This document discusses four approaches to effective design communication: 1) Visualize as much as possible using visual content; 2) Use real content instead of placeholder text; 3) Prototype quickly using tools like Marvel, Keynote, Axure or custom tools; and 4) Tell stories using techniques like storyboarding, experience maps, and comics.

1. Four Approaches to Effective
Design Communication
Meng Yang
Boston UXPA 2015

3. “As designers, we communicate ideas, not pixels.”
- Unknown

4. 1). Visualize, as much as you can
Tactics
!
Visualize

5. Rise of visual content on the web

6. Source: http://www.slideshare.net/LisaDrobek/styles-of-storytelling-cultivating-compelling-longform-content-1

7. 18 Mistakes That Kills Startup
1. Single Founder – as a single founder you have almost zero chance of getting funding from
Paul Graham. Why? It’s not a coincidence, he says, that founders who succeeded did so as
a team of at least two.
2. Bad Location – you can change everything about a house but its location. Likewise, if your
startup is in a bad location, you can’t change the nature of that location. It’s easier to move
the startup. Where to? Silicon Valley.
3. Marginal Niche – by choosing an obscure niche a startup may paint themselves in a corner.
If you are afraid of competition, this is not the way to avoid it.
4. Derivative Idea – there are only so many Twitters for pet owners one can come up with. The
bottom line is that the Google of tomorrow will not be like Google.
5. Obstinacy – or inability to adapt kills startups who would have survived had they not been
too stubborn to see what their users were telling them.
6. Hiring Bad Programmers – knowing a good programmer from a bad one often takes being
a good one yourself, or having a trusted one on your team. Exceptional programmers are
always in short supply. So the odds are stacked up against hiring good ones.
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform – how fast you can scale will determine whether your
startup lives or dies once you get traction. On the wrong platform scalability will be the
bottleneck. And users often don’t wait for you to figure it out.
8. Slowness in Launching – before you actually launch you are in the dark about whether
your startup should even exist. The longer you delay the launch the more you delay getting
the answer. If you are afraid to know what the answer is, you might want to ask yourself why.
9. Launching Too Early – launch too early, though, and you may be completely unprepared to
handle your growth, or worse yet to present a usable product.
10.Having No Specific User in Mind – somewhere someone will for sure be interested in your
product, you just don’t know who yet? Sounds like those people may not exist. Be sure to
check.
11.Raising Too Little Money – you get what you spend on. With too little money you may not
be able to flesh out your product in to its full potential.
12.Spending Too Much – spending too much before you grew enough to have the numbers to
raise the next round, and you are out of cash, which often spells the end.
13.Raising Too Much Money – raising too much will likely make you feel like a huge success
even before you made anything useful. At the end of the day it’s users, not investors, you
want to impress the most.
Source: http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

8. Home
screen
Short-look
notification
Clock
Long-look
notification
Scrollable
offscreen
actions
More actions
menu
App
landing
Additional
app info
Pressed
Digital Crown
Received
notification,
tilted wrist Didn’t drop wrist,
kept staring
Action
selected
(Seems to be
no confirmation
in Watch?)
Force
touch
P
Glances
Expiring in 5 min
PARKING
P PARKING
Your parking expires
in 5 minutes for...
233 S Main St.
Cambridge, MA
Expiring soon
Refill for half hour
Refill for 1 hour
Dismiss
Swipe left
App selected
Swipe
up
66%
6Days
left
until Bermuda
Apple Watch
App Interaction Flow 1.1
Action taken
on glance
Action optionsAction item
pressed
Food intake
Track
Water intake
Sugar intake
Main 10:06

10. After
Before

11. 2). Use real content
Tactics
!
Real
content

12. “Death to Lorem Ipsum” - Luke Wroblewski

13. Real content makes people think of real experience

14. Inaccurate content confuses people

15. 3). Prototype, as fast as you can
Tactics
!
Prototype

16. “If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is
worth 1000 meetings.” - IDEO

17. Image hotspot clickthrough (Marvel)

18. Animation (Keynote)

19. Html-based (Axure)

20. Build your own prototyping toolsetTactics
!
Source: http://www.cooper.com/prototyping-tools

21. Build the UI libraryTactics
!

22. 4). Tell a story
Tactics
!
Story
telling

23. Source: Communicating UX Design through Storytelling by Kathryn Parkes

24. Storyboarding

25. Storyboarding

26. Experience map

27. Comics
Source: Kronos Design Team

28. Tactics
!