Last week I broke the ground on a mini-series in the Dashboard blog titled Storytelling. In the inaugural post I shared a few examples of stories that have been told in a very visceral manner, in other words: high-fidelity.
For this week, let’s dial things back and talk about a low-fidelity activity that we’ve all done before–sketching. But before we go on further, let’s put some definition around what is a sketch and specifically in context of User Experience Design.
A sketch is:
- Unpretentious: It lacks the visceral punch to incite the knee-jerk-reaction of awesome and remains authentic to the idea as a whole.
- Agile: It affords you the agility to look and play with an idea from a multitude of angles, bending it backwards, and flipping the whole thing on it’s head.
- Profitable: Now this one forks into A) the profitability for the project with respect to the time saved iterating on higher fidelity designs and B) the quality of the idea itself.
Now gluing it all together:
Sketching as an activity in UX design is an agile approach to explore, challenge, and define the over-arching drivers of an idea, creating authentic and unpretentious design artifacts while reducing churn further down the design process.
At Dashboard, in and among the many exciting projects that are in-flight, we very often pickup a sharpie and a stack of 11x17s to sketch. We love the process and heart the results.
To help you get inspired to click less and sketch more, here some techniques and resources to check out. Enjoy!
Flickr Groups
There are a handful of active groups on Flickr that share sketches and discuss the merits of the idea in the sketch or just the notion of sketching itself. It’s really quite an experience flipping through the pool of photos in full-screen. Here are a few notable groups worth checking out!
http://www.flickr.com/groups/uxsketches/pool/show/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/ilovewireframes/pool/show/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/informationarchitecture/
Sketching Templates
Here is a big collection of free and downloadable PDF templates for sketching wireframes, creating task-flows, and doing storyboard by Smashing Magazine.
http://t.co/ewkhebP
Sketches are notes too
Why start sketching only when you’re brainstorming an idea? Rewind to the part where you took the notes on that idea. http://sketchnotearmy.com/ is a blog featuring and archiving some really cool and inspiring note taking sketches.
Want more?
InspireUX has put together an even bigger collection than Smashing Magazine on a list of 50 resources for UX designers to sketch or start sketching. It’s got links from articles to read, videos on how, tools to do, and templates to guide. All and more at: http://bit.ly/9G4hLS
To sum it all up, we love sketching and it’s unique ability to shape stories. Do you have an approach or tip that works well in storytelling? We’d love to hear it!
Pharmb17 says:
Pharmb531 says: