This week’s lecture concentrated on how to use sketching and paper-based techniques in our design process. We looked att the advantages of using paper in terms of cost, time and collaboration with our team.
We looked at sketching icons, wireframes, logo ideas and other interface elements as well as using paper to brainstorm and map out user flows. The ability to iterate on all of these quickly and cheaply makes paper the go-to tool for early stage design. We can use paper to come up with a myriad of ideas and then select the best to go on and recreate digitally.
We also looked at Miller’s law (the magical rule of seven) and online tools for user flows such as LucidChart.
During the lecture we looked at a video from Eva-Lotta Lamm where she explained how she uses sketching in her work to take notes and how she uses quick sketches to visually show ideas. We didn’t have time to watch the whole video, so, for this week’s blog I wanted to look more at Eva’s techniques and she if I could implement them into my design process and wider working.
Eva-Lotta is a visual thinker who teaches individuals and organisations to think more visually in their thinking, planning, collaboration and communication. She uses a lot if basic sketches (you could say doodles) to achieve this and advocates for the use of sketching to visualise complex problems and see them from a different viewpoint. She has worked with major businesses such as JP. Morgan, UPS, Yahoo and Google.
I really like Eva’s sketching style its simple but highly effective and I want to look at it further to see how it can help me work through design problems. I want to see if implementing more sketching as part of my work can help me develop new and more creative ideas.
The first thing I did was sign up to Eva’s email newsletter which provides weekly tips and inspiration on sketching and visual thinking. For signing up to the newsletter you get a mini visual starter kit to help you take notes and plan projects. This covers how to practice your sketching, simple icons to use, how to structure your notes and how to develop a project timeline with sketches to help visualise the project at a glance.
There are also helpful pieces of text explaining how sketching can make things more effective, for example in your meeting notes she details two ways of laying out the notes that can make scanning them quickly and getting to the information you need a lot easier.
Source: From the Mini Visual Starter Kit PDF
One section I found particularly useful was creating a summary of your notes, I felt this could be something I could do myself, as I take my notes on a computer during lectures for ease, I cannot really add sketches to these notes. However, by the end of a lecture I have a lot of notes and no hierarchy to show which ones are more important than others. I feel by creating a lecture summary including all the key points from the lecture I could get more from my notes, and it would be a fun task as well. It’s something I will look into further and try.
Another part of this mini guide looks at effective practice and improving your sketches, I have never been a naturally talented artist, even at school my drawings were average at best. It is always something that has frustrated me as I enjoy drawing, I just wish the final results were somewhat more visually pleasing. Practice was also something we discussed during the lecture looking at work from Paddy Donnelly and how he had developed from his days as a student to his current career as a highly successful illustrator. A lot of this development was down to practice and continued honing and refinement of his style and personal style.
It makes sense that practice will improve skills and in terms of my sketching it has been something I have neglected using the poor illustrator excuse, but while I don’t need to be an artist improving my sketching skills will, improve my UX design work. It will make my wireframes and other idea sketches better and can be used as a tool to communicate my ideas with colleagues.
Eva’s guide suggested selecting an icon from the cheat sheet she provided and simply creating a fill row of around ten to twenty copies of that individual icon. Then you could go on and fill the whole page with icons till sketching that icon becomes second nature. You can think about your pace and edit the provided icon to suit your own individual style and preferences. This is a technique that I wanted to try so I selected the goal icon and got practicing.
Source: From the mini visual starter kit PDF
