A transcript of Episode 289 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Abby Covert to discuss what diagrams are, why are they so useful, and how we can make good ones.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Dave Trendall.
Transcript
James Royal-Lawson
Ambition Empower is a professional education programme. It’s directed towards design leaders and UX professionals interested in upping their game through a continuous learning journey that engages you in small chunks every week during your membership. Find out more by visiting UX podcast.com/empower
Computer Voice
UX podcast episode 289.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Hello, everybody, welcome to UX Podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts, James Royal-Lawson.
Per Axbom
And Per Axbom.
James Royal-Lawson
Balancing Business Technology, people and society. We have listeners all over the world, from Barbados to Germany. To be honest, just this last month, there’s only been one listener in Barbados. But hello to you, whoever you are.
Per Axbom
That would be fantastic for them to reach out to us.
James Royal-Lawson
They would actually or if it was someone on holiday. I don’t mind. I don’t know.
Per Axbom
Today, we have for you our interview with Abby Covert. She’s the author of How to Make Sense of Any Mess. And she is, very soon it feels like any day now when you’re listening to this, back with a new book. So yes, there are plenty of books cataloguing, and analysing beautiful diagrams that help someone who was stuck. But many books provide diagrams, templates or visualisation methods to help in certain contexts and on specific types of problems.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, there’s a surprising lack of education on diagramming, where do you start? How do you know what to do first, next, and last? And how do you know if what you’re doing is working? Abby’s new book is called Stuck. The purpose, process, and craft of diagramming.
Per Axbom
And this interview with Abby, it was done in collaboration with Ambition Empower, where we record interviews in front of a live audience, which is really cool. And those people listening in live as we’re recording, is the Ambition Empower community who are attending the tracks of the Ambition Empower programme,
James Royal-Lawson
And get to ask questions to our guests at the end.
Per Axbom
As well, yes. That’s always a fun part.
James Royal-Lawson
It is, and dad jokes, lots of dad jokes.
Per Axbom
I think one of the benefits that I see with Ambition Empower, why I like it so much, and why I’m one of the track leaders there as well is because you think of learning and and competence, management in conferences, as where you visit conferences. And you – god that sounded really bad, I’m starting over.
James Royal-Lawson
Good.
Per Axbom
I think the reason I like the Ambition Empower concept so much is because I complained a lot over the years where you, you visit conferences, you get really inspired, you get all these new insights, but it’s really hard to incorporate them into your everyday work. But with Ambition Empower, you’re being inspired and getting those insights week by week. You’re actually learning as you go along, which make so it makes more sense to apply that into what you’re doing every day, into your everyday work, which makes it really easy for someone to participate as much as you can. But then also think about what was I doing just this morning in the project? And how can I apply what I just learned from Ambition Empower?
James Royal-Lawson
continuous learning, Per
James Royal-Lawson
So Abby, perhaps a good place to start us off is by explained to us, what is a diagram? Although, hold on, I think actually, we’re gonna flip that. Can you tell us then and what’s not a diagram?
Abby Covert
Oh, thank you so much for that. I did not pay them for this entry. But this was such a great question to start with. So I’m gonna I’m gonna back up, because I think that you know, y’all are a little bit of a ringer here, because you’re you’re working on understanding what my definition of diagram is for my new book.
So my definition is a visual representation that helps someone. And the really important word there is helps, I think in answering your question. So what is not a diagram is a visual representation that doesn’t help anyone. And I think that there’s a lot of those.
There’s a lot of things that look like diagrams in terms of, you know, connecting shapes with lines and words in boxes. But when you actually get into the content of it, we have all had that experience where it actually doesn’t make much sense at all. And having taught in business conferences and art schools and in agency settings and in-house, I’m seeing a lot of that going on masquerading as diagrams. So I thought it was really important that we think about both sides because I see a lot of focus on the visual documentation side of finding the right template and visually executing it in the right way. But what about that other part?
What about the part where we actually make sense of the thing enough that it makes sense to somebody else. And I think that that also applies to ourselves, which is a really interesting thread that I’ve kind of wove through this, this new book is like, we can use diagrams just to help ourselves. So the someone and the definition, sometimes it’s us. And I see a lot of diagrams, for other people born from diagrams that we make for ourselves, you know, we get stuck on a large subject matter, and we’re trying to work our way through it.
And we make this big messy diagram trying to figure it out. And then once we have our point of view solid, we might make a more simplified diagram to take to other people. So there’s a lot of that, that I think is kind of inherent in design, but also outside of design. I mean, you’re seeing diagrams in every profession from you know, teaching to law. So I think it’s really fascinating.
Per Axbom
Wow, I love that that’s so much to unpack there, actually. Because that definition of diagram where you’re talking about yourself, me personally, I draw a lot of mind maps, like to prepare for interviews like this as well. But in that case, that mind map might not make sense to anyone else. But in that case, since I, myself am the target, it would be it would be a diagram, but it wouldn’t be a diagram that works for everyone.
Abby Covert
Right? And like think about, I don’t know if this has ever happened to you all, but have you ever like made a really cool diagram to figure something out on like a project, and then somebody on the project team wanted you to take like a little tiny picture of it and put it on a slide so that everybody knew how much work you did. That’s not a diagram. I mean, it’s kind of helpful in letting them know that you like did a lot of work and thought about a lot of stuff and like have a lot of knowledge that they do not have and cannot unlock from that image.
But it’s not actually a diagram, it’s not meant for them. So yeah, you’re right on. If you make that diagram, and it’s for you, and it helps you with your purpose gets you to the place where you don’t feel stuck. Great. Now, if you take that, and you unroll it in front of your whole team and use it to confuse them and make them feel like they don’t understand the thing as well as you. I mean, I guess that’s still helping you. But it’s not a really great use of the diagram.
James Royal-Lawson
That’s a very interesting point that, that kind of boundary between something as a diagram and note taking, because in some ways your Mind Map, Per, that’s a form of personal note taking but it’s kind of a diagram as well, possibly, or in some context.
Abby Covert
Yeah, no, it’s absolutely a diagram. And I mean, there’s things that you’re working out on that page for yourself, that would enable you to make better diagrams for other people on that same subject. So that messy mental model diagram or concept diagram that you’re making of what you think, is getting onto the page, the territory you have to explore before you can actually do much for other people at all. So in my experience, even when I’m making diagrams, for other people, that messy first diagram is almost always for me, you know, it’s my map to the territory. And it’s not something that everybody needs to see, which kind of changes the rules about, like, what it has to look like, and how bounded it really needs to be.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And that’s such a beautiful segue into these phases that you talked about, with the first phase of I think it was called understanding at first, but now you call it exploration, and then modelling and then discovery.
Abby Covert
Delivery.
Per Axbom
Delivery, sorry, delivery. And what we’re talking about, then is that it’s fine that the first thing you do is actually for yourself.
Abby Covert
Yeah, yeah.
Per Axbom
And the words and the labels are for yourself as well.
Abby Covert
Absolutely, yeah. That’s something that I actually have come to that, late. In my career as an information architect. I used to be so dogmatic about getting people to agree on the labels early on in the process. And I used to say things like, no, if we can’t figure out a label for it, then it’s not a thing. Like we can’t, if it’s got to be named something, you know, crazy to get through the conversation that maybe it’s not a strong enough object to survive. When in reality, sometimes you really do need to call something by like a shorthand until you have more information on it.
So yeah, one of the things I recommend in the new book is looking at labels through those three phases. And looking at what the intention of the label really is, because early in the process, we are literally just trying to get it out of our heads. And sometimes it comes out really messy, you know, it’ll be half nouns, half verbs, some of it’ll be plural. Some of it will be really active. So it’ll be really passive. Get it out of your head before you start putting the judgement on it, because it can actually expose different ways that you might do things. And then as we get closer to delivery, that’s when we’re actually putting that pressure on a label to get results. Like, what is the thing that you’re actually trying to intend to do? And are these labels getting you there?
James Royal-Lawson
So that’s interesting, because we often talk about how a shared vocabulary in a team or a group of people is a really important thing to to have in order to go forward as a team in the right way. But what we’re saying now is that you don’t want, I guess it’s what you’re saying anyway, that you don’t want that process of building a shared vocabulary to stop the process of creating a useful diagram.
Abby Covert
Yeah. And sometimes I find that the diagram is the way into the vocabulary. So there’s this really interesting conversation to be had about what is an object versus a label for that object. Because identifying early in your process, what the objects are, is incredibly important. And I don’t think that that changes based on this latest thought. But figuring out what the label for that thing is, that is something that can come later on, needs to be iterated on all the time, and multiples can exist, right? That same object might need to appear to three different user bases under three different labels, whether that’s for a language reason, or an accessibility reason or Reason of just context. I mean think about the same object being seen by a doctor versus a patient.
You might have a slightly different label change for those two audiences, but it’s still representing the same object. And I think that from a diagramming standpoint, it’s really important to represent those objects on the diagram. But figuring out exactly the words to use to get that point across is something that does tend to get tweaked all the way up until the end. It also seems to be to me, it seems to be the place where other people have the most opinions to come in on our diagrams. I don’t see people being like, oh, no, move that over there, or I don’t like that line there. It’s more like, I don’t feel comfortable with the way you label that. And so that iteration that happens in the collaboration cycle, I find also is happening a lot on the label side.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, I’m getting flashbacks to all those years. We’re doing sitemaps and I’m doing new website structures, and there’s those arguments when you hit those kinds of trigger words and people, ‘Oh, no, no, you can’t call it that’. And you kind of you end up unpacking, like decades of company history of why you’re not allowed to call it that. But I want to call it that, that’s the right word.
Abby Covert
But try to elicit that reaction with a spreadsheet. Yeah. They see it in a spreadsheet. And somehow it’s like, ah, like back there, like back there stuff. You’ll see it in a map go that’s representing the navigation scheme of their whole website. And all sudden, they got real opinions about that word. I find that fascinating. I mean, I wrote my first book about linguistic insecurity. And like this idea of like people talking over your head, and you sort of like feel like the thing is not meant for you. And in the new book, I’m talking about diagrammatic insecurity, because I think that that happens, right? You like open up the thing, you’re like, ‘Whoa, not for me, closing it back up’. Man, I open a lot of systems diagrams that I’m supposed to understand, but elicit that exact reaction in me.
Per Axbom
Oh, that makes me think there should also be like iterations of the same diagram, depending, but now we’re talking again, of course, about the target group. But if somebody isn’t confident reading those types of diagrams, they start with a section of the diagram, this is how you read this part. Okay. And then you add on to it.
Abby Covert
I mean, really, call to question how much of that information they need to have. And if it’s in the format that they need it at all, you know, because I think in some cases, it’s not. In some cases, it’s like a, you need to clarify through the execution of the diagram, the visual vocabulary that you chose. But I also see a lot of like, over explaining how we codified our diagram, and relying on other people to decode it. So I think like there’s a, there’s a really fine line between like, teaching somebody your diagram, and making a diagram that is able to be accessed without having to be taught by another person, or especially about the maker.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, okay. So you have to be completely aware of your audience in order to make that decision.
Abby Covert
Yeah. Big time. Yeah. Yeah,
Per Axbom
That makes me think that so many people accept diagrams because they look beautiful. They’re easily marketed that way as well. Whereas what one big takeaway from from early on in your book for me was that when we were talking about the definition of it, if I decide that the diagram is done, when it’s useful, that means I can stop earlier.
Abby Covert
Exactly. It doesn’t need to be gorgeous. It doesn’t need to be visually stunning. I mean, I’ve had the opportunity to teach diagrams in art school and design school. And there’s something that has happened every time I’ve run a group critique in a room like that, somebody puts up a beautiful diagram, it’s beautifully rendered. It has gradients and custom icons. It’s got beautiful typography, from 10 feet away. And then you get up close to it, and you start to actually try to consume, what they’re trying to tell you with this diagram, knowing that you’re the audience that made this diagram for this room. And it all starts to fall down.
And I think that is a really interesting wrinkle that we have in design education, because if we all are only focusing on the visual representation part, there’s a lot of things out there masquerading as diagrams. And I mean, if you look at the infographics thing, and that chart junk thing, I mean, that’s really where that’s coming from, is that there is a ubiquity of these types of images in culture today. And so it is becoming imperative for users of those things to know if they are good or not, versus, you can look at a beautiful thing and it can be full of lies, mistruths, or be made to manipulate you into thinking that something is true that’s not. So, yeah, it’s a really interesting part of of diagrams. And I’m glad that you got that part. So, yay.
Per Axbom
Means I spend less time on it, which is perfect.
Abby Covert
Exactly. Yeah, sometimes you don’t need to just completely continue down the path of visual perfectionism just because you think you need to make it pretty to be accepted. I mean, the best diagrams I have made have been walking up to whiteboard in a complicated moment where everybody in the room is totally stuck, drawing a square and going, ‘Is this what you mean, or do you mean like this? And then they go, ‘No, this way’, and then they’re up there, we’re up there and you walk out. And it looks like hieroglyphics, nobody knows what we’re talking about in that room. That’s not what it was for. But if we were to take a picture of that, put it into a deck and expect people to understand it, it’s no longer a diagram. So it was when we were making it, it was for us as the audience in the moment. But taking that thing and using it exactly the way we left it as a diagram for another audience out of context, it would be just visual representation, just proof that we did a thing and not expected to help anybody.
James Royal-Lawson
I think as well, about if you’ve gone beyond the point you need to, to communicate what you want where you are, you’ve tended to your diagram, then I guess you’re running the risk of, of getting to the zone of things like shame, and showing off. I mean, your people in the group, have you spent so much time making the pretty diagram that you do get that reaction that you’ve seen some of these workshops, and so on, like, ‘Oh, my God, your, your diagram is so good’. And they feel then, bad about their own diagrams or their own work for you. You didn’t need to go that far to get the point across.
Abby Covert
Yeah, I mean, we’re judging them by the way that we know to judge things hung on the wall, which is visual aesthetic, right? We’re walking up to it, like a painting in an art gallery and going, that’s beautiful, that’s not beautiful. And therefore, that must be a good diagram and that must be a bad diagram. I think that taking a second look at that, first as a student of diagramming. But second, as a consumer of diagrams. I think it’s really important. You know, there’s, there’s diagrams all around us, most of them are not visually pleasing. That’s the ticket. But you’re missing a lot if you pigeonhole yourself, as a person who has access to that skill, you’re pigeon holing yourself up by not doing it because you can’t get to that kind of visual perfection place.
Per Axbom
And you’re also making it more difficult to collaborate, I assume, because a big part of diagramming within organisations is collaborating. And if you make other people feel insecure, they won’t be able to feel comfortable to participate.
Abby Covert
Yeah, yeah, I was talking to somebody recently, who told me that when they go into a room with a stakeholder to critique a diagram, they always have a spelling error on the diagram so that they can take a big Sharpie marker and like before the person even gets into it, they could be like, ‘Oh, this, I’m so sorry. This is actually misspelt, let me just take care of that.’ And they just write all over it. Because it opens up this idea that like, this thing is changeable. And I think that like when you have when you have the superpower of visual representation, you can get away with a lot, you can convince people that something’s a lot more thought through than it actually is. And I think that that’s something that more people need to know and press on. Especially if we’re gonna live in this crazy cross-channel modern world, we do we’re gonna need diagrams even more than ever before.
James Royal-Lawson
Well, that makes me think though, I read you say that with the intention that diagrams, it might be that what you think a diagram is useful for, isn’t necessarily what you need to do with it. There’s something other than a diagram that might actually help you.
Abby Covert
Yeah, yeah, in setting your intention for a diagram, I’ve thought a lot about like, what makes a good intention. And one of the worst ones that I found is when the intention is just to visualise it. Like, I’m just going to make a visual of this thing tends to take us down a path of prioritising the visual part and not focusing on the helpfulness. So with my students, I found that pressing them on not using that as an intention, and really asking them themselves the question of when I do come to my intention, is it something that I can do with a diagram, you know, we don’t want diagrams to like, get a bad rap for failing on on us for big things.
But also, can this be done without a diagram? Because I think that makes for a stronger case, for the diagrams to actually come in, is to know that it’s maybe not the right solution, but you’re gonna go down that that path. I also find that a lot of times people don’t know they’re having a diagram until they’re kind of in the middle of having it, you know, they’re doing something else. They’re writing a thing, they’re doing a presentation, whatever it is, they run into a part where they get stuck, and they start to visualise it for themselves. And then at a certain point, they go ‘wait a second, maybe this is actually useful for somebody else.’ And then they add that in and sometimes they know what to diagram so sometimes they don’t you know. It’s just like, ‘I know a visual would be helpful here’ is a very human drive I think.
James Royal-Lawson
I think when you mentioned doing a presentation there that made me think of, I suppose, templatitis that you, you kind of get pushed into diagrams really quickly, really early on by a lot the presentation tools we have that you’ve got wizards and buttons, you just press something and poomf, you’ve got a tree map or something. And you’re intended to complete that template rather than actually, I guess think it through.
Abby Covert
Yeah, yeah, I really worry about that. Because there’s two parts to it. One, I see a lot of people who are completely capable diagramerrs that are just wasting time looking for the template instead of making their own diagram, you know, like doing it. But then I think more sadly, what I see is people that are new in the field, not having permission for themselves to do that. They truly feel like the problems have been thought out. The canvases and tools exist, the methods are named after people that I can Google and see things about them that seems fancy, let’s just go with this. And that is also really sad.
With my students, in Micah. One of them asked me in a question answer session recently, they’re like, I have this thing is kind of like a hierarchy. But then I have this other thing that’s kind of like a flow. What should I do? And I was just, ‘Well, what do you think you should do?’ and she’s like ‘I think I should put them together and do something that’s neither a hierarchy or a flow.’ It’s great, why don’t you do that? And she’s like, ‘that’s not a hierarchy. And that’s not a flow. It’s something else? What is it?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, we could call it your name when we’re done. If it’s really useful to somebody else to use a template. How do you think all these templates got made? Somebody decided that there needed to be a new way? They made it and then they named it, you know?
Per Axbom
Interesting. I actually had a question about have computers made the diagramming more uncommon, but I think it’s actually the opposite. It’s just, it’s more common, but it’s actually just worse, because of all the templates.
Abby Covert
Yeah. So you have to kind of you have to take it back, right. Diagrams, first of all, diagrams, not modern at all. Completely the least modern technology in our technology realm. We’ve been diagramming for I think, like the length of humanity, when we put pictures of simplified pictures of animals on cave walls, to remind other people that those might eat you or be good to eat. That was diagramming. And so I think if you look into the history of it, specifically with technology, a lot of the modern forms that we have in diagramming today, whether that’s flow diagrams, or block diagrams, or swim lanes.
A lot of that was born of the Industrial Revolution. But when the kind of paint got put on it would be when the tools started to go digital. And you started to see ubiquity of many professions, having access to those things through the chart wizards and stuff like that. So yeah, it’s really wild to see how similar all the diagrams are starting to look, based on the tools that exist. I’m really hopeful that some of that will start to change at some point. But for now, all the journey maps look the same. And that’s, you know, that’s the suburbs of diagrams, I guess.
Per Axbom
And we’re spending more and more time in online meetings, which makes it difficult to just, well, let’s just start drawing together here.
Abby Covert
Yeah, I mean, like, I think the online whiteboarding tools are wonderful. Having that innovation during my career has been life changing, like the fact that I can be in Florida and working with the team anywhere in the world on a diagram in real time, and that I don’t have to like save versions of it and email it to people anymore. That’s magical. But yeah, it also creates a lot of new interaction design challenges that we didn’t have in diagrams before, like being able to zoom in and out of them really easily, or like the tools that allow you to create kind of paths through that auto zoom people, into sections and stuff.
That’s all relatively new for us to figure out from a how do you teach people to do that in their work tools? But then also, how do you design diagrams that are able to support that level of depth? Right? Because it’s almost like having multiple layers on a diagram as possible now, which is really cool. You know, I think that there’s a lot there, but you can also get lost in, ‘God, there’s so much here.’ I think it’s very often for me to see that those ever expanding canvases lead to ever expanding diagrams, and I have not seen many ever expanding diagrams that are useful to people or helpful. So yeah, kind of blessing and a curse.
Yeah, as a note taking tool, it kind of works. But I think we’re kind of dissing a bit of the tools and some of the templates and everything now but thinking back when I was at school, we had stencils for doing flowcharts in computer science. And that was effectively a template or rather, it was it was helping me structure my diagrams in, or on my flowcharts in a uniform way. Which I mean, we’re not we’re not dissing that, are we?
No, I think the visual consistency is definitely a tool and a tactic that one can use in diagrams and also doesn’t work for all things. You know, there’s there’s some diagrams that need to be ornate or very highly decorative to be accepted into the place in the world that they’re supposed to fit. But I think like the the diagramming tools that we have today, I think are very limited to like which templates they tend to represent. But also, on the positive side major, there like opening up the potential for more people to diagram. I mean, the closest that a lot of the business users that I’ve worked with had before was PowerPoint. And, you know, that’s a great diagramming tool, PS, thank you, Microsoft. But it also is really limiting. And it’s specifically limiting in terms of like what you can do from a visual styling perspective.
And so yeah, I think the fact that those, that same market, seems to have been targeted for these templates that are in these whiteboarding tools, I think that that’s actually really cool. Because I feel like there’s a lot of business users that would use diagrams, if they didn’t think that they were owned by design, or needed to be made by designers, you know, because they have to be pretty. So those templates, give them that starting place to like, no, oh, no, you too can make a journey map if you just drag and drop this template and start typing words.
Per Axbom
So there’s an aspect that was really important that I took away as well, of diagrams that is often there that we see. And it’s called the key. And for everyone listening and wondering what I’m talking about, it’s often that a small area on a diagram or a map that explains what all the different symbols mean. But you’re saying also, it doesn’t have to have a key, but the important thing is that people understand it.
Abby Covert
Yeah, yeah. So I think that one of the main questions that I get from folks is, Does every diagram have to have a key that visually explains the diagram? o you need? If you make a hierarchy map, and you have two different colours of boxes? Do you need to have that represented somewhere else on the diagram in a box called key? I thought about this really hard. First, I wanted it to be like a Yep, you always need that. But then as I looked at diagrams that I myself have made, I realised how many of them did not have keys. And I started to really ask myself why that was, why would I ignore advice that I would give to my own students about diagrams? And what I started to believe was that it actually is more important for us to look at the diagram towards the completion point, through the users eyes one last time to figure out what is the key to understanding this diagram?
And do I need to be super explicit and verbal about that in this diagram by making a box called key and explaining myself? Or are there other visual elements, mostly labels that I might be able to add that are going to make this come to life without having to look at a key? Now, this might be well, that is kind of pedantic. Like, why not? Why does it matter? It could be in the key, it could be on the diagram, what’s the difference? The difference is, the cognitive load of your diagram will be different. If you ask a user to travel down to a box called key, keep something in their mind to travel back up to decode your diagram. And it might seem small, but it’s not. It’s actually it piles up on people.
And the more you ask them to decode from going to key to back to diagram, the less they’re going to understand your diagram were the more likely it will be that they’ll misunderstand your diagram. So I think that that’s it’s a critical point, like, just by adding a key and explaining yourself exhaustively does not make for useful diagrams, right? You can have a key, everything can be explained, over explained. And it can be unhelpful in terms of the kind of takeaway,
Per Axbom
Exactly, the presence of the key can actually be an indication that you’ve you’ve made a poorly designed diagram, and you’re trying to explain it away.
Abby Covert
Exactly. Like how many diagrams have you seen where you have to, like you’re looking at it, you’re going I know, these colours are supposed to mean something. Okay, let me go to the key. I’m gonna say, oh, okay, so pink means this and green means that and then you go back to the diagram, you’re looking at, you’re going wait, this pink means, wait, what does green mean? Crap. Was it green that meant that, was it pink that meant that? And then you gotta go back down. It is work. And it’s often work that should have been done by the maker of the diagram that has been offloaded to the users of the diagram.
James Royal-Lawson
I was just about to ask a question about keys. And then I realised it wasn’t really a question about the keys. It was actually more. Okay, I’ll ask it, so what’s the difference between a key, a caption ,and a legend?
Abby Covert
Okay, so my understanding is that a legend and a key are synonymous. So I think that that’s like a stylistic choice of what we what we call things. What was the second thing you said?
James Royal-Lawson
I said key caption and legend so captions was the other one. So a heading, I guess a name for your diagram, I suppose.
Abby Covert
Yeah. So the headline and caption elements of diagrams, I think are really important. They often are the places that you can kind of pull information from that key to make things more clear whether it’s in positioning the diagram with a really bold headline line that kind of tells the user what you’re expecting them to do with this thing, or by making more context clear with the encoding that you’ve used in the diagram kind of thin line. So yeah, I think that they’re similar. They’re all related, but slightly different.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. And I think that’s where my brain was going with this is what we’re saying about well, keys, you don’t want to use them too much to get too deep into explaining your diagram, then I started to think about well, I’m going to probably make use of a caption than to do some kind of summary rather than rely on it, a key
Abby Covert
Sure. Yeah, captions are really important. And while we’re talking about captions, let’s talk about accessibility, alt text, incredibly important for diagrams. But perhaps more important, is alternative content. Because there’s, there’s a point at which explaining the visual part of a diagram actually isn’t important or necessary to support a user that has accessibility needs. So, similar to writing a caption, you really want to think about what is the goal of this thing with a caption, you’re writing something that adds context to the diagram with alternative content, you’re writing something that replaces the diagram, but still gets the same point across.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, that’s an excellent point.
Per Axbom
Yeah, fantastic point. Wow.
Abby Covert
I mean, you turn the background red, I was like, we’re running out of time. And we haven’t said the word accessibility yet. So I’m going to make it work and it did.
Per Axbom
I love this. One insight that came to me as I was reading your book and watching your talks, was that it’s easy for things to get confrontational, when you get want to get a point across. I mean, this but with a diagram, you get people to have the insight themselves, which means that it’s there. They’re more likely to actually accept that insight, rather than you’re telling them.
Abby Covert
Yeah, that’s a beautiful thought. It’s almost like they’re looking at the diagram. And they’re going, Oh, that’s what you think. That’s not what I think at all. And you can kind of have a chuckle about it versus like, I think this and I think that you would agree, you know, like having that verbally as me who wants to do that without a diagram.
Per Axbom
Thank you for unpacking diagrams for us and explaining all their power, which is huge. I know because I’ve seen seen so much stuff going on with diagrams, both good and bad. And I love the definition that you have with them actually being useful. Thank you for that. I’m going to start pointing to diagrams and saying that’s not a diagram. That’s not a diagram.
Abby Covert
Just a visual representation hoping to make it to diagram one day.
Per Axbom
Oh, it’s fantastic to talk to you again, Abby, thank you for being on the show.
Abby Covert
Lovely to see you both. Thank you.
Per Axbom
So I think what, what Abby is doing and what she’s representing here is this fantastic art of information architecture, which sometimes feels like it’s sort of a lost art in the world of UX, at least to me. It’s this attention to detail, willingness to spend time with complexity, and really get to grips with how the smallest of things can affect and change a whole organisation. And so just this concept of making diagrams to explain diagrams is so meta. And that is information architecture for me.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that structure and an order, and yeah, visualising some of this complexity in a more accessible way. And yeah, one of the, talking of meta, the one the diagrams from his book, is nice, because I like how it touches on the idea that well, we talked about, we complain about how icons, for example, these the aren’t any universally understood icons, basically. There are very, very few. You can’t just pull out an icon say, ah, everyone knows what that means. So just think about that with with diagramming. Are there other universally understood elements to diagrams? Is there a is there certain things you can apply in diagram that everyone’s going to know what you mean by that?
The instant response is going to be no, because we said that about icons, so you know, kind of fits and it will say about the elements of diagrams as well. Well, Abbey’s got a diagram in our book that just exemplifies four ways you can visualise relationships in diagrams. And it’s wonderful diagram because it’s, it’s brutally simple, but very, very effective. Should I try and audibly describe a diagram about diagramming? Yes, this is real, real meta level now, Per.
Okay, so this diagram has four different relationships described in it. One of them is, well, they’re all based on this and that. Okay? So the first one is, this is part of that, where this is inside a small box, which in itself is inside a bigger box with the word that. So this is part of that. Another one is this leads to that. And in that one, this is a box with an arrow pointing to another box with a word that in it. So this leads to that. Third one is, this is a type of that. Here, you’ve got that, as a box, kind of looks like a label, I guess, with a line connecting it to a slightly smaller box, or label with this in it.
Per Axbom
Where this is indented, so it’s indented from marginally for the lab.
James Royal-Lawson
So the combination of the size and the line, implying that, oh, this is a type of that. And that, of course could be repeated. So the icon doesn’t do this. But you’d have several. This is maybe no, but visualise it was several different things that were a type of that. On the fourth one, this relates to that. Now this one looks very, very similar to the this leads to that, where it’s a box with this in and a line across to another box with that in. But here, it’s just a line, not an arrow. So it’s the connected, but there’s no direction attached to it, or hierarchy. So just this just this one diagram actually contains a huge amount of information and a lot of useful tips on how on how to do diagrams,
Per Axbom
And like you said, brutally simple, but still so very important to remind yourself. Yes, it maybe feels obvious, but when it’s so clearly described, it makes you more careful and attentive when actually grappling with the task of making a really good diagram. I don’t remember if if you remember, James, when I was drawing the system map of pandemic relationships.
And I had arrows between elements because this when this thing increases, it will also increase the spread of the virus and I had an arrow in between. But sometimes it decreases the spread of the virus. And I still had an arrow. But I didn’t know how to make people understand how do I add and subtract. So really, according to this model, I was just saying this leads to that I was I wasn’t really implying that it would increase or decrease. So I was actually doing that diagram a bit wrong which way, which is why I was struggling with it so much.
James Royal-Lawson
And, which is really good there, though is that I know that you shared that diagram. You tested it, and you got feedback.
Per Axbom
Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
And this goes back to what we say about there’s no universally understood icons, and are these universally understood elements of diagramming. And Abbey said, You’ve got to test your diagrams and and see whether they work in love with their work with the audience they were intended to work with. And if they don’t quite work, then you tweak them.
Per Axbom
Exactly, yes.
James Royal-Lawson
Great UX process.
Per Axbom
Yes, it is really. Yeah. And that’s, I guess what you can pull from it is how it applies to everything we do. Just thinking about these details. I think I think the thing that really sticks with me is Are
James Royal-Lawson
Are you stuck?
Per Axbom
Yes, but the things is that’s
James Royal-Lawson
I’m doing dad jokes before we finished.
Per Axbom
This one, I think what I mentioned in the show as well make the diagram so it performs its purpose. And don’t do more than that. There are so many things we just we keep going even though we’re actually done. But also the second part of my two big takeaways is, ensure that every visual element is clear in its intention and its meaning. So these two concepts together, they really encourage you to look at every element, every arrow and label that we just talked about. And consider is this enough? And is it understandable, understandable for the target group? Okay, then you’re done. Which is fantastic.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And I’m not going to do, but I think we could get into a real philosophical discussion about like, what’s sketching, what’s diagramming? What’s prototyping, perhaps even what’s what’s UX or what’s Information Architecture. We could have imagined spending three hours talking to Abby about this. I mean, wonderful time, maybe not fitting it all in three hours. But instead of going into that, maybe recommended listening is a good way of taking this forward. So we can we can listen to why we have listened to Abby now and talk to Abby. But next up, you can maybe listen to episode 234 where we talked visual thinking with Eva-Lotta Lamm.
Per Axbom
Oh yeah, that’s a good one. That’s one of my favourite episodes I talked about a lot. That in itself, speaking of philosophy, that for me is like, really understanding life almost. It’s so when you listen to it, you’ll understand what I mean. It’s like a philosophy for coping with struggles in life, but through sketching, explained through sketching.
James Royal-Lawson
What a wonderful toolbox, this, with with Abby helping you when you’re stuck and Eva-Lotta Lamm getting you through life by sketching.
Per Axbom
Oh, excellent Yes. Remember to keep moving
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
Per Axbom
So James, why did the nurse always have a red pen?
James Royal-Lawson
Don’t know, Per. Why did the nurse always have a red pen?
Per Axbom
In case he needed to draw blood.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Abby Covert recorded in April 2022 and published as episode 289 of UX Podcast.