I still remember the lesson that my first leader taught me, he said: “No one pays attention to your lengthy document, even though it’s adequate, and detailing”. It enlighten me from that time from now.

My leader was a Product Manager, he used to write the product requirements document (PRD) for the team. For a while, he realized a few people in the team had read the document carefully, and they just focused on some pictures or diagrams in the document. Reflect on myself, I am also a person who prefers to read the image instead of a bunch of texts — maybe that's why I became a designer :D

Do you want to read this “academic” document?

Got that insight, he tries to create another version that summarizes all the key things into one diagram. Besides, the full version is still available when the team needs to read it when needed.

This is not the actual image of him demonstrate image, just a demo for you to get the idea.

After testing, he recognized that the missing implementation features of the team were reduced effectively, and the bugs appeared less than before testing.

This lesson has changed the way I communicate, or explain some complex information to my team to this day.

Here's what I did recently to break down complex information into just 2 slides by summarizing the key ideas and illustrations instead of writing it into many slides.

and the text version looks like this

So, which version do you prefer?

In addition to that study, I also apply illustration techniques to make the presentation more vivid. You can have a reference of it:

• https://maggieappleton.com/basb
• https://maggieappleton.com/reactpotato