Skip to content

SarahBloomer.com

Narrow screen resolution Wide screen resolution Increase font size Decrease font size Default font size    Default color brown color green color red color blue color
logo
You are here: Home arrow Sarah's Blog arrow Sketching the user interface
Skip to content
Sketching the user interface Print E-mail
I've been researching Sketching the UI for my upcoming course. Sketching is used to explore a design problem, it's a thinking tool. That's because a sketch is rough. It promotes ideation.

In the past when we designed GUIs collaboratively with our clients, we sketched in two ways. I would take ideas and sketch them on a whiteboard (preferably an electronic whiteboard) with input from a product team. We used Activity Scenarios to guide us.

Or, we would co-design using a paper prototype. My set up was to place A4 paper--the GUI prototype--on top of flipchart paper so that we all had sketching area around the edges of the paper prototype. Using different colored pens and with a video camera capturing the activity for later reference, we'd work through design concepts by illustrating the Activity Scenario. This allowed us to explore mutliple ideas, while communicating through drawings. Sometimes we'd start with an informal usability test of a paper prototype, and then move into co-design complete with collaborative sketching.

Is a paper prototype a "sketch"? I think of any tool that involves rapid drawing, iteration and discussion as a kind of sketch.

Today, sketching in interaction design has taken on a broader meaning. Bill Buxton talks about sketching as a "thinking tool" and points to the way industrial designers (as one example) sketch many many examples. Interaction designer Shane Morris, in his course "Interaction Design Studio", takes participants through a rapid sketching exercise to generate design ideas. Jonas Lowgren presents different ways to communicate design ideas through sketching. Adaptive Path uses a collaborative tool they call a Sketchboard to collaboratively "explore, share and iterate on ideas". Comics are increasingly becoming an accepted way to sketch user experiences before a detailed interface is created.

I first learned about Bill Verplank's sketching way back in 1990 at a CHI conference where he talked while sketching from an overhead projector. Bill Verplank was one of the designers of the Xerox Star, the design of which continues to inform today's user interfaces.

Here's Bill Verplank defining Interaction Design through words and sketching. While it is not a sketch of a user interface, it shows how a sketch richly communicates ideas.



Another source for learning the value of visual thinking is Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures This is a quick read with lots of ideas and insights for using sketching to enhance thinking.