VisualsSpeak blog

Testing the VisualsSpeak Tool was a long process of finding and organizing thousands of photographs. I started by cutting out and laminating thousands of photos from books and magazines. Some were squares and rectangles which I cut on paper cutters, while others were cut from their backgrounds with scissors. Thousands of books and magazines, many hours of cutting. Little scraps of paper everywhere.

Then I decided to laminate. I laminated over ten thousand pictures on my home office laminating machine. I loaded them into letter sized laminating pouches, sandwiched them in carrier pages and fed them into the machine.

I tested the photos initially by asking people to make collages of how they see their present and what they wanted in their future with a transition in between. I watched how they did it, what they said, what they asked. At first, I gave people four thousand images to choose from, organized into 96 categories. If they said they couldn’t find something they wanted, I’d try to find it to add to the set.

I noticed some people would get deep insights, while others not so much. I got interested in figuring out which factors made the difference. More testing.

I started meeting other people who wanted to use the tool. There was no way I was going to cut out and laminate 4000 images for each one of them, and they weren’t so hot on the idea of doing it themselves. So, I needed to figure out how to reduce the number of images. I made sets with 2000 images then 1200 images.

I kept testing and watching, and eventually found I could get results with two hundred images in four major categories with twelve subcategories. I still had to cut out 2400 images to make the first prototypes for the development team, good thing by this time I added my business partner Tom. We started to use our plastic supplier, Oregon Laminations, to do the bulk lamination. We still do some lamination for testing, but we have a heavier duty laminator now.