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Thoughts on the benefits of sketching

Amid the backdrop of agile development cycles and an explosion of choices in new design tools, there’s often a sinking feeling that we’re falling behind in a wave of information, improvements and products.

While I understand the appeal of new tools and the excitement they bring, along with the optimism for new possibilities and increasing efficiency, designers often overlook the humble pen and paper as a practical tool to help communicate ideas quickly and cheaply.

Here’s my thoughts on the role of sketching in the design process:

1. Sketching is not a replacement for digital tools

Sketches give everyone involved the permission to consider, talk about, and challenge the ideas they represent.

— Mike Rohde

I see sketching on paper as one of the option along the continuum of design tools. When it comes to depicting concepts or communicating ideas, a few sketches with paper and pen are hard to beat. When you’re having a user interview, it can work wonders just asking the user to draw out their thoughts.

What about the common defense of “I just can’t draw” or “I’m not an artist”?

Here’s the thing — a functional design sketch doesn’t require artistic talent or professional design skills to be useful. It’s about quickly getting ideas out into a form that is understandable. Often it’s the foundation for having the right conversation.

Aim for clarity, not perfection.

There is still of course a time and place to use digital tools, for example — to collaborate with other teams, to present polished ideas, to refine a few select options, etc. These are cases where digital tools help refine the representation of the original idea and improving the level of details and functionality.

Others may ask: why start with low fidelity when you can jump right into high fidelity designs? It’s certainly understandable to want to save time. But the temptation that comes with starting with a digital tools right away is that they can actually add time into the design process and bring forth distractions. From an efficiency point of view, sketching helps many of us (designers and non-designers alike) to clarify ideas quickly and cheaply.

2. Digital tools can lead to choice paralysis

Pen and paper can give writers and designers a direct means of sketching out their ideas without the complicating biases of software, while whiteboards can bring engineers “out from behind their screens” and entice them “to take risks and share ideas with others.”

— The Revenge of Analog, David Sax

Too many options can lead to choice paralysis.

In a famous jam study, participants sampled either a small selection of jams vs a large selection of jams at a grocery store. The study “raised the hypothesis that the presence of choice might be appealing as a theory, but in reality, people might find more and more choice to actually be debilitating.” said Professor Iyengar, who conducted the study.

The options presented by digital tools operate under the same premise. Not only does the modern designer have to choose which tools they will learn and master while keeping up with the latest batch of updates, they have to make small decisions about how they can do simple tasks.

Even drawing up a wireframe or a simple sketch using software can be unnecessarily time consuming. Designers love finessing with details, but this can be distracting at the start of a project.

While digital tools promise more functionality, they may do so at the expense of true efficiency.

As the level of details and functionality improve naturally in digital tools, so do the amount of choices a designer has in accomplishing what might have been a simple task. Working on the computer forces you to consider how to do something rather than quickly getting out the idea you have in your head.

3. Digital tools can give false limitations

Every new design tool tries to solve a problem that designers have. But tools have their limitations. Here’s an example: maybe that new tool you’ve been using can’t draw curves very well. Then the designer will naturally turn away from what the software doesn’t do well and toward what it can do. People are susceptible to such invisible nudges and whatever is easiest to create may become the default.

Conclusion

The benefits of sketching are numerous, providing a freedom to think that isn’t bound by technology. To me, there is something deeply satisfying about sketching on paper first and being able to represent ideas at the speed of thought. I highly encourage you to encourage you to consider adding sketching to your design process.

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Thanks for reading! My handbook on UX is now available on Amazon!

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Fast, Good and Cheap (Design Tools) was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fast, Good and Cheap (Design Tools)

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