I love innovation. Building something from scratch. It starts for me by having a problem, being frustrated about something and thinking about how to solve it in a better or different way. The idea of this post is to show that innovation can surge from any problem you may encounter just by thinking out of the box. Be creative!
With textografo, we do innovate as we provide a new way to create diagrams which is different from our competitors so I will take this example and another one — Typeform, a company who is changing how forms are done.
The recipe is not that difficult :). You need three ingredients: A purpose(What do you want to achieve), a problem (Is there a pain?) and creativity(What’s the best way to do it?). Let me explain with our examples.
For Typeform, the purpose is to get information from people online (web, mobile…). The problem is that traditional form are quite painful. Think by yourself. Do you like to complete a form online? And probably even less when there is quite a lof of fields to fill in. So here you get your problem.
Then, let’s be creative. Is there a better way that traditional forms for getting this information? And the answer is….YEESSS.
So the Typeform team came with the idea that when you speak with someone, you ask a question and get an answer. That’s the most natural way to get information and this is actually this core concept called “conversational forms” which is the innovation. They took as a reference Wargames. We all know this movie but just in case…a computer is asking a question and waiting for an answer before moving to the next one and eventually to the end of the world (sic!).
So Done! There is a lot of hard work to get the market fit but the core idea and the innovation is already there. Typeform just raised 15 millions euros (more or less) and is a brilliant startup here in Barcelona. Have a look tothis article if you want to learn how they Rethink conventions.
What about textografo? What’s the purpose of a diagram? A diagram is a visual representation of something (could be a process, an organization, a floor plan, a system…). We do it as it helps analyzing and communicating this “something”. Good. So let’s do the reasonable assumption that we want to have a diagram.
What’s the problem? For me as a Business Analyst (but I saw that for other BA as well), I found that it takes time…a lot of time to create a diagram and obviously more when it’s a complex one. And what about making changes when one of your stakeholder gives you a feedback or simply when your process, data, system and whatever reality you are representing change? It becomes to be a time consuming nightmare. All this time spent in positioning, formatting, positioning and connecting shapes was quite frustrating and I was frequently looking for a tool that will generate diagrams from text.
I identified a second problem. Salespeople and Solution Architect was using PowerPoint to animate each part of a process flow as presenting all at once was quite painful for them to explain and for their client to understand. Imagine the time spent again for doing that kind of work rather than selling.
So let’s apply creativity to these problems! I was convinced that diagrams can be done using structured text and some keywords (what we call the hashtag or markup). And I was as well convinced that it will be pretty easy, once we have a structured text, to display the diagram step by step in one click. You “just” need to go along the lines in the text editor and display the corresponding shapes one by one. Textografo was born (at least in my head 🙂
At the end of the day, you want a professional looking diagram and the fastest the better. We are all looking for tools that make us more efficient in our day to day job and allow to communicate better with our audience. This is the ambition of textografo and this is what we modestly try to do in the field of diagramming by applying a set of innovations. Soon, we will introduce a new innovation in textografo but this is for another post…
As a conclusion, what’s your purpose, problem and what creative solution will you apply to it?
