Five Sketches™

Designing is usually a rewarding activity, but the path from start to finish can be filled with frustration and even panic. I’ve seen design processes work—and come to the realisation that “My own designs benefited from rapid iteration!”
These humbling experiences helped me learn to trust the process, even in the face of frustration or panic. It’s these experiences that give […]

On Agile product design, I read:
If you tell someone about a great idea, and they say “That’s a great idea,” it’s not a pattern.
If you tell someone a great idea, and they say “Yes, we do something like that too,” that’s a pattern.
 Exactly! That’s why I speak about Five Sketches™ at conferences and professional development sessions. And […]

Microsoft’s Bill Buxton recently wrote an article for Business Week, titled On Engineering and Design: An open letter. In it, Buxton explains that developers can improve the user experience of the product that they’re building by learning three of the four layers that engage designers:

Design awareness.
Design literacy.
Design thinking.

Buxton also mentions a fourth layer, design practice. He explains that […]

For a Five Sketches™ design session, I ask design participants to bring at least five substantially different ideas to the table, in the form of sketches. A common initial reaction is: “…But I can’t sketch!”
Many design participants believe they cannot draw. To be honest, I believe that about myself. People who feel they cannot draw tend to extend that belief […]

Over the past month, I’ve come across the same discussion several times: “When designing a website or product, do you use wireframing or prototyping?”
The first part of my answer is: “Make sure you sketch, first.”
At the design stage, sketching, wire-framing, and prototyping are not equal. Sketching is useful at the divergent phase of design because it lets […]

Three-quarters of the way through a Five Sketches™ session, to help iterate and reduce the number of possible design solutions, the team turns to analysis. This includes a usability analysis.
 
After Œ informing and defining the problem  without judgement  and  generating and sketching lots of ideas  without judgment , it’s often a relief for the team to […]

I first heard Bill Buxton talking about sketching in Texas, at the UPA 2007 annual conference. I was running around with a video camera asking people what they thought of Bill Buxton’s presentation. Everyone loved it, including his ideas on sketching and design. But almost everyone I spoke to also said Buxton’s requirement for five sketches […]

When solving a software-design problem or a web-design problem, you get the best results from following a design process. I’m not referring to something I made up. I’m referring to something that people who are trained in “Design” will recognise as a design process. And such processes inevitably include divergence and convergence.
Divergence is the stage when […]

Having a good design idea is not an amazing event. People have good design ideas all the time. What is amazing is having lots of good design ideas, so that they can be combined and iterated into the best possible design.
Here’s why ideas are disposable:

Sketching lets you capture lots of ideas, quickly and inexpensively.
The more ideas […]

I’m sure Douglas Bowman’s blog last week was widely read. His post was a kind of public exit interview, titled Goodbye Google.
As Bowman left Google, he pointed out the pro-engineering bias in its approach to problem solving—including problems of design. Two of several examples he gives:
[…] a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 […]