Five Sketches™

It’s a design method that reduces software-development risk and saves you time.

Five Sketches™ is a structured, group method for exploring and analyzing design solutions. It’s a fast way to explore multiple solutions, facilitate discussion, and build consensus. It engages developers, QA, marketing, and usability staff, and other “non-designers”. And it reduces project duration because design is resolved, validated, and agreed on by key stakeholders before any code is written. Acceptance testing is the wrong time to realise that the design was off target.

How it works: Given a specific problem statement, each participant separately sketches five solutions, then shares, combines and adds to those sketches several times before any analysis begins. After identifying many solutions together, each participant sketches what they think is a good solution. Those sketches are critiqued—the team considers developer concerns, usability standards, and market requirements—and then resketched to help select a single way forward.

Since each participant brings many ideas, and since the team also iterates and combines the ideas, there’s no “ownership” of ideas. This diffuses the tendency for each person to defend “their” idea, and makes it easier to respond to design critiques.

This method was developed for and with teams of developers from Canada, USA, Australia, India, and South Africa. Five Sketches™ works for software and web-page design.

Information for facilitators

If you want to lead a small group of people on a software- or web-site development project, or if you want to learn about the Five Sketches™ method, here is the detailed information you need:

What you need to know before you try it. (Content to come)
How to do it, step by step. (Content to come)