Collaborative Product Design

Chapter 19. Strategies for Sketching Interfaces

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Strategies for Sketching Interfaces

Before you start to Make an interface, a ton of thinking goes on. The 4-corners canvas provides a way for you to think with your team before you make the interface. 4-corners embeds user-centered thinking into the design process. With the thinking done, you can move on to making the interface.

Different sketching activities offer teams unique advantages. We’ll look at three specific activities:

• Group sketching to create a single, shared vision
• Individual sketching to reveal multiple perspectives within a group
• 6-8-5 sketching to generate multiple variations for individual screens

Each of these activities helps your team or clients sketch a model of an interface. When you use 4-corners and collaborate on a sketch, your team learns how to make better interfaces. If this sketching continues your thinking with the 4-corners (from the previous chapter), refer to the topics you and the team just discussed.

Activity: Group Sketching to Create a Single, Shared Vision

When you sketch with a group, the team collaborates to draft a single version of a screen. This is useful when you believe the primary problem is not what the interface should look like, but getting everyone to agree. Group sketching creates a shared vision of what the interface should look like. Use the collaboration roadmap to keep the team focused. Start with the frame, facilitate sketching, and finish with a final version of ...