Building visual documentation for the visual learner

Before a few years ago I did not know I was a visual learner.

Because I’m weird… I would write “faster than fuck” trying to keep up with a speaker.

Trying to keep up with words people say is exhausting. At a row level, it feels like I’m dealing with acid compliance at a row level, I’m a beep boop robot.

Now I know better. I’m very visual.

I can draw pictures with words, ask questions, make diagrams, and eventually start to generate something that is sensible.

I’m very visual and after notes are generated, next step are appearing or completely obvious at this point.

I like learning patterns. My grand mother showed my patterns in checkers and chess growing up. I also noticed a pattern that she was declining mentally while playing these games with her. That was an interesting aspect of life.

Chess is a very visual game. You get to see all the chances, the moves, and your options are obvious. The other team is trying to make their moves not obvious by getting you distracted with other moves that seem more important. Hiding your moves is important.

Hiding what you mean behind your words is a place to add visual documentation

Visual documentation takes your understanding to another level, it’s the architecture, it’s the blimp view, it’s more than a few buzz words and spoken phrases that mean XYZzzz.

Before understanding what a visual learner is I was alway trying to fall into a pattern of what I was trained to do…

Being trained is cool if the person training you knows what they are doing.

I talk about this topic too often, however it’s something that I see often. A lot of trainers are career trainers and have little to no experience in production experience of this application or software or code. I try to avoid learning from them, unlike people like Brian Holt. Brian has a lot of experience and also enjoys training others. This is really rare.

Before I understood I enjoy whiteboarding and living the consultant life… I was trying to write notes like people expected notes to be built in high school or pre high school, which is row level information each time.

I would enter information into this line until it’s full. However now I enjoy giving myself a lot of room, draw charts, diagrams, wireframes, whatever it takes for my visual learning brain to say… “This is what makes sense right now.”

If you don’t know your audience – ask questions to learn more.

Your audience might be a visual learner. If you don’t know, ask.

If you’re making documentation for a visual learner…

Do more visual and less words. Try to boil the ocean with icons. I like flaticon.com.

If you’re wrapping text over and over it’s because you’re not really sure what you’re saying. Like a powerpoint where you’re staring at bullets that wrap. That’s junk. You’re not prepared. You should be reading that text. Powerpoint is not for wrapping text. It’s for presenting information. Your mouth is the wrapping text.

Visual learners don’t mind wrapping text, but I hope you’re enjoying the points I’m making by not only speaking about one topic. I think these are called analogies with some functional results.

What are you trying to say to a visual learner? Saying things to visual learner is like them drinking from a fire hose nozzle and you’re the fire hose conductor.

I know I need to tell someone I’m a visual learner as soon as they hit me with more than a paragraph and I’ve not seen anything visual. Like a recruiter saying “we have xgoogle people here” and in my mind I’m thinking “the people who didn’t cut it at google are here?” But if they had shown me a photo of them and what they created I would have never formed this strange opinion about them being flunkies.

I’m a visual learner and I love to document things to help my brain understand things better.

My brain needs to see a visual before it completely comprehends everything.

Getting a lot of information in form of chapters is not inviting for a visual learner like myself. I hate books, I need a lot of pages open at once and if I take pages out of the book it degrades the book and then pages will fall out of the book. I believe this is rather destructive and not the point of a book but that’s the basis of why I struggled the most in college. So i did my best to put the entire chapter on one piece of paper. This allowed me to boil the ocean, only bring what’s important, and helped me learn I can write really fucken small.

This is often lacking in my client engagements and I enjoy filling the gap. Also, if I can’t visually see everything at a high level it’s hard to suggest a path forward from a solution perspective.

Anyone can build powerful visual documentation if they try.

In an office setting or WFH, I prefer writing my notes on paper and if it’s good enough I move it from paper to digital. Pencil to paper in my opinion is therapeutic.

[TYLER RAMBLE] In an office setting writing on a dry erase board you’re left with “that’s what she said” or “that’s what she said” and “here’s my cell phone look at what we had on whiteboard.” What we had on a whiteboard is rather difficult to get sign off on. If you do not digitize the whiteboard immediately you’re staring at a picture. Trying to get someone to agree to something is difficult. Adding a layer of “we erased the board” isn’t helping a solution. Moving to pencil and paper has been the best. Flipping to what happened is helpful.

The more I’m in technology consulting the more I need to document. Documenting is essential. Good documentation is cool. Dry erase boards are cool but should not the source of “next steps” because it’s “done” that day. Figma allows me to remove this paradigm.

We all need to document better. I hope this blog explains how you can document better using free applications. Free applications are cool.

Visual documenting is fun on figma, and I’m kind-of-a-big-deal

Jokes aside, visual documents VS text documents or “erased” documents is powerful in all industries.

I wrote a 14min blog about figma. Figma helped my business. A typical TLDR article by Tyler Garrett on Linkedin.

I started on photo editing and graphic design when I was a teenager in the mall.

I was fortunate that the company that hired me to sell things in their kiosk at the mall also had a head quarters for processing images, which taught me about photoshop.

Later in college it was cool to see our professor suggesting photoshop and me being able to offer suggestions during class. I’ve been using it for awhile.

Since college I’ve always enjoyed documenting and this is a quick blog about what I’m working on right now.

Having paid the money for photoshop, or rather adobe cloud. I’m familiar with these apps. My opinion has 15 years of photoshop under its belt…

Photoshop is good for visual documentation and it’s very similar to other apps that are great, like figma. Figma is free, multiplayer, and not exactly like photoshop. When it comes to “photo editing” depth or crazy filters, go with that app. If it’s website related, 2d objects, and not a depth of photo development needed then you should check out figma because the features are great.

Today, I started a training call with my team mate Dave. We started working on a project together before xmas, now I’m realizing he needs a quick ramp up on Tableau.

Building visual documentation

“Information about a work of art is often conveyed in images of it, made for the purposes of reproduction, study, examination, documentation, or teaching. 

Visual documentation about a work of art may include historic photographs, conservation photographs, or installation photographs from a particular exhibition. Information about related visual documentation provides references to available reproductions or documentary images of a work of art.

Certain types of visual documentation, such as historic photographs, may enhance understanding of a work of art, identify its subject, or establish facts about its creation and history.”
– source

Visual documentation to me is important because I’m a visual learner.

I love visual documentation. Clients love visual documents.

My visual documentation is what helps clients know I’m the right choice.

My website https://dev3lop.com is a form of visual documentation.

Wiki calls documentation; Documentation is any communicable material that is used to describe, explain or instruct regarding some attributes of an object, system or procedure, such as its parts, assembly, installation, maintenance and use.^[1] Documentation can be provided on paper, online, or on digital or analog media, such as audio tape or CDs. Examples are user guides, white papers, online help, and quick-reference guides. Paper or hard-copy documentation has become less common.^{[citation needed]} Documentation is often distributed via websites, software products, and other online applications. Documentation as a set of instructional materials shouldn’t be confused with documentation science, the study of the recording and retrieval of information. – source

In this blog, I’m showing how I need to make visual documentation for for multiple tableau consulting gurus to be able to train themselves or others on things that I feel that I’ve repeated often in a SaaS product called Tableau Desktop.

Lately I’ve been working towards being able to communicate my development in a way that any audience will understand. This is even more challenging while doing it in person, while writing it here allows me to consider gaps that I may not have considered prior to writing the content.

Documentation needs to be visual to be grasped by many audiences.

Documentation is art.

Plus, if there’s text, it should be written in a language that I feel non-technical people will be able to grasp.

Figma is a great application for beginning this process of operationalizing great ideas. Operationalizing is documenting your idea so that it becomes less of a fuzzy concept.

Thanks for learning a little more about visual documentation with me, Tyler garrett.

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