Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Johannes Schleith

The sketch is one of the most important tools in design! Given that also “anyone who influences what the design becomes is the designer” (Jared Spool) — Everyone involved in design decisions should sketch!

As part of project work I have been working on workshops with customers and internal stakeholders. Having captured a variety of ideas during an ideation phase, we asked our participants to sketch their dream tool. Not everyone engaged fully, but most produced a range of beautiful, simple, complex and fun sketches.

This motivated a post to explain why the sketch is great, how to make everyone sketch and what to learn from sketches.

Why Sketch?

It is easy to embellish an unclear idea verbally. There is little need for prioritization. Maybe, most importantly, the linear narrative in speech or written language simply does not do justice to the many ways you can interact with an interactive systems. Sketches do!

Sketching an idea forces to think about priority.

While speech is transient — your statement disappears after you said it. Sketches enable a group to point to and discuss specific aspects when reviewing ideas. It allows to compare ideas, pull out individual parts and re-assemble.

Make everyone sketch!

Everyone can sketch. Sketching is not about precision and detail. Its about communicating ideas that are difficult to capture otherwise. Often you reflect and discover gaps in your ideas only when putting them on paper anyway.

Street Art by ‘Stik’, Image source: Guardian

Sketching is fun. Ask your meeting attendees to sketch a dot, a line and a circle — now they can draw a face, or a whole stick figure (some ‘Stik’ figures became art). There are great games that run on the gap between idea, sketch and interpretation. Chinese Whisperers (e.g. Telestrations) is one — it makes a fun ice breaker for workshops too.

Given a visual vocabulary of a few simple symbols anyone can produce a sketch. Combining paper with post its, helps to make it more dynamic. Exercises like “Crazy 8” or “6-Up” help to quickly produce different ideas.

Illustration of a visual vocabulary

Features — to — Sequence — to — Screens

We have been applying a very simple approach to facilitate sketching:

Building on a shared understanding of context and problems, and previously collected ideas, we asked participants to translate each idea in one or more features
Next, they were asked arrange such features in a sequence, if possible. If not, they could come up with more ideas how to combine the steps
Finally everyone was asked to group these steps into meaningful “screens”, sketch or paper prototype

Illustration features to sequence to sketch

Sketching for Ideation

Courtney Gallagher (2017) proposes another simple four step framework called “Sketching for Ideation”.

Gather information about your problem, users and context
Create custom triggers (mood boards, visual inspiration, creativity triggers)
Sketch ideas, go back to (2) and find more inspiration
Present & share with others

In previous workshops we applied a similar approach. Custom triggers included a range of screenshots of data visualisation tools in order to inspire participants to think more about data and different ways to visualise it.

Illustration visual inspiration

However this could also include previously gathered material or workshop outcomes (e.g. empathy maps, stakeholder maps, customer journeys etc.)

Learn from sketches?

Sketches are qualitative data. Why not try to apply techniques from qualitative research to sketches?

We can use open coding (a method from grounded theory) to analyse our sketches.

Look out for the following:

Which (similar) items or icons do participants put in their sketches?
Which ideas or functionality do they want to express with it?
Reviewing grouped items or ideas, we can infer what types of tasks they might prioritise
Layout can be interpreted as some kind of prioritisation
Visual grouping of ideas indicates further prioritisation
Similar to card sorts, grouping of course also indicates which features participants feel belongs together

Encouraging the use of actual labels and headings helps — as well as colour, or the use of post-its.

Illustration analysing your participants’ sketches

The above illustration shows an example where 6 participants used similar features in their sketches.

If sketches are not too similar, thats even better. It might make sense to run a second round during a workshop, in which participants discuss and synthesis a common vision (make sure to document the first sketches).

Sources:

Sketching for UX Workshops was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sketching for UX Workshops

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