The Back of The Napkin (Dan Roam)
/I bought a book a few months ago and I was never able to open it. Yesterday I did and it is awesome. I only got through a few pages before falling asleep (tired, not boredom) but I learned some valuable things.
The Back of the Napkin is a great book about visual thinking. (see the slides above for an impression though I suggest you buy the book here.) One of the first lessons is of the process of visual thinking.
Look -> See -> Imagine -> Show
Pretty self explanatory.
One of the more striking ideas of this cycle is the concept of finding boundaries or as Dan describes it: "Which was is up". You can use the W's and H as your guidelines. Every visual presentation is one based on the W's and H's: Where, Why, When, Who, What, How (much).
This is a great tool to brainstorm and visualize customer journeys. With a large dataset in front of you try combining different W's and H's. See what the possibilities are and see what stands out. This will make sure that your conclusions and recommendations are based both on a great data set, as well as a solid framework built around the data.
Take a look at the data you have. Take your customer surveys, your social media monitoring, your employee satisfaction and your mystery shopping. Cross the data sets with each other and see what kind of interesting insights come out.
