to be presented and shared widely, your stakeholders and teams will have already have all of the context around the work because they’ve had early visibility and been collaborating with you throughout the process.
Of course it’s impossible to bring everyone along for the entire ride, and in some cases even preferable to keep your working group more tightly knit for portions of your process. When you’re trying to reach a new audience that’s unfamiliar with what you’ve been doing, it’s helpful to create a recap of your process to give them context, so they’re not just seeing the end product.
And last but not least, it’s important to tie your work back to the end goal and the impact you’re looking to make with your vision. Don’t leave it up to your audience to connect the dots. Simply putting great work out there and assuming people will tie it to larger company goals or future strategy discussions isn’t enough — be explicit about connecting your work to the bigger picture.
Case Study: Visioning doesn’t happen overnight. The story of the Thumbtack Pro “Services” view
Remember, you’re running a marathon, not a sprint. Be patient! A retrospective on a recent project at Thumbtack is a great example of both how much time visioning can take, but also how big an impact it can make. Last year we launched a “Services” view on our pro app that aggregates all of a pros settings and insights into one place. It’s meant to give our pros a destination to see how they’re doing and tune their settings as they get more experienced using Thumbtack. By the time we launched it, we’d been through a nearly 8 month process of research and exploration to build a case for launching a brand new tab on the pro app.
It started with a few quick sketches between a few colleagues that we took to a few meetings and got lukewarm responses to. At the time we had bigger fish to fry, and while most people thought it was a good idea, they didn’t see an immediate need. We just weren’t in a position to think (much less talk) long-term solutions. But we didn’t give up! We kept refining our ideas, building a set of principles for the new experience, and gradually collecting customer support feedback and research to make a stronger case.
A few months later we started getting more specific research insights that our pros were having a difficult time understanding how to control their services using a variety of fragmented settings that were buried in a dark corner of our pro app. So we revisited the idea and spent a few weeks doing some high-level white-boarding and discussions. That led to a set of stories with wireframe flows that we took to a leadership-level product review, which inspired our team and leadership to invest in the area. While we launched the V1 a year ago, we’ve gone through a few iterations of the “Services” view and we continue to think about how to improve its usage and comprehension based on our original vision.
Case Study: Strategy coupled with execution on Thumbtack Pro profiles
The design team at Thumbtack has really stepped up its visioning game in the last 2 years. We went from being a fairly tactical team that went from project-to-project and feature-to-feature, designing mostly MVPs and V1s, to a team that delivers strategic vision work to the entire company and then executes against the visions iteratively.
Nowadays we dedicate a few cycles each year to company-level vision, which we typically do for the beginning of the year and mid-year company meetings. These are fairly intense efforts with multiple designers (and sometimes a motion designer) that are highly visible and impactful, and are referred to by our entire company for many months as guideposts for where we want to see our product go. Smaller team-level visioning efforts spin up several times a year, typically with just one or two designers focused for a few weeks on how to invent or re-imagine a specific product area.
Recently one of our design leads led a visioning and research effort focused on our pro profiles. Pro profiles hadn’t been updated in several years and were fairly outdated. Additionally, profiles weren’t a core part of the customer experience in the past, but with our new Instant Match strategy, profiles were quickly becoming one of the most important parts of how customers browsed and compared pros for their projects. We needed to completely rethink and unify profiles. The vision work for profiles kicked off quickly and included research, a new information architecture, a unification plan for how profiles would appear to customers and be editable by pros, a set of promising new features that we’ve immediately started to build, and profile brand expression work with our creative team.
The research and audit phase helped clarify an ideal profile IA based on the issues with the current IA and the product goals for the next year.
Next the team explored a variety of new feature ideas based on both foundational research and pain-points we’d been hearing from customers and pros.
After presenting the vision to leadership and across the teams, we quickly identified a few top new features to start designing and building. One of the most promising features is a way for pros to showcase their past projects to customers.
Last but not least, we worked closely with our creative team to explore how a branded Thumbtack Pro profile could stand out from other service profiles and create a best-in-class experience for pros to showcase their work. We’re still working on this, but are excited by how much progress we’ve already made based on this visioning effort.
Case Study: Using video narrative to go further into the future
For our 2018 company-wide kickoff, the design team decided to go further into the future to show what Thumbtack would look like for its customers and pros when we’d fully realized our new product strategy.
We eliminated all of the constraints we think about day-to-day, and really focused on the magic moments for our future customer and pros. We wrote the script, cast internal employee “actors”, shot the video at an employee home and our office, and used a Thumbtack pro camera man and editor to assemble the video. We were scrappy and got the entire vision done from start to finish in 2 weeks!
There was minimal UI shown superimposed on the screen to assist with the storytelling. One of the designers on our team took the opportunity to learn some AfterFX to do some motion design to bring the UI to life.
The video was shown to the entire company to inspire everyone about the future experiences our product will enable for our customers and pros. To complement the video, we built a simple microsite to give everyone an easy place to refer back and re-watch. The vision piece was a big hit, inspiring our teams and showing an elegant product experience we hope to achieve in the future!
Past visioning projects
Here’s a few quick snippets of visioning projects I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of in my past roles:
At Sony I worked on conceptualizing and then building a “universal” commerce tool that would allow us to build and deploy editorial and commerce experiences for any type of artist — whether it was an emerging artist with one single, or a legacy artist with dozens of albums, movies, merchandise, concert tickets, and editorial content. It started as an idea that an engineer and I proposed to help alleviate a series of manual processes, and resulted in building an internal tool that drastically simplified the design and deployment process for all of our artist stores and sites.
At YouTube I worked on several visioning projects, and while I can’t share most of the the work externally, we focused on the future of how individuals and groups thought about collecting and consuming video content throughout the day in different contexts. We spent quite a bit of time doing foundational research, and created several videos (both scrappy and professional quality) and user journey flows. My visioning work at YouTube started as scrappy self-initiated projects, to later becoming small team initiatives between design and research, to finally becoming a full-fledged visioning team.
One foot in the present, one in the future
Since publishing the first article in this series, I’ve received a lot of great questions, several of which have asked how to make visioning a priority right away, especially for smaller teams. It’s important to remember that while visioning is a great tool you can add to your team’s arsenal, it can take time to develop into a successful practice that works for your specific team.
Some teams can dive right in (often bigger teams at more established businesses that are already positioned to have some team members to think about the future), while other teams (typically smaller, more resource constrained) have to stay focused on tactical work and shipping short-term features before they can start to gradually dip their toes into more strategic efforts. It can take time, but it’s worthwhile. The beauty of this tool is that you can test your way into what works best for you and your team.
I’d love to hear more of your questions and thoughts. And if you’re interested in learning more about how we work at Thumbtack or sharing your visioning experiences, you can find me at jsassoon@thumbtack.com. Oh, and we’re hiring!
