Pre-conference workshop

Communicating product concepts with comics

Kevin Cheng

You don’t need to know how to draw to use a comic to solve your documentation problems.

As projects become more and more complex, it becomes crucial to provide stakeholders with approachable and easy to digest design concepts.

Many teams try to use requirements documents, personas, user scenarios, and storyboards to define products. However, I’ve often found stakeholders misinterpret these documents or in some cases, don’t read them at all.

As it turns out, many companies include Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, and Sprint have experimented with using comics as a technique for communicating the core concepts behind a design's intended experience.

In this full-day seminar which has been refined over the past few years and featured in Jared Spool’s User Interface 12 conference last fall, I will share how this technique has worked well to get teams informed and on the same page. I'll demonstrate an in-depth walkthrough of my process and the advantages I’ve found using comics over other methods.

In this workshop, I will cover a number of topics in depth, including:

• How to create your own comics and convey useful narratives. Even if you’re not an artist and feel you can’t draw, I will show you how to use previously generated facial expressions, photos, or avatars, and tracing.
• 5 inherent properties of comics (communication, imagination, expression, motion, and iteration.) If understood, they can help people use comics to their full potential when communicating a vision.
• How comics can be used to convey subtleties of timing and emphasis. I will show you how to use icons and art to help people relate to the characters and focus on the concepts instead of minute details.
• The portability of comics. You will see how you can use Flash to create a portable, distributable version of your comics that can be easily consumed online by remote stakeholders.
• The limitations and challenges to consider when using comics. I will discuss the delicate balance of presenting sufficient interface elements to instill discussion, but not so much as to distract from the overall concept.
• How to get buy-in from management to begin using comics in the product development process.

At the end of the workshop, you should be able to utilize this methodology for future products or features within any team structure or environment.