Five Sketches™

What makes Five Sketches™ so useful to developers, QA staff, usability staff—and any stakeholder who participates in this design process—is that it helps them go outside their comfort zone just long enough. The Five-Sketches™ method combines parallel design, a divergence-then-convergence approach to design, and organisational behaviour and project-management techniques.

Parallel design

Parallel design works because it increases the number of solutions in the problem space. Through rapid iteration, those solutions are then combined and (amazingly) improved. Parallel design is recommended by guideline 1.10 of the Usability.gov Research-Based Guidelines, by usability and design experts, and by the studies, below. (Academic publishers often request a fee for online access to articles.)
 

• Ball, L.J., Evans, J., & Dennis, I. (1994). “Cognitive processes in engineering design: A longitudinal study”. Ergonomics, 37(11), 1753-1786. Unavailable online; cited in 18 other publications.
• Buller, D.B., Woodall, W.G., Zimmerman, D.E., Heimendinger, J., Rogers, E.M., Slater, M.D., et al. (2001). “Formative research activities to provide Web-based nutrition education to adults in the upper Rio Grande Valley”. Family and Community Health 24(3), 1-12.
• Macbeth, S.A., Moroney, W.F., & Biers, D.W. (2000). “Development and evaluation of symbols and icons: A comparison of the production and focus group methods”. Proceedings of the IEA 2000/HFES 2000 Congress, 327-329.
• McGrew, J. (2001). “Shortening the human computer interface design cycle: A parallel design process based on the genetic algorithm”. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings, 603-606.
• Ovaska, S. & Raiha, K.J. (1995). “Parallel design in the classroom.” Proceedings of CHI’95, 264-265.
• Zimmerman, D.E., Akerelrea, C.A., Buller, D.B., Hau, B., & LeBlanc, M. (2002). “Integrating usability testing into the development of a 5-a-day nutrition Web site for at-risk populations in the American Southwest”. Journal of Health Psychology.

Divergence and convergence in the Five Sketches™ method.
Recommendations for Five Sketches™.
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Divergence and convergence

Divergence involves bringing lots of ideas to be considered. Convergence involves analyzing, iterating, and combining the ideas into a few.
Bill Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, in his Sketching User Experiences book (p.74), wrote about a design process that includes divergence and convergence, with convergence taking place in the design funnel (pictured at right, in red). Buxton writes:
 

The process is represented as a funnel, since the number of concepts to emerge is always anticipated to be fewer than the number that enter. Design is a process of elimination and filtering as well as generation.

I recommend Buxton’s book and video lecture:

• Buxton, Bill. (2007). Sketching User Experiences: Getting the design right and the right design. Elsevier/Morgan Kaufman. ISBN 13: 978-0-12-374037-3.
• If you prefer towatch it on video (free), Bill Buxton presents many of the main points of Sketching User Experiences in a lecture.

Recommendations for Five Sketches™.
Your Five Sketches™ training options.
Contact me.