I love sketching. If you know me, I probably have told you that. I’m like one of those people with an “alternative lifestyle.” I have to tell you about it. So I don’t know how Ketones work, but maybe we can talk about sketching.
According to Wiktionary, sketching comes from the ancient Greek skhédios, meaning “made suddenly, off-hand.” And it is defined as:
- A rapidly executed freehand drawing that is not intended as a finished work, often consisting of a multitude of overlapping lines.
- A rough design, plan, or draft, as a rough draft of a book.
Sketching is great if you are about to embark on a design task. Not only a “website” or “logo” design task. I’m talking about design as a synonym for layout, planning, ideation, conceptualization, setup, etcetera. You can design an office building, a vacation trip, a football strategy or a birthday party. If sketching is essential to logo design, why not to other applications of design? (maybe not the party, it’s overkill).
Because this post is long, here’s a TL;DR
Sketches can be helpful to:
- Layout what you know and identify critical points.
- Serve as the first filter for ideas.
- Reach consensus within a team.
- Be the first draft of different types of documentation.
It helps the brain to focus on the important stuff
You probably have seen the old TV and cinema trope in which the detectives of a case—or maybe a conspiracy theorist—will lay all the evidence and information they have on a wall and start building connections with pins and a red thread. It is not only a narrative tool for TV writers; in the real world, it is also a way to have a global view of all the information available when tackling a design problem.
We know our minds can keep the context of big ideas, but they can only focus on a thing. That’s why multitasking is a lie unless you consider breathing a task. Similarly, our eyes can solely focus on a space not bigger than a thumb, while we seldom remain aware of the things around that area. The best we can do for our brains is to save some energy and entrust a physical medium to hold some information.
Think about an artist sketching a drawing to avoid realizing in the middle of their task that their work will not fit the canvas, or that the posture of the character she was drawing looks unnatural. Of course, some geniuses can build complex ideas on their minds and transfer them without a “crutch,” but I assume that generational talents and savants don’t read my blog.
Once names, concepts, or ideas are laid out, it is easier to begin creating connections among them. We start thinking about solutions instead of organizing. Also, it is easier to realize if there are any pieces we might have been ignoring, like the detective who got a case-solving epiphany while looking at the board case. It is especially evident in the case of sketching a journey or a process when you can examine each step, one by one, maintaining its context.
A standard practice that I had with junior members of my teams was to make a quick map of the requirements they received from clients. They would paint on a whiteboard everything they had to make, not only to have a bigger picture of the task in front of them but also to discover if there were any missing pieces or questions to ask the client, to deliver the expected work.
That’s the reason: To uncover missing pieces, unearth details that might require special attention or form questions that eventually will need an answer. That’s why sketching is such a powerful tool for so many ideation activities.
It allows you to make mistakes while you can
A sketch doesn’t have to be detailed or complex. It is not supposed to be self-explanatory; only you or the people working on it should be able to get it. They are ugly by nature, and nobody outside the room (virtual or physical) in which the activity is taking place should ever see them.
Sketches must remain ugly unless the creator has a unique talent to make beautiful hand lettering and straight boxes without effort. That’s because we don’t want to get attached or to add unnecessary conversations to any option that we might be exploring through sketching. If the ideas you’re screening depend on visual appeal, this might not be the right tool.
Not all kinds of design challenges can have the first test in the form of a sketch. But, when it does, it is a great way to filter out ideas that sound good in your head but start to show their weaknesses as soon as you put them on “paper.” You will also have the chance to test more alternatives because of how cheap and fast it is to create a sketch. Put everything you can think of on the whiteboard and take what has potential to the next step.
Some people might say they prefer to start working on their computers. They say they are fast at typing, wireframing or creating flows. I call that BS. No matter how fast you are, a sketch is more rapid than anything you might do on a computer. As soon as you put some kind of effort into an idea on software, you’ll try to keep working on that one, instead of diverging into other alternatives with unknown value.
I love pen and paper, but some of the great weird things about a whiteboard are that you can (maybe shouldn’t) erase things with your hands, how the common markers are big and don’t allow details, are limited in colours, and how when lines meet the result is something messy. It is like a medium trying very hard to keep you from doing pretty things.
That’s the reason: To make the first exploration of every idea you might have in your head, even the silly ones, before committing to anything. That’s why sketching is so essential when you need to cast a wide net and diverge.
It speaks the language of collaboration
Do you know the fastest way to understand somebody else’s idea? Give them a marker. In the best-case scenario, they will add a visual medium to their words. Worst case, they will realize that when trying to explain, it didn’t make any sense.
I’m a sucker for words and meaning. I really am. But making sure that everybody involved in a project is speaking in the same terms is a monumental task. The act of explaining your idea while doodling is an aid to make communications faster. It is useful when clients need to express what they expect, but they don’t know how to call things because they are oblivious to the technical terms. It is useful for that English-as-second-language designer to try to explain a problem with his limited vocabulary #suspiciouslySpecific.
90% of the time, clients will flinch to the sight of a magic marker. “I don’t know how to draw,” they will say, like if they require special talents to make arrows and crooked squares. Lead by example, show them how simple this practice is. Sketch with them. Turn it into a conversation with visual aids, not a drawing exercise.
Precisely this approach to a “conversation with visual aids” is what makes this an activity and not an artifact. The value of it is in the discussion and discoveries you made while sketching. Again, you shouldn’t show a sketch to anybody else. It is like trying to explain an internal joke.
My most satisfying experiences working as a UX professional have come collaborating with people who discover the value of this “alignment of minds.” I specifically remember a year-long project working hand-in-hand with a Product Manager. Each time a requirement or an issue arrived, he would drag me into a room, and we would sketch for 15 minutes straight and go out of that place knowing exactly what we needed to do. He wasn’t a visual person at all, but he was design-oriented; and paraphrasing Peter Merholz, “bad design is the product of the wrong expectations.” We had our expectations clear.
I don’t know how multidisciplinary Agile teams can be aligned 100% to an idea without any documentation o pre-work done without a good-old sketch meeting. How can you be sure everybody in your group is speaking with the same terms when discussing new ideas? Drop me an email if you have an answer, seriously.
That’s the reason: To be sure teams are better aligned before starting an endeavour without depending solely on abstract spoken terms. That’s why sketching is so essential for Agile teams.
It can evolve to serve other purposes
The lifespan of a sketch is short. Its nature of simplicity makes it shallow. But in some cases, it might be useful to keep feeding the sketch through specific processes, modify it if required, supply it with new information, and keep it as a living reflection of your project—like in the detectives’ board. It will no longer be a sketch when you make it readable and understandable.
I’ve been saying that sketches are not artifacts. But as a user experience designer, a sketch is a proto-deliverable. It becomes a flow in a computer, then a journey, then an experience map, then wireframes, then a fully-fledged design. First, I design with abstract shapes, then with words, then with complex shapes. Similar to how an artist evolves its work, maybe with fewer meetings in between.
Because of that, you might find many UX portfolios with sketches (I have them!) intending to show the designer process in detail. As long as you don’t try to make your sketch pretty to be portfolio-worthy and ignore its real use.
On my last blog, I mentioned that sketching was a good alternative to taking notes while attending a live class. If you cannot reproduce the lecture verbatim, it might be a good option to try to and capture ideas more abstractly and visually through quick sketches. Again, the shelf life is very short. You will need to turn these into a proper set of notes right away before you forget what all those lines and doodles mean; and, like with notes, this process will reinforce the ideas in your head and strengthen your learning process.
However…
I started with the idea for this post when I saw some smart people react with caution to the invitation of brainstorming rapidly on a whiteboard. It made me feel the practice wasn’t as common as I believed. When I was a kid, my dad bought a big whiteboard, and when he wasn’t using it, it lived in my room. It took an entire corner, but I loved that thing, so it is second nature for me.
Today’s circumstances are not helping. Not only is impossible for us to use the big whiteboard at the office because of social-distancing, but remote work is the new standard. 80% of my team is located in a city 3,357 km away. I’m not in any way against remote work, but if you think video tools can replace the effectiveness of a conversation in the flesh, you are delusional.
Design tools are pivoting into real-time collaboration, but as I mentioned before, rapid wireframing is not the same thing. Slack allows users to doodle on top of a shared screen, which has been proved extremely useful in some cases. But we are still bounded to a mouse or a trackpad. Sketching can be done privately, but I haven’t seen a digital alternative to perform it between teams in the same fast-paced way. Do we need to buy everybody a Wacom or an iPad with a pencil?
Let me know if you have an alternative!