The diagram your industry has been missing.

Design · 5 min read

I was working with a client in the electrical trades. He wanted to build an education app for his industry. So I asked him to show me the existing training material. He pulled up a standards document. Then a study guide. Then a set of exam prep notes. All text. Every single page was just paragraphs and bullet points. No diagrams. No illustrations. No visual explanations of any kind.

This is an industry where the actual work is entirely visual. You look at wiring. You read technical diagrams. You identify components by sight and make decisions based on what you see in front of you. But the training that prepares people for that work? It's all words on a page.

When I showed him what the same content could look like as an interactive visual, his reaction was immediate. He just stared at the screen and said, "Why doesn't this exist already?"

The gap between how people learn and how they work

This pattern shows up in more industries than you'd expect. Trades, compliance, healthcare, safety training. The people doing the work think visually. They learn by seeing and doing. But the systems built to train them were designed by people who think in paragraphs. The result is a mismatch that makes training harder than it needs to be.

Someone studying for an electrical licence doesn't need to read a description of a circuit. They need to see one. They need to interact with it. They need to tap on a component and understand what it does, not read three sentences explaining what it looks like. The gap between the text format and the visual reality of the job is enormous.

And it's not like the visual content is difficult to create. The knowledge already exists. The diagrams are already in the heads of every experienced professional. Nobody has just taken the time to put them on a screen in a way that's interactive and useful.

Why pictures stick and words don't

There's solid research behind this. Allan Paivio's Dual Coding Theory, published in 1971, found that the brain processes images through two channels simultaneously. One visual, one verbal. When you see a diagram, both channels activate. When you read text, only the verbal channel fires. That means visual information gets encoded twice, making it significantly more memorable than text alone.

Think about what that means for training. If someone reads a paragraph about how to wire a switchboard, they're encoding it once. If they see an interactive diagram of that same switchboard, with labels they can tap and states they can toggle, they're encoding it twice. The same information, retained better, understood faster. Not because the learner is smarter. Because the format is doing more of the cognitive work.

For my client, this wasn't theoretical. He'd spent years watching people struggle with text-based study material, knowing the information would click if it was just presented differently. The research confirmed what he already knew from experience.

If your industry runs on text, there's a product hiding in it

Look, I'm not saying every industry needs an app full of animations. But if you work in a field where the training is text-heavy and the actual job is visual, there's a design opportunity sitting right there. The people in your industry are already frustrated by the mismatch. They just don't know there's a better option because nobody has built it yet.

You don't need to visualise everything in version one. Start with the content people get wrong most often. The scenarios that cause the most confusion. Even a handful of well-designed interactive diagrams mixed into a text-based system changes how the product feels. It signals that someone actually thought about how people learn, not just what they need to learn.

The best part is that the subject matter expert usually already has the visuals in their head. They can draw the diagram on a whiteboard in thirty seconds. The hard part was never the content. It was the fact that nobody thought to turn it into something interactive. Until now.

Sources
Dual Coding Theory (Allan Paivio, 1971) - The brain encodes images through two channels (visual and verbal), making pictures significantly more memorable than words alone.

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