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Do you find it difficult sometimes to share ideas or brainstorm with your clients? Or have trouble aligning objectives and expectations?

You probably need to implement sketching into your workflow.

UX sketching is a method that designers frequently use to explore, suggest, iterate, improve, and convey their proposed design solution.

Compared to moving immediately to a digital version of the solution, where there is a higher level of fidelity and complexity, sketching takes less time and is less expensive.

Why UX Sketching?

You might wonder why you should spend the extra time sketching when you can start to work on the final solution.

Sharing sketches enables collaboration and creativity across the whole team, resulting in shared understanding and alignment from start to finish.

Sketching…

Makes complex ideas easier to understand
Encourages creative explorations
Takes less time & effort
Keeps you focused on keeping the best idea without gaining attachment to discarded sketches
Visually captures an archive of ideas that you can refer back to
Prevents technological distractions
Helps you become a better visual storyteller

How I used sketching to collaborate with clients

Starting a new project is exciting and to help create momentum, I wanted to visualise the solution as fast as possible. I used to dive right into digital tools like Figma but as predicted, the first version is never the final version.

Endless rounds of feedback meant that the solution was always evolving and I ended up focusing on the individual elements rather than the bigger picture.

This is also true when reviewing with clients.

Clients are easily distracted — most often than not, they miss details and we end up going back and forth with revisions.

I’ve wasted hours and hours in the process of exploring different approaches and getting slammed back into the first idea that we approached.

Then I tried sketching. It was a game-changer!

Not only did it help me produce more ideas, quicker, but showing and collaborating with clients was actually becoming more fun.

We quickly put down what was in our heads and iterated together. Bringing them into the process through sketching made the process much more enjoyable and with fewer revisions.

Getting started with UX Sketching

Here are three main sketching techniques you need to know

Scribbling is excellent for capturing your core idea and it gives you a holistic view of the UI components.
Layering focuses on the importance of the hierarchy before progressively building layers, elements, and details.
Interactions help you define multiple interactions in one sketch. You can easily change the placement of each interactive element without having to redraw everything.

When sketching, choose whichever tool you’re most comfortable with.

You can start with A4 paper and a pen.
Some designers pick pens with different line weights, i.e. The Sakura Pigma Micron (my personal favourite).
Next, state the problems & goals you want to solve and define your audience. Answer the following questions: (1) “Why am I doing this sketch?” and (2) “Who is this sketch for?”.
Set a time limit and get your creative juice flowing!

Important: WRITE CLEARLY!

Finally and most importantly…

Don’t invest too much time in producing sketches. Sketches are not meant to be a detailed representation of an object. You want to use this method to quickly visualise a solution.

It’s meant to be messy — that’s kind of the whole point.

In general, UX sketching is a good technique to help conceptualise and communicate ideas. See how sketching is able to help you think differently or collaborate in a different way.

There is no right or wrong way to do it. Do what works best for you.

Want to learn more?

If you're interested in running this play to have better UX Sketching, join designers from 40+ countries using UX Playbook. Get detailed step-by-step guides and templates to supercharge your UX process.

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I hope you found this helpful.

See ya next week

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