Adopting the sketching mindset

Sketching is a common technique used to visualize your ideas and help you think about them. It forces you to transform the abstract idea present in your mind into a more concrete and tangible form that captures its essence. This process helps you to consider how your solution may be used by your target users and whether it fulfills the different design goals.

Pen and paper are the most commonly used tools for sketching. The simplicity of these tools is ideal to focus on capturing your ideas and iterating them quickly. They also represent a very low entry barrier to the sketching process. You can sketch anywhere, alone or with other people.

Sketching takes advantage of our visual processing capabilities and uses paper as an extension of our limited working memory. However, despite visual skills being a common way of expression for kids, not all adults are comfortable using them. In addition, making the most of sketching requires practice.

Sketching helps you in different ways to find great design solutions:

• Think more about your solutions: Sketching helps you find better ideas that you have not considered before and also helps you to analyze what makes one solution better than the others.
• Experiment: The low investment required for sketching encourages experimentation. You can consider risky ideas with very little time investment.
• Communicate: Sketches represent potential approaches that you can discuss with others to get their valuable feedback. This is also helpful as historical documentation, capturing discarded paths you may want to reconsider in the future or useful to explain expected drawbacks when someone proposes similar ideas.

The sketching process is iterative. It combines cycles of idea generation with cycles of idea synthesis. When generating ideas, you will focus on quantity, exploring as many ideas as possible. When synthesizing ideas, you'll focus on quality, evaluating the ideas to identify the most promising ones. You will discard many ideas, and select a few promising ones to iterate on next, thus starting the process again.