Aaron Louie - Blog

Never underestimate the power of a well-designed, informative, visually-appealing document. I’ve learned that if there’s something needs to be communicated and evangelized across an organization, it helps to use a format that pleases the eye from any distance — across the room, at arm’s length, or up close. Provide a concise, at-a-glance summary, but pack it with detailed information backed by research and analysis. This enables the audience to digest it progressively. If we’ve done our due diligence in creating the document, they’ll be able to gain insight, identify problems, and understand the depth of our work.

However, sexy deliverables can be powerfully destructive as well if they are not well-researched, properly constructed, presented without guidance, or disseminated out of context. Clients and stakeholders may be lured by the prospect of gaining an incisive communication tool, but that knife can cut the person that wields it. Or, to stretch the metaphor, the knife can be totally ineffectual if not forged and sharpened by a professional.

An example of such a deliverable is the persona. Most personas are easily recognizable — a one-page summary of a member of a user segment, often including:

• a fake name and job title
• a stock photo
• a summary paragraph
• a few bulleted lists of characteristics and tasks
• maybe a little graph showing their rating on a couple behavioral or aptitude scales

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? All these elements could be completely fictitious. Just get a copy writer to make up some stuff, hand it to a graphic designer, and you’re done, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Personas are like the tip of an iceberg — they are the executive summary of a mountain of documentation, the culmination of weeks of extensive user research. An even cheesier simile: a persona without the attendant background work is like a mannequin dressed up like a doctor. From far away, it looks like it might be able to help you, but good luck getting it to give you CPR.

It would be far safer to create a deliverable that can’t be misused in this manner. Make it a visually pleasing, giant poster with multiple levels of detail, encapsulating in its form factor all the depth of the background work that went into it. Make it challenging to construct and difficult to fake.

At ZAAZ, we have a deliverable called a Blended Agenda Matrix (a.k.a. “BAM”) that puts this into practice. The last one I did was for a large national financial institution with stakeholders across all lines of business and based on the work of a team of user researchers and consultants over several weeks. By the time I was finished analyzing and summarizing their work, the poster was 6′ x 4′ with 12pt text. The amount of information that goes into a BAM poster is daunting, but it connects high-level business and user goals down to low-level tactics and metrics in a visual and digestible format. It exposes the patterns that emerge from the apparent chaos of competing business and user objectives and provides a guide to accomplishing those objectives in the most strategic manner. Most importantly, it’s a sexy deliverable, an effective sales tool and communication artifact that cannot be easily misused.

(Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to post a sample BAM here yet…)