The need for better technical communication tools
I’ve worked for ~7 years in a technical capacity bridging the communication gap between technical and non-technical people and often technical and technical people.
As the iPad came out and the Paper app, I fell in love with the possibility for dramatically increasing the efficiency of communication through quick visual diagramming.
I love visual abstractions and the capability they offer to decrease communication loss and establish fixed reference frames for meaning. This might sound a little abstract and perhaps I’ll develop it more as I go. I’m writing this because I want to start writing more and getting random ideas out of my head and into the wild.
Unfortunately, the visual diagramming tech that I wanted wasn’t really there for another 5 years until the iPad Pro came out and the new Apple Pencil stylus. In 2018 I bought these two gizmos and was blown away at the progress and the ease of diagramming.
It became by defacto journaling and communication tool and the more I used it the more I started to think in ways that I could use it in a work and personal life capacity.
The problem
The problem I’m considering lately is that most of the well designed diagramming and sketch tools are consumer oriented and have fairly simple feature sets.
I want to be able to listen to a customer and quickly map out the landscape of:
- their business structure
- their technology stack / architecture
- their needs
- how what we’re speaking about right now is related to the downstream value they’re working with customers on
- how our technology relates to all of the above
I can do this now but it’s fairly cumbersome and repetitive. I want an interface specifically tailored to this use case and I think there is probably enough business value in the world to justify creating it.
Think of all the technology or complex product companies in the world who need to constantly communicate across vast differences in perspective and understanding.
That’s all for now. I’d love to write more on what sort of information models could be tailored to this use case in order to increase communication efficiency related to the bullet points above.
To be continued…
