Start ugly
Ugly is good. Ugly doesn’t distract people from content. The danger of starting with a pretty artifact is that people will respond to the look of it without having to pay as much attention to the content. The point of this step is to force yourself toward clarity. If you can create a clear diagram and explain it to someone else, then you probably have a good grasp on your issue. If you can’t explain it clearly, you don’t understand it clearly yet. Back to the drawing board, literally.
Sacrificial prototypes and the benefits of being wrong
When you want to test an idea with someone, it can be an illuminating process to create a workflow or a diagram that you know is incorrect in some way. You’re playing into human nature here. If you present a solid, decent, unobjectionable concept, you may get lukewarm positive feedback — “Sure, that looks fine.” But if you present something egregiously wrong, you’re going to get swift, strong correction — which is usually much more specific and much more valuable. “No, that’s not it at all! Let me tell you exactly what’s wrong with it. In detail.”
The three-minute meeting
This concept is from my friend and colleague Ryan Quinn. Pop songs, he observed, are brilliant communicators of a complete concept — and they take only three minutes to do it. That’s because so much process has gone into the creation of a song, and so much meaning is “stacked” in the final product: lyrics, melody, chord progression, orchestration, performance, engineering, production. How, he wondered, could you make a workday meeting as efficient as a pop song? The process of artifact creation becomes a way for you to clarify your thinking and condense your meaning into a tidy package. Although Ryan would never describe himself as an artist, he makes literally hundreds of diagrams each year, either to share with colleagues or simply to help himself think.
Stack meaning: Use your placeholders
Sometimes, when you’re creating artifacts or designs, you’ll need or want to use placeholder data and/or images. If you work smart, you can get a lot of mileage out of this placeholder content. For instance, I was recently training a school on how to use their website builder. We’d spent hours on a videocall and the training hours were finished, but they still had more questions. In particular, they wanted to know how to make new text appear when a user hovered over an image. I told them that, since we were out of time, I’d create an example block on their site that they could copy and reuse. That night, as I was constructing the example for them, it occurred to me that I could use the block as more than just an illustration; I could use the hover text as a tutorial to help them walk themselves through the process.
I’m not suggesting that you spend all your time creating elaborate placeholder images and data; sometimes a wireframe is all you need. There are times, though, when you’ll have to create some temporary or positional content to make an artifact or a mockup look right. When you find yourself in such a situation, spend a couple of minutes thinking about what content might help inform or illuminate, rather than just filling in the blanks.