Good Design Faster was a work shop presented by Adaptive Path members Leah Buley and Brandon Schauer at User Experience Week 2008 in San Francisco. This workshop focused on how to create great design while keeping a strict, deadline driven schedule. This workshop practiced what it preached by packing a lot of good content into a small time frame and focused on understanding the process rather than finishing with a result.

Sketching

Here is a common scenario: you are finishing up your user research and have plowed through all of the qualitative and quantitative data. You have a pretty good idea of the direction your design should go, so you sit down and begin wireframing. Yet, wireframing at this point of the design process is probably a mistake, as wireframes are not a good tool for exploring a large number of design concepts. Wireframes are good at outlining the details of a single design approach, and creating them tends to make you focus on the details instead of exploring multiple concepts. Instead of wireframes, we need a tool that avoids this unnecessary detail, allows for quick review of many different design concepts, reveals the best of multiple solutions, and gets everyone’s input and buy-in.

Quick sketches are really the best tool to use at the conceptual stage. They allow you to go through many ideas quickly and evaluate the good and the bad. Sketching also forces you to avoid unnecessary details, which only get in the way of creating a lot of ideas really quickly.

There are two types of sketching: exploratory sketching and refining sketching. In exploratory sketching, we are trying to produce as many ideas as possible. A tool the presenters provided for doing this was a 6-up template. The 6-up template is basically a blank piece of paper that contains six sections. For each concept you are trying to illustrate, you force yourself to come up with 6 completely different ideas. Often it is difficult to get more than a few ideas out, so tools such as word lists, inspiration libraries, and conceptual models can be used to spur ideas. Word lists are a list of interaction paradigms such as ‘according menu’, ‘rating system’, or ‘drag and drop’ that helps a designer to spur ideas that might not have normally been associated with the problem at hand. Inspiration libraries are a collection of images depicting different interface designs (see Peter Morville’s search screen Flickr page). You use these images, much like the word list, to spur ideas that you might not have normally associated with the design problem you are exploring. Finally, concept models allow you to define a problem as a range of characteristics. These ranges can be a linear spectrum, a 2 x 2 Cartesian chart, or a multi-celled grid. Defining design problems as range of characteristics allows you to frame the problem in a way that can help you visualize a design approach.

Once you have come up with six different solutions to a problem, you then begin to refine your approach by a process called refining sketching. With refining sketching, you take the best ideas contained inside of your six sketches and condense them into a single sketch. Here, instead of exploring as many ideas as possible, you want to focus on fewer, better ideas. A 1-up template (which is basically a single section version of the 6-up template) is used to refine these sketches into a small number of high quality ideas. On this template it is important to use line weight and shaded areas to create a visual hierarchy that emphasizes the ideas that you are trying to convey. Also, create interesting labels names to give your page and features context.

Sketchboards

A major theme that emerged throughout the conference was that ideas are not scarce or fragile, but they are actually really cheap. Generating of ideas is really easy. The challenge is going through these ideas and finding the best ones. Sketching allows you to do this, and sketchboards allows you to present these ideas in a way that is both visible and easily iterated. Sketchboards are basically a large piece of paper where you attach all of the 1-up sketches you create for your product/service. Sticky notes can be added to the sketch board to categorize ideas. Also, inputs to design such as your design tenants, personas, etc. can be added to create context around your concepts.

The purpose of these sketchboards is to facilitate conversation. Sketchboards should hang on the wall of your workspace, which will encourage people to discuss their contents. Wireframes tend to reside in files confined to our hard drives making them invisible to the rest of the team. Sketchboards are out in the open where they are easily seen and scrutinized. The visibility of your design concepts allows you, your team, and other stakeholders to visualize and discuss all of the ideas for the product/service. In addition to casual encounters with the concepts, formal design review sessions should be scheduled to evaluate the design direction with both the team and the client/stakeholders. During this session, the sketchboard is presented by the design team, outlining all of the concepts for the design, how they fit together and how the design inputs influenced the concepts. At this time, everyone is allowed to discuss, vet, approve, shoot down, question or modify any of the concepts presented on the sketchboard. The key here is to document this discussion on the sketchboard itself. When you are finished, your sketchboard should be filled with annotations outlining the resulting conversation around the design concepts. Writing directly on the sketchboard itself helps participants remember where and how concepts where presented and how the conversation affected the various designs presented. When finished, the design team has a clear picture of the discussion around each of the concepts, how they were successful or unsuccessful, and how to approach the next step in the design process.

The next step in the design process could be wireframing, or it could be more conceptual sketching. After the sketchboard review, you should have a clear idea if you are ready to commence with the detailed design or not. If there are still questions that need to be answered, iteration on the sketching and sketchboard exercise may be necessary. If you now have a pretty clear idea of the direction the design needs to go, then you are ready to begin the detailed design of wireframing.

Design Sprints

The great thing about the above techniques is that you can crank out ideas very quickly. In fact, it suggested that combining these techniques with an agile development process is a way to get to the ‘Good Design Faster’ goal. This quick design can be achieved by using a design schedule organized into five-day ‘sprints’. A five-day sprint might look like this:

These design sprints can start over the following week with the next round of design problems to solve. However, sprints also should only be held consecutively for three weeks. The intensity of these sprints tend to lead to burn out, so designers will need a week off to help them refresh for the next round of sprints. The fourth week could be spent tweaking and presenting the wireframes to the client, and also planning for the next series of sprints.

Conclusion

The goal of this process is focusing on having the right ideas at the right time, generating lots of ideas, and creating design activities that everybody can get involved in. Wireframing too early can pull a designer into details that are not necessary at the design concept stage. Sketching allows you to explore many ideas quickly, and allows you to involve stakeholders at the conceptual stage. By the time you get to presenting wireframes, your stakeholders/client is already familiar and has signed off on the design concepts contained in the wireframes. This helps to ensure client buy-in of the designs, and eliminates unnecessary work on wireframing the details of concepts that will not work or will not be accepted by the client.

So, get out your pens, your paper (both large and small), and begin sketching ideas for your next design project.