DAM Technology

One of the things that I spend a lot of time concentrating on is how to simplify things. There’s an adage that I picked up somewhere along the way about focus — “Focus isn’t saying yes to the right things, it’s saying no to everything else.” I think that’s pretty much spot on and mirrors how I approach a lot of our work.

Here’s a relevant example. We received an incredibly generous donation from a business consulting firm primarily in the form of in-kind services. Before I disparage them here, let me be clear in saying that I hold the group in pretty high regard and my experience with them both personally and professionally has been nothing but positive. We’re working on a big data project with them and they bring an incredibly amount of resource and skill to our little problems that we’d never deal with otherwise.

In a nutshell, our big data problem is that we have a bunch of business systems that live in silos. We’re creating a middle layer that knows how to talk to the data stores and can do some manipulation of that data and spit out new stuff that we can’t do now. A common problem, a reasonable solution.

So, how do we communicate that to people? Here was the consulting firm’s take:

I look at that sort of image with horror. A good indicator that you’re too visually complex is that you need pullquotes or tooltips to explain what you’re doing. It’s all good information, but only a mother would care for that little beast.

So, I simplified a great deal and then turned it into a before and after story to better demonstrate the actual change that’s going to take place.

I’m not totally happy with it and think I probably could have done a bit better, but as a communication tool, it’s worked out pretty well. I’ve changed a handful of things — gotten rid of about a thousand words (listen to me, not read the slide), made the second slide mirror the first to show progression, provided higher contrast in complimentary colors, and show only the essential bits of what’s happening. Oversimplified in spots? Perhaps, but for most people with no familiarity of what the hell’s going on, it’s probably about right.

Big Picture, Opinion