I was back to Hong Kong last week for the UXHK conference and brought back some local snacks for my Japanese colleagues. One of them is Roasted Pumpkin Seed (瓜子) which is a common delicacy usually served during the Chinese new year. The hard shell is inedible, so without any tool people usually just bite open the shell with their front teeth and eat the white heart of the seed.
However, since most of my Japanese colleagues had never tried such local food, it’s necessary to tell them the proper way of consuming it. In order to avoid confusion and potential danger of somebody choked by the seeds, I decided to sketch the following instruction note:
To my surprise, everybody forgives my broken Japanese and gets the idea of eating the pumpkin seed almost immediately. It’s tricky, but at least nobody was hurt. I was relieved.
My Thoughts
Comics has become increasingly popular and commonly seen in websites, especially in those complicated web services where plain words is almost a sure failure for non-techy users to follow. One example is Google’s Chrome Browser Comics, where the dev team tries to explain some pretty technical concepts, such as sandboxing and malware prevention, with the use of comics.
Book: See What I Mean
There are increasing interests in using comics for usability applications and a legitimate communication tool for projects and business environments. Usability Publisher Rosenfeld Media is teaming up with Kevin Cheng to publish See What I Mean – HOW TO USE COMICS TO COMMUNICATE IDEAS, a book that is dedicated to using comics as a documentation and communication tool in usability. From the introduction:
In See What I Mean, Kevin will walk you step by step through the process of using comics to communicate, and provide examples from industry leaders who have already adopted this method.
