Visual Storytelling to Elevate Your Vision Communication

Yutong Xue at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/gxGaByNqs7g

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

What makes a great vision

[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Rachel, a product designer at Meta. Today I'm going to be talking about how visual storytelling can elevate your vision communication. Let's get started.

[00:00:09] First of all, a little bit about me. I've worked at Google and Meta in the past couple of years. At Google I worked on products like the Google Pixel phone, the Google Pixel Watch in its very early days, and at Meta I've worked on Workplace, the enterprise product we sell to our customers. Most recently I'm working on the metaverse and working on avatars to prep for the future of the metaverse. Across these kinds of experiences I've seen a lot of visions being created and also presented to leadership, to teams. There have been good ones and there have been not so great ones. I personally have seen visual storytelling play a very key role in making sure the visions are well received and also get buy-in and also get excitement from the team, and that's what I want to share with everyone today: how visual storytelling can elevate vision communication.

[00:01:05] Before we get into a bit more detail, I'll first talk about what are great visions. I think we'll agree on many things, but I want to just talk about them first. Great visions, first of all, they should get people excited. That's really the reason why we create visions. They are things we want people to believe about the future.

[00:01:26] One of the examples I'm showing here is last year, when Mark Zuckerberg was talking to people about the metaverse in last year's Facebook Connect. The metaverse is of course still very, very early, and it's abstract, and there are still a lot of things that haven't been defined, but he was able to show people what the metaverse can look like. He didn't just tell us, he showed prototypes, he showed videos, he showed how things can work in the metaverse, and that kind of realistic representation of the future was very exciting. Internally at Meta I heard so many other people saying, after seeing Facebook Connect, let's change team, let's go work for the metaverse. And that's what I did. I got very excited about the metaverse because of the future that he presented to us, and I changed over to work on the metaverse and the avatars.

[00:02:20] At the same time, visions evoke emotions, so they help people to connect with the future. Oftentimes people don't remember the exact features that are being presented, but they will remember how the visions make people feel. For example, here the example I have is back in 2016, when Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, talked about Airbnb Trips to everyone. I still remember he showed a video of a lonely traveler who went on a trip and how Airbnb Trips helped him to transform what the trip would be. I remember the music, the visuals, the story. I don't remember the exact features or whatever they were trying to promote, but I remember how it made me feel. So feelings stick to people, and when presenting visions I think focusing on the feelings over the features is very helpful, so that people connect and they remember.

[00:03:20] To sum up, great visions help people to see things and also feel the future. It's like you almost can touch the future. The future is not here with us yet, but visions bring it closer to today and people can feel it almost now.

[00:03:37] So I want to share how visual storytelling can play a role. Visuals and stories can help people connect, can help people to see and help people to feel the future. I would like to go over a couple of things today. First of all I want to talk about stories, so how stories can help ground visions. Second, talk about visuals, so how visuals can help to clarify and also drive excitement. And last I will talk about some frequently asked questions.

Stories ground your vision

[00:04:08] So first, stories. We talk about how stories will ground your vision. Let's think. Humans are story animals. When we are younger, as kids, we like adults when they tell us stories, that's why there are so many bedtime stories. And now, as adults, we think, we walk around, we read things, we write things, and in our mind we're always making up stories, and that's how we make sense of what's happening around us. Also when we talk to people at work, at home, anytime really, we are telling each other stories. Again, that's how we process, how we make sense of how things work around us.

[00:04:52] But oftentimes I see visions presented as feature lists instead of stories, and that makes it hard to understand. Here on the left you can see how sometimes visions are structured: you have a vision statement, you have some themes, and within each of the themes you have different features. That is a realistic or reasonable structure, but after you present it to other people, oftentimes what they remember is only a couple of parts and pieces. They may forget a theme, they may forget some of the features. So their takeaway becomes a couple of different features and some themes, and they have to later recall what is the vision.

[00:05:39] Why is that a problem? Here I'm using a metaphor, the blind people touching the elephant. For you, the person who's creating the vision, you may think, isn't it clear, it's an elephant, it's a whole big picture, right? Because you're so close to the vision. But then for the people who are viewing the vision, they may only remember or see or digest parts of it, so on their side they see, is it a snake, is it a tree? That's their interpretation, and that's not great, they don't see it as an elephant as you do.

[00:06:15] So what can we do? This is what I want to share. Instead of showing visions as feature lists, show them as a story. So instead of going through each of the features by theme, which is a reasonable baseline, change them into: here's the story. On the right you can see here, first introduce the vision statement, that's fine, do a summary, and then talk about who's the user. So here, meet Jay, and here's who Jay is and all that. And then talk about what are the challenges, the pain points Jay has. Jay is our user, so when Jay is doing this and that, these are the problems. And then you go into the vision, talking about, now when Jay does the same thing, the experience is so much better. As you go through the narrative it becomes so much more humanized. People understand where you're coming from, what are the pain points, and also how the vision can make it so much better. It becomes a narrative.

[00:07:19] But you may say, well, people are still going to forget things, right? They are still not going to remember the whole story. That is okay. So what we are going to do is to try to really focus on the emotions instead of the details. When you present the user, when you present the problems and the result, focus on having them connect with that vision. So, nice to meet you, that's a user. And then he feels a pain, it is very painful: have your audience feel the pain. And when you show the vision, they can actually feel the joy, oh, it is so much better. So get them to feel that way, and their takeaway after the vision would be, I remember that it's solving the problem. That's what they should be remembering and that's what they should get excited about. They still may not be able to remember all the features, all the details, but that's okay.

A vision presentation structure

[00:08:16] That's on the user story itself, but when we show it to other people there are still other things that we should cover, so this is what I want to share. This is a vision presentation or slide or story type of structure that we often use at Meta. I've seen it work across different teams, different visions.

[00:08:36] So here it is. First of all, still go through the vision background: why are we even doing this, what are the existing insights, problems that you already know? Then do a summary of the vision. As much as the story is important, I still think the summary will be very important, so call out key features, key things, principles, statements and stuff. And then you go into the user story. Here is where people go into the details and really go through the whole narrative, and when they get to this point, even though they may not read through everything, they know you've gone through the process of understanding the user, understanding the problems, and making sure your vision actually fits the problem and solves it. Last, we can talk about execution plans, the strategy, what are the next steps, the metrics and things. Those things are always very important as well for next steps, but they are more of a post-vision type of work.

Visuals clarify, and quality matters

[00:09:35] So that's what I want to share on the story part. Then second, I want to talk about visuals. For visuals, I'm a designer, so I'm sure a lot of designers also know visuals are very helpful to clarify things, but I do think there are slightly different understandings of when visuals should be used and how they should be used, and that's what I want to highlight here.

[00:10:00] As a junior designer back then, I used to like to always ask different people, what can design bring to the table, what can I contribute to product teams? I remember a lot of senior designers used to tell me, yes, design can do pixel work, we can provide visuals, but design isn't all about visuals, so don't jump into visuals too quickly. I still agree with that, I still think we should find the right moment to jump into visuals. But at the same time, I think when creating visions I've seen too many times when visuals were introduced so late, so people spend a lot of time trying to use words and text to clarify, which isn't efficient.

[00:10:45] Here's an illustration of how it might work. For example, visions always start with text, always start with words, so here's a wall of text that's written about the vision. And for the different people in the audience, they just might have different interpretations. You never know what another person might be imagining in their mind versus my own, and whether or not they are aligned.

[00:11:11] But how it can be different: introduce a visual, introduce a prototype, and here it means this. There's a lot less room for misinterpretation[?] or misalignment, and the conversation would change from previously, is this what you mean, to now it's about, is this what we want? And that's a step forward.

[00:11:35] So the old saying goes, an image is worth more than a thousand words. I would say a prototype here is worth more than ten thousand words. We can see it, we can see the future without spending all the time to try to build it, and I think this is the superpower design can bring. I would encourage designers to really use this superpower, especially in the early stage of vision creation. It may take more time, but it will help in general and streamline the process and clarify for everyone in the process.

[00:12:11] Then on the visual side, one other thing I want to talk about is visual quality and also fidelity. Even though it's a vision, the quality and the fidelity matter so much. The whole point is to get people excited. Imagine when Mark Zuckerberg was showing us the metaverse, instead of showing these high quality, almost realistic videos, he just talked about it, he just showed composed sketches or static images. Then we wouldn't get excited, we wouldn't see the future that he believes in. But here, using something that's much higher fidelity, we are able to really understand what he's talking about, and that's very important. I think spending the extra time when crafting the vision to bring the visual quality higher, and also adding more fidelity, is very important and also efficient in the long term, even though it may seem in the beginning it takes longer.

Frequently asked questions

[00:13:12] Now I will move on to the third part, so, frequently asked questions. I'm a firm believer of visual storytelling and I keep telling other people about the topic, so I've heard a lot of different questions that may come up in the discussions, and you might have some of the questions too. So I'll just go over and address some of the questions and comments.

[00:13:35] First one. When I say, well, you should create a holistic user story, sometimes people would say, but we don't have enough insights to create a whole story, what should we do? We all know that for any product vision, or really building product in general, we have to understand first. So yes, we know user insights are important, but I would say sometimes when teams try to move fast there are times we don't have enough insights, and in those cases, if you do have time, spend the time, do the research. Otherwise we'll end up building products for ourselves, which is never good.

[00:14:12] But there are also other times, especially in large companies, you just don't have the time to do the research. Leadership says we need a vision and you have to do it, and then what do you do? There must be some insights you can leverage, otherwise I don't think there'll be a trigger to say why a vision. So leverage that and then make best guesses, but make it super clear that after you create this first round of vision, it needs to be validated, it needs to be tested. There are hypotheses that you're putting down and it needs to be proved with real user insights. That needs to be made clear. By this stage you can make best guesses, just to make sure the conversations are moving forward.

[00:14:54] Second question, or more of a comment: user stories feel so cheesy. Yes, sometimes they get cheesy. And then also, leadership, they're so busy, they don't have time to read through everything anyway, so why bother, it's just a lot more time spent, right?

[00:15:13] So in my mind I think, cheesy, but so what? It does the job, it helps to connect people, it grounds everything in a human life, in a problem we're trying to solve, and the products, so we can all relate. So as cheesy as you may think it is, it's still worth it. I would do it, so that people all get bought in[?].

[00:15:35] And from the leadership point: yes, they may not have all the time to read through the whole thing, but again, first, it helps to at least go through the process even for yourself. When you're creating the ideas you may think these things all make sense together, but going through the process of creating the user story can really help you see where are the gaps and where are some of the ideas that actually aren't solving the problems. So go through that as much for others as for yourself. And then for the leaders who may not have much time, summarize for them, and that's where the vision summary is so important, sometimes the key points, so that they can glimpse through and then they can get the point.

[00:16:20] Now, third question: what if I'm not sure what exact features I should add into the story? That's totally fine. What we mentioned already is focus on the emotions, focus on how you want people to feel. You want them to feel the pain, feel the joy, feel the transition. So that's what you should be focusing on. The exact features you can figure out later. Once you have buy-in, once you have excitement, you will have more time and more people resources to work on the exact things.

[00:16:53] Next one, so this is more on the designer side: it seems a lot of work to do all the illustrative mocks, and later on you have to redo them, redesign them anyway, so why spend this time? I would say yes, it can be a lot of work, especially if you're trying to bring up the fidelity, create prototypes and things. That's yes, a lot of time spent. But really think about your goal. If the vision is to get buy-in, excitement, then that's time well spent. It's probably the most impactful thing you can do at this stage, everything else can wait. If you don't get buy-in, if you don't get people excited, there's no next step. So do spend the time, if you have the time.

[00:17:39] Now related to this, as we mentioned, does visual quality matter? Yes, of course, yes, that's what I mentioned. I've seen so many designers tend to be like, let's move fast, let's do something just to illustrate the point and not polish it. It works sometimes, if the whole team understands that the visuals and the concepts are going to get better in the next step. But oftentimes when the team is large, others don't understand. They see what they see and they think that's what you are proposing, and if it's a lower quality they're not going to get excited. So I would say if you have the time, make sure there is a craft, there is a quality, that would get people to say, this is what I want, I want it today. And I think there's a lot of payoff by spending that extra time in the beginning.

[00:18:30] And after you create the mocks, this is what oftentimes happens: people keep asking about some details in the illustrative mocks. What should you do? Make it very clear to them: visions are not specs. I think too often, especially coming from other functions other than design, people get caught up about details. They may ask about one specific interaction or this visual, this icon even. Make it clear to them that doesn't matter, we will change them, we will make them better. You can provide feedback, you can ask questions, but I may not have answers, and that's not a problem, because that's not the point at this stage.

[00:19:10] So those are some of the frequently asked questions that I would hear from others when I talk to them about this topic.

[00:19:17] And now I also go back just to remind ourselves: great visions help people see and feel the future, you can almost touch it. And what I want to say here, really just one takeaway, is visual storytelling can help. So don't just tell the vision, paint the story of the future. Show them what it can be, so then people understand how much better it can be and why we're doing it. So that's my talk today. Thank you.