Phil Barrett

You only get one shot at building your innovation into a successful business.You have to deliver something people want, need and love first time. And you have to deliver it fast.

Sketching makes that one shot really count. It adds a little time up front, but massively reduces the overall time, cost and risk of launching something new.

An early sketch of the Twitter idea, by Twitter's creator, Jack Dorsey

Use sketches to discover and grow good ideas

Sketches come in all shapes and sizes, but the most important things about them are:

• They are quick and cheap to make
• They let you open up and explore lots of designs rather than narrowing down to the final decision
• They are vague and incomplete in certain areas, to provoke other people into having ideas too

Here’s how to use sketching to get practical benefits.

1. Use sketches to evolve ideas by having a constructive conversation with yourself

• Draw your idea with pencil or pen. As you draw it, little ideas will need to emerge to fill the spaces in your drawing. Soon you’ll have drawn something which, only minutes before, you didn’t realise you knew you knew. In fact, you didn’t know it. Sketching it helped you invent it.
• You don’t have to be good at drawing. How it looks doesn’t matter. What it says is what matters. But using a pen rather than software such as Visio or Illustrator for your very first ideas is quite important. You want to waste minimal cognitive effort on using the tool, and you want to restrict yourself to not fiddling with irrelevant options.
• Next, stand back and assess what you’ve drawn from a different perspective. Then draw it again, but better. Or draw something different.
• When you come to a situation where you can’t decide between two ways things could be presented, draw both. Then you can compare them properly, side by side rather than just in your head. The process of exploring lots of options is great for generating really innovative ideas. Apple asks its designers to sketch 10 ideas, before narrowing down to 3 and then eventually 1.

2. Use sketches to get idea-boosting input from your colleagues with less politics, cost and risk

At early stages, you want all the brainpower you can get to help you come up with the best possible idea. Why limit the possibilities by trying to succeed in isolation? For the best results, you need to engage with stakeholders - and after that, with target users. Like it or not, you need to gather their ideas and feedback, and boil it down.

Sketches are great for working with stakeholders. Because sketches look unfinished:

• They tell people not to worry too much about the details, but to engage with the fundamentals of the idea.
• They let people give feedback without worrying about hurting your feelings, because they can tell you didn’t spend months slaving over them.
• You don’t have to worry about what people will think of you if they find a big mistake in your work - after all, they’re only quick sketches.
• They stimulate new ideas as people think about what should go in the fuzzy areas and gaps.

Testing drag and drop on a crayon sketch

3. Use sketching to step through and test interactive things

Designing something interactive is hard because you’re designing over an extra dimension: time. Some kind of experience will unfold for people as they use your product. You want that experience to hang together into a smooth, consistent whole, otherwise you’ll shake off customers with every jolt.

• A sequence of sketches lets you walk through the user’s journey and see how it feels. You can sketch thumbnails of screens or pages, and connect them with arrows, or you can sketch one screen per A4 page.
• Electronic tools can take the pain out of drawing every “frame” by hand. Once you’re starting to concentrate on interactivity, pens aren’t so good. There are shedloads of interaction prototyping tools to choose from. My favourites for early stage sketches are Balsamiq and Powerpoint. Both let you duplicate a page, modify its content and string a walkthrough together.
• You can test sketch prototypes with target users. You won’t get back detailed usability findings. But you will get back essential feedback on whether the idea makes sense to people and whether it matches their needs. It’s vital for ensuring you don’t run off down the wrong rabbit hole.Sketches for this kind of “concept testing” need to be a bit more fleshed out than your very first sketches. They have to make sense to others with minimal explanation from you. Usually it helps to include what I call “realistic fake content”, along with button names and the like. Then stick page one in front of a target customer and ask them to tell you what they see, and what they’d click on. If they click on something you weren’t expecting, find out why, then steer them back onto your expected track and show them page 2. Repeat until you reach the last page.

A sketch of an iPhone interface using Balsamiq

Now aren’t you glad you tried it?

Imagine that. If you hadn’t drawn and discussed all those sketches, your amazing product wouldn’t exist.

• It would have missed customer’s real needs, leaving you vulnerable to competitors or reducing adoption rates.
• It would have required a spiral of expensive changes to the code after release.
• And worst of all, it would have missed that market-beating feature idea.

Just that little bit of sketching helped you discover the right mix for a killer product. That was worthwhile, wasn’t it?

Controlled risk, great returns and outcomes that customers love. If you want that for your project, get in touch with Phil Barrett and he’ll show you how user-centred design works.

Or read more on his blog: FrontToBack.