Sketch more. Sketch less.
Thoughts on using sketches to generate and convey ideas in product and service design.
This story is my reflection on almost a decade of using sketches to generate and communicate ideas for products and services and on thoughts on how to approach it the right way.
What’s good about communicating ideas via sketches?
Sketches are quick to make; they kill ambiguity and help you and others to envision the future. It’s as simple as that. Verbalizing an abstract idea (i.e., the one that exists only in your mind) for a product or a service is not very practical. The challenge with verbal communication, especially when we try to explain rather complex service ideas, is that we assume that what we say will be understood by our audience precisely the way we understand and see it in our head. Unfortunately, it rarely happens.
When you explain an idea, to picture it, everyone in the audience will use his or her imagination, and, guess what, everyone has a different one. Five people in the room (let alone on the call!) will have five different interpretations of what you’re saying. This is not good and results in endless debates and a never-ending misunderstanding that multiplies with more people involved in the discussion. Sketching saves the day here. Fleshing out your idea as a simple storyboard will not just help you better define the idea that not long ago existed only in your thoughts but also help your audience build a shared understanding, because you won’t be forcing them to imagine things as much.
In other words with the idea explained via sketches, it’s more likely that the team will align around it, and the stakeholders will understand it and give it a go. This is explained very well in many books — my favorites are Mapping Experiences and Sprint.
This works in practice, too — I have experienced this first-hand in numerous cases:
- Visualizing future service ideas to be presented to stakeholders to get their support and kickstart the development process
- Facilitating workshops and seeing non-designers (e.g. customer service professionals and accountants) sketch quite complicated ideas and explain them quickly and clearly to their colleagues in a matter of minutes
- Working with a tech startup and using sketches and other forms of simple visualizations to align a multidisciplinary team around product vision and customer journey.
So, yeah, communication through sketches works, and anyone can do it.
Ok, sketching is a good guy. What’s the problem then?
There is one classic problem that often gets in the way of using sketches as a means of effective communication. I had fought it, myself, and I saw other people struggle with it. Funnily enough, both designers and non-designers are exposed to it.
Designers struggle with taming their inner artist.
As a designer, especially in the beginning of your career, you naturally want to show off your technical skills, in this case, your drawing skills. You want to express yourself and to build a flashy portfolio quickly. As a result, you tend to focus on the prettiness of the picture rather than on the quality of the idea. Without necessarily admitting it to yourself, you become an artist, working on the masterpiece of your life, rather than a designer, developing an idea for a client. It’s the pitfall that I got myself into, and I think it cost my employer, at the time, thousands of euros. Sorry, guys; I didn’t know what I was doing!
Non-designers struggling with overcoming the artist’s block.
If you are not in the design or any other creative profession, you’re most probably embarrassed by your drawing skills. You fear being judged by the quality of your drawings and, ultimately, laughed at for even trying to communicate that way because, you know, it’s not like serious adults talk to each other. So, you, as a serious adult, end up trying to explain your idea verbally and your team members, pretending to understand it, because they are also serious adults. The result is a bunch of serious adults hearing and eventually doing their own version of one idea. Gordon MacKenzie explains how and why this happens in his Orbiting the Giant Hairball — I highly recommend it.
What we often time have is designers trying too hard to show off their sketching abilities and over-focusing on them and non-designers paralyzed by the fear of being judged by their drawing skills and not using them at all. Both cases are bad. Both defeat the purpose of sketching in product and service design, which is communicating your ideas as quickly and as clearly as possible, not drawing pretty pictures.
What can we do to overcome this problem?
Taming your inner artist as a designer.
As a designer, you have to realize that your job is to generate and communicate ideas, not create art. As strange as it may sound, you will need to put a leash on this aspect of your creativity. Have a look at this diagram that shows the evolution of my sketches over the past decade.
Sure, the ones on the left look more artistic and more elaborate, but guess what? No client had ever looked at them from this perspective. 99% of the time, the comments were regarding the ideas: “Would this be relevant for our consumers?” or “No, that’s not exactly how it would work…” When it comes to product and service design, people gather in meetings to discuss ideas and choose the ones that will delight customers, can be implemented on time, and make money. They aren’t there to appreciate your artistic skills.
Overcoming the artist’s block as a non-designer.
With non-designers, it’s lot easier. All you have to do is overcome the artist’s block — the mindset that you can’t draw and the fear of being laughed at for trying. While facilitating workshops, I learnt a very efficient way to help non-designers do it. What worked 9 out of 10 times is to do this:
- Say: “You don’t have to draw the Leonardo Da Vinci kind of sketches. Remember it’s all about quality of your ideas, not that of your drawings” — the advice from Sprint.
- Draw a stick man as an example, to demonstrate the level of “good enough” and proof that there’s no catch in the previous message.
After that, usually, everybody jumps right to sketching, no questions asked.
Stop trying to be an artist, stick to being a designer. It works best!
As simple as the above thought may sound, it took me several years to really adopt this mindset. Now, whenever I have to visualize ideas, I use these mantras:
Think “Is this clear enough?” vs. “Is this pretty enough?" Clarity is what matters. Focusing on shading, coloring, and making your sketches look like that professional storyboard you saw the other day is a harmful thing and a waste of your energy and your employer’s or client’s time and money.
Stick to stick figures when possible. In other words deliberately aim for simplicity. Stick figures is the ultimate form of it — it’s the most honest style that doesn’t distract you from ideation. There are, of course, other styles, so just experiment a little and find the one you’re most comfortable with. You’ll find yours when you stop thinking about how to draw objects (e.g. a car, a computer etc) and focus only on your ideation process.
Give yourself a timeframe. When I was a full-time employee, I had all the time in the world to waste on making my sketches pretty. Now I’m on my own and have one million things to take care of and only so much time to do it. Having limited time helps to re-evaluate the task and see it for what it is. In the case with sketching, it’s a vehicle for communicating ideas, not an art contest. This approach shows itself best in workshops. You give people one hour to produce a storyboard, and they realize that there’s no time to worry about the prettiness of the sketch; there’s only time to think through the idea.
Understand when a professional illustrator is needed. It’s very important to identify the situation when your client needs an illustrator rather than a designer. In my experience in service design or design-thinking projects, when you explore and communicate ideas, flashy illustrations are almost never required, and simple sketches are more than enough. That said, sometimes you need a high-quality drawing, for example, when you need to present your ideas to a broader public at an event. For such situations, it is best to hire a professional illustrator or a story-boarder who will quickly create illustrations based on your doodles. In the end, the illustrator will do a better job in less time!
My takeaway? I’m trying to be this guy who doesn’t hesitate to sketch whenever there is a need to explore and communicate ideas and who deliberately makes very simple drawings, to avoid getting distracted by the inner artist.
Who, in the end, sketches more, by sketching less.
