Efecte Blog

Sketches to choose from

There is no choice, if you only have one option. Or well in that case you still probably have two options, as Rolling Stones had back in 1981: Take It or Leave It. If you should, however, decide a new business application to solve certain problems that you are having in your organization, the option to leave it is really not part of your vocabulary. You have to choose something. To make a better choice there should always be plenty of options to choose from.

The same amount of options applies in user interface design. Stakeholders like product managers, potential customer, and user should have plenty of design sketches to choose from in every step of the product development. From design perspective this requires a lot of fresh and different ideas to solve the problem at hand. Luckily, we designers live and breath from the ideation process.

Bill Buxton says in his book about sketching that:

 ”You are always in the ideation process – it’s just the granularity that changes.”

Meaning that early on in the software development process, when there are only some initial market needs identified and not a single line of code written, the possible solution sketches can and should look fairly different from each other – clearly different ideas of the solution. As the software development continues, the sketches will become more precise and focus on narrower area of the upcoming solution.  The amount of different solution sketches or even simple prototypes should still be big enough to give stakeholders room to comment and options to choose from.

The initial sketches act as a good visual channel to communicate the possible solutions and verify that the market need is understood correctly in both sides of the fence. Later on, when the sketches become prototypes and prototypes become production-ready software, the means to gather feedback changes. Now there are not that many options anymore and feedback is received through different usability testing methods. What remains, is the need to give enough options and receive invaluable feedback to support the continuous improvement on the design at hand.

In the end, there is only a set of production-ready business application to choose from, it is time to make the final choice: Take one and leave the rest behind.