Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium muditha batagoda

Why I start designing wire-frames on paper

When I started my career as a product designer, I always had a problem of finding out when my idea should be pitched to the client. Most of the time as designers we prefer visual designs to give the first glimpses towards the application for our users, and and also in most cases, to the clients. This can give a clearer idea about the application and its overall flow. This is a typical methodology that is being handled by many professionals in the industry when it comes to design.

Being a black Sheep — I say different

Since I am a person who likes to write and draw things in the paper before everything, I wanted to draw my ideas on the paper.

Why?

Being a Product designer we always have to collaborate with multi-functional teams so we can create meaningful and simplified solutions to the complex problems that the users might have, or a real-world problem that you might want to solve.

To do that I want to get most of the ideas out of my head in the early stage of the design process. I find it easy to sit on a chair and get a pencil and paper and start drawing the basic flow of the application rather than using a complex prototyping tool. It’s not to say that I don’t like to use prototyping tool or I have something to it. I feel free and comfortable to draw my ideas from my hand to pencil to paper.

When sketching an idea first thing I would do is to brainstorm and generate ideas. In the first stages, I might have so many ideas but all the functions and components are not well defined. But I will be able to think different ways of getting a certain task done and their constraints as well.
The second thing I do is to drill down on the processes that I have come up with and look for the best paths to carry out the work.

So how do I do this?

I do it my self

Start doing the outlines — I write down the parts of the design. It may be a rough outline of the elements that I will be using.

2. Add elements which are necessary — I would add the elements that the user would need to get the job done. It will be very useful to me to understand the flow of the application.

3. Then I draw down the detailed design and add notes — I draw detailed design sketches to show all the elements each page has. Then I put notes in each and every screen I make so who ever sees the screens on the board would come up to it and read the notes, and understand what these screens are about.

4. Don’t have one path, have few and connect them– When you have few workflows to get the same work done and put it on the board and discuss with your team, they might come up with really good ideas. They might put notes for you on the board. It is really helpful to come up with different flows to the application so at the end the team will be able to give more feedback to you regarding what should be there to improve the experience.

5. Update you layout and show it to the client — After the feedback session, you can take your best path and show it to your client. A discussion in this initial stage would help the client to understand what we are building and does it help to mitigate his/ her problems or not.

What are the benefits of paper sketches?

Most of the time when I go to meeting with the clients I here these common sentences:

“Why did you use this color?”

“Shall we put this animation here?”

“I don’t like this layout. I have a meeting tomorrow, I need this change by tonight so I can show it to them as well and see.”

“Shall we change the font? I don’t like it that much.”

The problem with these questions are that the user does not see the application flow, but gets distracted by color, fonts and the type of the elements used by the designer to make the design look nice. Sometimes changes that the client request might take loads of time and effort, but might not effect the core idea of the product being designed.

To prevent these kind of distractions and focus the user towards making a quality and effective product, I think having paper sketches will help the designer in a big way.

This is how I work in the initial state in product design before going to visual design. I like to here your stories and feedback so I can improve myself.

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Sketches on Paper was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sketches on Paper

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