TEI 320: Visual strategies to better position your product ideas – with Amy Balliett

How product managers can use visual storytelling to make their ideas stand out As we move into 2021, the name of this podcast is changing to better reflect our objective here—product managers become product masters. That new name is Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming in a few weeks and it will show in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator™ but as Product Masters Now. Product managers must communicate their ideas to others in ways that are clear and solicit feedback. Using visuals to help communicate information can be very helpful. Visual tools can make information easy to understand and also place it in context. When it comes to visual information, Amy Balliett is a leader. Her visual communication agency has created thousands of successful information campaigns for Fortune 1000 clients. She speaks on and teaches visual information concepts whenever she can. Today, she joins us so we can understand how simple visual tools can make us better communicators. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:44] How did you end up on the path to becoming the “Queen of Visualizing Information”? In film school I fell in love with visual storytelling. Later I pivoted my career and started my own business, Killer Infographics, creating infographics for online marketing. We evolved from infographics to motion graphics, interactive eBooks, and other visual media. We merged marketing and visual storytelling and drove success by applying what we had learned with infographics—the best practices of visual storytelling—to all these other types of creative content. Visual storytelling makes a huge difference for businesses because audiences want to get to know the brands they’re buying from, but they often don’t want to take the time to read content that delivers authenticity and transparency. We visualize those messages so that audiences will consume them far more often and voraciously. [8:13] You’ve been compared to Edward Tufte, the “King of Visualizing Information.” What are your thoughts on that comparison? To be compared to Tufte is a huge compliment. I’ve followed him from the beginning, and one time I went to one of his workshops and saw that some people were overwhelmed by the pace at which he was sharing information. I wondered how I could share the same content in a way that’s easier to digest. Tufte focuses on visualizing scientific or historical information for an analytical audience. At Killer, I focus on visualizing content to advertise to an audience. We want to make content edgy and exciting while delivering a clear, succinct message. We focus on catching attention very quickly, because today’s audiences have super short attention spans. What would you like to share about your eight rules for visual communication? [11:04] Always think about con-text. It’s a con when there’s too much text. The definition of visual communication is the act of graphically representing information to efficiently and effectively create meaning. A key word is graphically, but 99% of infographics have paragraphs of text next to images. That’s not visual communication. According to brain science, humans take in visual information in one-tenth of a second, but they take over five seconds to take in text-based information. If you have only five seconds to get your viewer to come to a conclusion, use visual content. If they have to read the text to understand the visuals, you’re not visually communicating. A recent study found that articles with images every 75-100 words had two times the engagement of articles that had one image or less. [14:53] Avoid the stigma of stock. It’s not enough to stick unrelated images into your content.