From Boxes and Arrows, this article provides a blow-by-blow description of how visual learning helped to easily explain a complex web strategy to a diverse client group.
Rebekah Sedaca works as a user experience designer on an interactive team at a mid-sized strategic communications firm, Capstrat, based in Raleigh, NC. One recent web project presented her team the opportunity to communicate using comics.
They were redesigning a family of more than 120 individual franchisee websites into one common web strategy, look and feel, and information architecture (IA). The challenge (“opportunity!”) was that governing umbrella organization had never enforced any kind of control over the web and the brand had been fractured by an inconsistent online user experience.
Rebekkah's team knew that presenting wireframes or flow diagrams to such a large group had the potential to be disastrous, and they also recognized that presenting flat visual design screenshots would leave too many unanswered questions. That’s when they considered the idea of using comics.
Comics are effective not only because they are essentially narrative, but also because they are unpretentious, easy to follow, and accessible. Whereas a functional specification document uses words and often “tech speak” to communicate functionality, comics use pictures and interactions to get ideas across. Comic artist and Yahoo! staffer Kevin Cheng put it best, calling comics “the universal language.”
In contrast to many of the common tools of our trade (for example, use cases and process flows), the sequential nature of comic frames can communicate the progression of time (see image 1). Scott McCloud, author of “Understanding Comics,” notes that “creating meaning differences” in sequential comic frames is what transforms a series of separate illustrations into the “art of comics.”
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