Kevin Cheng
Abstract
We live in an age of bite sized information where gaining the attention of our potential customers, executives, sponsors, clients or even peers can be difficult.
Stakeholders seldom read the carefully prepared specifications or reports and customers have become blind to advertisements and marketing copy.
Earlier this year, Google chose to overcome these communication barriers by marketing their new browser, Google Chrome, with a comic book drawn by comics legend Scott McCloud.
Just as vividly as they convey the feats of superheroes, comics can tell stories about your customers and products. They can provide your organization with an exciting and effective alternative to slogging through requirements documents and long reports.
In this full day workshop, the presenter will discuss how you can use comics as a powerful communication tool without any illustration training or background.
This interactive workshop will teach you
- A method to document your organization’s work, ideas and vision in a way that any project teammate, customer or manager will readily understand and consume
- Putting the story back in “storyboarding” and really describing the user experience from the users’ perspective
- How to sell the idea of using comics to all levels of your organization
- How comics can be used as a way to engage users early and solicit their feedback
- The properties of the comics medium that make them so much more than either words or pictures alone
Workshop Details
Learning objectives
Attendees of this workshop should gain an understanding of a number of topics in depth, including:
- Methods of creating comic storyboards without being an illustrator
- When comic storyboards are useful. Comics can be used to marketing, for the homepage or even for concepts of products that have not been built.
- 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 to create their own comics and convey useful narratives. Even if they are not artists and feel they cannot draw, the interactive workshop will have participants learning how to use simple templates to convey emotion.
- How comics can be used to convey subtleties of timing and emphasis. The workshop will illustrate how to use icons and art to help people relate to the characters and focus on the concepts instead of minute details.
- The limitations and challenges to consider when using comics. The workshop will discuss the delicate balance of presenting sufficient interface elements to spark 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 organization.
- How to conduct user research on concept storyboards to inform product design
- Some alternative concept communication methodologies such as video and photographic storyboards with examples from Yahoo!
How will the workshop be conducted
The workshop will be a combination of presentation and participation. Participants will alternate between learning some of the theory of the medium and applying them to a comic of their own.
Core IA-related issues
Practitioners are always seeking new tools and methods to assist with their day to day activities. A large part of the task of an IA is not only to do the tasks assigned to us but effectively communicate the proposed solutions. The comics method represents a fast, easily accessible tool that most people forget they are capable of doing. Further, the skill of storytelling in general, whether though comics or not, is one that needs to be refined for presenting in any medium.
Audiences
This workshop has been expanded and designed to help anyone who needs to communicate a product or idea concisely to their customers or business stakeholders. In particular, this workshop is suitable for designers, marketers and product managers.
Where & when the session has been previously presented
This workshop has been presented with very high reviews at the last three IA Summits as a full day workshop, at CanUX 2006 and at Jared Spool’s UI 12 conference. It has been expanded greatly to encompass the material that will be included in a forthcoming book and incorporate many of the industry examples that have appeared over the past year.
Handouts/takeaways
Participants will be given copies of:
- Detailed notes and tips and tricks as quick reference material totalling 125 pages
- All the slides for both the workshop and regular session presentation
- Example layouts for common scenarios
- Common iconography and symbols
- A gesture dictionary to guide participants on how to communicate body language
- An expression dictionary to show how various emotions can be conveyed with just the eyebrows and mouth
- A collection of useful online and offline references
AGENDA AND PLANNED EXERCISES
8:30 AM Introductions and objectives (discussion)
9:00 AM The process of using comics in design (talk)
9:30 AM Why comics are powerful (talk)
10:00 AM Break (20mins)
10:20 AM The seed (exercise)
10:35 AM Settings, characters and stories (discussion and exercise)
11:15 AM Flow, camera angles, progression (discussion and exercise)
11:45 AM Tools for creating comics
12:15 PM Lunch (1.5hrs)
1:45 PM Drawing comics! (exercise)
2:15 PM Gathering feedback from comics (talk)
3:15 PM Break (20mins)
3:35 PM Peer user feedback (exercise)
4:00 PM Comic reviews (discussion)
4:30 PM Selling comics in the organization (discussion)
5:00 PM Wrap-up / Q&A / Overview of course notes / Feedback
Speaker Details
Kevin Cheng was one of those kids who missed the memo to stop drawing after the first grade. Nowadays, he splits his crayon time between many endeavors. He is the Director of Product Strategy at Raptr, a videogame social network, the co-founder and artist for OK/ Cancel, a webcomic on user experience, and the co-founder of Off Panel Productions, an online comic publishing network. He is also the author of the upcoming book, See What I Mean: How to Communicate Ideas with Comics published by Rosenfeld Media.
Kevin previously exerted his crayon prowess at Yahoo!’s Brickhouse incubator where he designed Pipes and Bravonation, and at Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Local, Adaptive Path, and Trilogy.
He holds a Master’s Degree from University College London in Human Computer
Interaction and has presented on strategy and design topics at numerous conferences including the Information Architecture Summit, the User Interface Conference, and South by Southwest.
Kevin blogs at kevnull(dot)com and has been known to Twitter as @k. One day, Kevin hopes to be able to answer all questions related to design by simply referencing comic strips.