Over the past year, I've been working at a more traditional ad agency, that has its roots in print and digital marketing. It's been a great education for me, in that, coming from Seattle -- where tech and startups are the norm, I've had to adapt how I communicate with those that might not be as familiar with the digital landscape.

When you're dealing with multimillion dollar marketing budgets, there are a lot of pieces at play and the stakes are high. The more the digital world starts to evolve, the more pieces there are to keep track of, and throw in multiple campaigns and social media and it can feel like a losing battle.

The Old Way

The IA in me would throw this all into a spreadsheet, and I still do, attaching dates and notes and things I need to be aware of. But, if you want to get the complexity across to a less technical audience, say marketing executives used to dealing in print media, you need to find a way to illustrate it.

The New Approach

Whenever someone's trying to introduce me to a new idea, i take lots of notes -- and i tend to write things in little blobs. And then i start to connect the blobs as I see related thoughts. It's similar to mind-mapping, but something I naturally do; little blocks of information are easier to absorb than a long thread.

So, after a number of conversations on one particular project that had social, mobile and web considerations, plus media buys attached, I realized the client just wasn't getting how it would all work together - and if one element broke then they would all break. In part, we were trying to convey the volume they were asking for by a very tight delivery date.

We were remotely located from the client so I couldn't just whiteboard it out for her. We also had several new people join the project who were still getting up to speed, so I'd been redrawing the same little diagram with all these bubbles to show all the pieces and how they all connect. Welcome to the ecosystem.

I quickly opened a Powerpoint, the client's tool of choice, and threw all my little circles into a slide and started connecting them. I sent the slide over to her mid-conversation -- she opened it and paused. It took her a minute to grasp it, but very quickly she started to realize how many pieces we were talking about. It also gave her a reference point as we focused on the individual needs of each area. It was gold. She understood which items we were referring to and she could then help us prioritize.

The Breakdown

Quick ecosystem illustrating drivers and the different pathways in a site.

Ecosystems drawings are intended to be a quick tool to communicate
Anyone can draw circles and connecting lines
It's a chance to get everyone thinking up at the high-level, before we dive down into any specifics.
It can be a quick whiteboard sketch with your peers, you all get the picture, it gets erased, everybody moves on.
Or, it can be more designed out to present to a client.

You have to be careful with this. Depending on the complexity, some clients will get overwhelmed and not understand - so it gets dismissed.
If it's for a presentation, I may start at the highest view possible and then on separate slides "zoom in" on the details of each block.

It's not intended to house all the details, it's just intended to quickly illustrate key considerations or show how things work together.

Get to sketching!