Corin Frost THUMB

Corin Frost

Design

Visual Communication

<h3>Five years ago, you created the visual communication service offering&nbsp;at Delve. What inspired you to do this?</h3>
One evening about ten years ago, after a long, tough work session, I sat next to a medtech client’s VP of R&D at dinner, and we started debriefing.&nbsp;I would ask questions, he would answer, and with every bit of additional explanation, I quickly mapped out the entire laboratory process across a single A1 sheet of paper. Where the people, objects, devices, and data interacted. What happened before, during and after the med device was operated. Where the bottlenecks and unknowns were.

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The VP of R&D studied my sketch for a moment, then looked up at me and said, “You know, the opportunity isn’t there.” He pointed at their device on my sketch, then pointed to the left and right of it. “The problems to solve are happening before and after, here and here.”

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That was a breakthrough moment for the project. And it happened because we found a way to visualize the process and communicate it clearly across the entire team, starting from a live sketch session with a client over dinner. Suddenly, we weren’t just talking at one another in meetings or trying to downselect strategic opportunities using just words. 
We used the visualized experience map to define needs and pain-points to solve for. We created worksheets and posters that helped executives imagine and compare possible future directions. We built infographics and frameworks that communicated the Voice Of Customer quickly so we could advocate for end-users in the room where decisions were being made on their behalf. 
After finishing that project, I thought, “This is important. We need to do this for all our clients.”&nbsp;
After applying the same skillsets and deliverables to subsequent projects successfully, I pitched the idea of a permanent visual communication service offering at Delve, to provide support on all our product design and development projects. The rest is history.

My master's degree is in industrial design and my experience at Delve up to that point had been in design research. I had no graphic design experience at the time, so I learned on the job and completed a certificate of Graphic Design online at nights and weekends. I love helping others see the world through the design lens for the first time and activating ethnographic research and human-centered design to make the world better. Leading the visual communication service at Delve taps into my passion for knowledge sharing, creative communication, and problem-solving by using information design, data visualization, and storytelling communication techniques.
<h3>How does Delve’s visual communication service help clients?</h3>
Our visual communication service contributes to projects in two main ways.
First, we provide decision-making support. In any project, no matter the product or sector, or at what point in the development process Delve becomes involved, the team will reach a point where a decision needs to be made. You will need to share data and provide options to choose from. You will need to explain information to help the decision makers feel informed and confident in their choices. My former colleague and mentor Stefanie Norvaisas used to say, at Delve, we rarely encounter a shortage of good ideas. <a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/designing-good-decisions" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The process of selecting the right idea, among many great ideas, then getting it approved by the stakeholders</a>, is usually the hard part. Whenever the stakeholders are unable to make a decision for any reason, development is put on hold. This can lead to very long development times or even worse: good ideas languishing because of inaction. 
Decision-making delays have big business implications. <a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/dont-launch-late-four-ways-to-reduce-risk-in-connected-device-development" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Launching nine to 12 months late can cost a project up to 50 percent of its potential revenues.</a>&nbsp;Being late to the market gives competitors more time to move in, so it can lead to a smaller market share.

Generating good ideas is usually not the problem. The process of choosing one good idea and getting it through your organization is usually the hard part.

Don't Miss: How to Design Good Decisions

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Delve’s visual communication service helps our clients rally stakeholders around a particular product idea or strategy by creating visual support and facilitating decision-making sessions. When a decision-making moment comes, we are ready with easily absorbable infographics to educate stakeholders about these long, complex projects. Our storytelling enables stakeholders—sometimes made up of executives who have very different priorities and rarely collaborate outside of their own business units—to get up to speed quickly and find alignment faster as a decision-making group. 
Tap the left/right arrows below to view examples from our past projects.

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The visually supported reports and storytelling presentations we create are also very useful reference—we call them breadcrumbs—for teams that come after us. Our clients co-create the message and feel confident they can deliver it themselves internally or share them with future teams who need to quickly grasp the project’s background, why they made the decisions they did, and what north star or future state the team is being asked to rally around. The second way we contribute is by designing visual assets to put into production as products transfer to manufacturing vendors. This might be a refined brand mark, graphics for a digital wizard, detailed instructions for use, quickstart guides, on-product labeling,&nbsp;or packaging experiences that help the end user understand how to engage with the product confidently.

<h3>How is your work different from graphic design?</h3>
Graphic design is part of what we do, but our&nbsp;visual communication service&nbsp;focuses on applying human-centered design approaches to communicate information effectively to a specific audience.

At Delve, we support our clients not just through Strategy, Design and Engineering, but also with the ‘intangibles’ along the way.

Don't Miss: 7 Tips for Creating Compelling Presentations

Delve's visual communication service is fully embedded into our design process. We all communicate visually at Delve.&nbsp;Across every project, from start to finish, we&nbsp;document and plan communications for client teams and develop visual assets for end-users as needed. We also provide tools and structure for <a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/drawing-out-a-groups-creativity" target="_blank">facilitating effective collaboration and ideation</a> sessions for in-person, hybrid, or all-remote teams. The underlying intention is key.&nbsp;We know that innovation works best when you’re collaborative. All the people involved in innovation are part of the team. This includes the client. Ultimately, they are the ones making the decisions. So, we design our process as carefully as we design the product—using powerful visual storytelling to intentionally guide our clients to make the best decisions possible—because the client’s success is our success. Visual communication enables everyone on the team to collaborate effectively and keep making progress toward the end result of successful design.

<h3>What's one project you're particularly proud of?</h3>
We're proud of the work we did for <a href="https://www.futurefoam.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Future Foam</a>. 
Future Foam makes the foam underlayment that is installed under carpet and provides comfort and increased durability. The problem they brought to us was that many people go into a store like Home Depot to buy carpet without realizing they will also have to purchase this other product. Carpet is a big investment. Without guidance, it’s easy for customers to feel overwhelmed or too paralyzed to decide. Future Foam asked us to apply human-centered design to improve the carpet shopping process and provide&nbsp;guidance for decisions they must make when they buy carpet. 
We researched&nbsp;Future Foam’s customer (carpet store/department associates), installer, and homeowner needs. We learned how they thought about carpet cushion, and about the entire carpet shopping experience from picking carpet over other flooring options through installation. We also created an experience map and report describing the strategy we could implement for both big box and mom-and-pop stores. Then we developed visual tools to support sales associates with kiosk designs, information design panels, a physical sample kit, and marketing materials. We even did naming and branding for the moisture barriers.

Viz comm test future foam

Before our work, all Future Foam used to promote their product in carpet stores were samples squares of cushion sealed in plastic. Cards were printed with the product photo and some specs, but the product descriptions used technical terms like pounds density and thickness that didn’t mean much to users. The sales kit we created for Future Foam was designed to be a user-friendly brand-building and educational tool. The kit allowed cushion samples and feature cards to be easily swapped out as needed. It could be brought into the user’s home or laid out in a carpet store. It used a good/better/best comparison matrix to clearly show the choices users could make. A user could test the difference between three types of cushions and compare them with cards that showed each's features. The kit described the product in terms users could easily understand, like levels of comfort and durability, or features that added clear value, like moisture barriers and sustainable materials like Nike Regrind. Because the kit was branded specifically for Future Foam and because it spoke to users in their own language, it worked alongside multiple carpet store brands and supported customer retention. We originally created 500 of the kits, but we have since updated the kits and Future Foam has printed thousands more. We continue to work with Future Foam on other projects, like updating their sales kiosks and in-store experiences. I’m also proud of the work we did on the <a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/papr-hood-for-healthcare-heroes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">PAPR hood</a> during the COVID-19 pandemic. The device was worn by healthcare workers to filter air and inflate a bubble around the head, rejecting contaminants. I was asked to pitch in because of my extensive experience designing and patterning <a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/when-to-use-soft-goods-in-product-design" target="_blank">soft-goods products and wearable medical devices</a> for our clients at Delve. I ended up creating the first seven PAPR prototypes in four days. We’re all about speedy product development at Delve, but this was on another level. It felt good to apply design thinking and rapid prototyping to try to&nbsp;get much-needed PPE into the hands of healthcare workers when they needed it most.

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<h3>What's an emerging technology or trend that you're excited about? </h3>
I’m excited about the <a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/how-the-consumerization-of-healthcare-is-transforming-medical-device-design" target="_blank">trend towards home healthcare.</a> It’s making facets of healthcare more accessible and affordable by allowing people to do certain things themselves, at home. That’s the good news. But there’s a tradeoff too: more risk. For example, home diagnostic tests involve chemistry. Sometimes they require you to draw your own blood, and that’s a painful, hard thing to do. Things can go wrong, making the test invalid. 
Part of designing a safe and effective at-home device in this new era means giving users with no clinical experience the information and confidence they need to operate devices correctly, on their own. 
I’m excited about how visual communication can help the medtech industry meet these new challenges. Meeting our new users where they are means understanding how people process information and what makes a new process feel intuitive. For one product, instructions for use might be a video people can watch. For another product, users might step through a digital wizard. Guidance for use might even be embedded in the packaging itself: you open one part and see the next step, and so on. 
Figuring out the right design solution will involve a multidisciplinary, holistic approach that involves industrial design, digital experience, human-factors engineers, packaging know-how, and of course, visual communications. Those are the projects I like best.&nbsp;
-- Read Corin's articles:<a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/7-best-practices-for-creating-compelling-presentations" target="_blank"> </a>
<ul><li><a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/7-best-practices-for-creating-compelling-presentations" target="_blank">7 Tips for Creating Compelling Presentations</a></li><li><a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/drawing-out-a-groups-creativity" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">How to Draw Out a Group’s Creativity</a> </li><li><a href="https://www.delve.com/insights/papr-hood-for-healthcare-heroes" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">PAPR Hood for Healthcare Heroes</a>&nbsp;</li></ul>

Not just graphic design. Our visual design services will help you explain complex experiences, tell better stories, and communicate human-centered messages.

Services Page: Visual Communication

Learn more about&nbsp;<a href="https://www.delve.com/services/design/visual-communication" target="_blank">Visualization: Delve Visual Communication Design Services</a>.​

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Get to know Corin Frost, Senior Director of Communication Design at Delve.

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Meet a Delvian: Corin Frost

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