Sketching for Ideas

• Reflecting on my own process would allow me to become more self-aware of the practices I find helpful and those that I don’t; I'd be equipped with the knowledge needed to refine the way I work and would ultimately end up a more informed and efficient designer.

• Others I worked with didn’t share ideas via sketches all that often, but if I could suss out what exactly made sketching such an effective medium for me, they might be inspired to reap its benefits as well.
• I wanted to practice public speaking and presenting to audiences of varying design backgrounds and levels of knowledge; this topic was one I could dig into and that held the potential to provide insights for those across the design-experience spectrum.
• The channels through which and the audiences with whom I shared my learnings would each impose their own limitations, forcing me to reconsider how I told the story and what its main takeaways were. Testing my topic and insights this way would reveal what resonated and what didn't, compelling me to develop and push my concept further with each imparted iteration.

Based on the 4-inch-high stack of sketches I’d produced in as many years at work alone, I realized that the act of sketching served as a more suitable medium for conducting ideas than most other approaches and tools I’d tried. To learn why, I analyzed my lofty pile of potential evidence for clues.

I examined the sketching techniques I’d adopted to convey my ideas, as well as shortcuts I’d developed as I became more relaxed and familiar with my materials over time. I’d found it helpful to start small when sketching screens and interfaces, because it physically forced me to leave inconsequential details by the wayside. Another pattern I took note of across my work again and again was the way I used color: I tended to abstractly encode meanings through hue in several different ways, rather than communicating the literal brand colors that the interfaces would ultimately end up taking.

The launch of a new project or problem solving endeavor guaranteed that I'd reach for my mug of drawing utensils—once I'd even sketched over 70 pages within the first week of starting a new project—but in retrospect it became clear that wasn’t the only time.


I used sketches as a way to more thoroughly explore and understand a problem, but also drew upon them to communicate ideas to others. Paper prototypes worked well to that end, because they conveyed interactivity and allowed anyone with whom I shared them to test out my idea themselves, rather than just looking and listening. This helped my collaborators better understand my concepts, which in turn enabled them to provide better feedback and even grow my initial ideas further.


It was a sure sign that I’d return to my notebook with pen in hand if a design direction or a detail within it felt precariously presumptive: consciously—and often subconsciously—I knew that the problem space and its possible solutions needed to be scrutinized more thoroughly. My stack of sketches contained a considerable tally of sticky notes that had once made their home as part of a Post-it pad that still resides in my nightstand; I can fuzzily remember awakening in the night a number of times to hastily jot down an idea for a design problem that wouldn’t leave me alone, even in my dreams!

I found that as my familiarity with sketching design ideas grew, so did my comfort with drawing for the sheer fun of it. Outside of the formal design process I've come to rely on sketching as a mechanism through which to examine the world around me in detail, communicate concepts to others visually, and investigate questions.

Once I'd analyzed my stockpile of sketches (and safely filed them away, distributing their collective weight across multiple sturdy hanging folders), I decided to start a sketching club at work: it held the promise to help me learn more about others’ drawing habits while also allowing me to share a bit about what I’d picked up myself during my time as a diligent design-sketcher. The club started out strong but after a while began to fizzle out; it was hard to arrange times to meet that accommodated everyone. A teammate suggested we start with our immediate team at a regularly occurring time each week, making it something our smaller group could commit to and pull into our culture. Since then, passers by from other product teams have joined our sketching routine.

As I became consciously aware of the contexts in which I turned to sketching and the ways in which I manipulated the medium to help me, I began to plan ways to more deliberately share my insights. My first move was to condense my main points into a 20-slide, 6-and-a-half-minute Pecha Kucha that I presented to incoming designers at IBM.

Every time I presented my thoughts and approaches around the relationship between sketching and idea generation, I re-examined the way I told the story for my various viewers. And each time I finished sharing, I learned a little more from the questions my audience made me consider, and the connections they drew between my concepts and tangential topics. The time had arrived to build my insights into a more robust presentation that I could share beyond the walls of my workplace.

From there it was just a matter of identifying opportunities to distribute the insights and advice I’d collected through my sketching practice and that I’d been pushed to discover as I developed my talk and experimented with it around the studio.

After introspecting my stack of sketches and testing the resulting takeaways with others, I’d come to some conclusions around sketching as it fits into the larger practice of design. I'd also thought a lot about the ultimate output of sketching—divergent ideas—and their contribution to a solution.

Of the many possible paths to a solid design outcome, nearly none are straight, short, or flat. Instead—comprised of vigorously winding routes that trail-blaze through previously unexplored territory—these trajectories to a final resolution are fraught with forks that veer out of sight and postulations that fizzle out. But if we are well-practiced in the creation of oodles of ideas, the very fact that we take an unpredictable path at all should be by design, as only through exploring the true extent of the problem space can we hope to arrive at a satisfactory and thoroughly considered design solution.

I distilled my conclusions into a comprehensive collection of illustrated takeaways and supplemented them with tips exemplified by real process sketches, which I presented first at Austin Design Week and, after more introspection and iteration, again at World Information Architecture Day.

“Lia, that was a marvelous presentation! I have so much to think about now.”

—World IA Day attendee, Rackspace UX Research Lead

Sketching makes for a superb idea-eliciting medium in part due to the unfinished feel of its outputs; compared to digitally rendered wireframes, sketches of interfaces and even interactions seem to reserve room for growth and change, which prevents both the sketcher and those they share their work with from getting too attached to a single direction too early on.

I wanted to tangibly coax others into adopting the practice of sketching—or at least give them a great first impression of its potential—so I developed sketching exercises, and following my talk, led a workshop aiming to help others get comfortable with sketching, wield it as a force for divergent thinking, and put it to use communicating their concepts to others.
You can even have a look at the exercises to try them out yourself.

The unrefined messiness of a sketch is one of its biggest boons, and I believe that this quality should be embraced. However, when first attempting to apply sketching to their process, some expect their drawings to be beautiful, perfect renditions of the idea living in their mind. In my talk and workshop I aimed to help attendees get past the superficial layer of their sketches' visual styles, and instead to use lines, shapes, and shading to convey their ideas in a number of ways that can consumed by others.

“I loved all of your sketching activities. I had been trying to sketch whenever I start a project, but these really helped me get past the fear of what my drawings look like and, by the end, focus just on being able to communicate with sketching.”

—Austin Design Week workshop attendee, UX design student at the University of Texas

• What I’ve learned so far from this ongoing effort is that if you see an unmet or as of yet un-encouraged need in your community—or your workplace culture—be the one to fill the gap! Even if you don’t start out as a domain expert in the area of question, learn more about it, share your discoveries as you go, and encourage others to join in your educational efforts.

• Limitations force iteration, which leads to deeper understanding. This notion—that reassessing ideas leads to a much more holistic awareness of the problem space—ended up as one of the main points in my talk, but ironically I learned it myself many times over in the process of recalibrating my story for various situations, mediums, and audiences.