Start Your User Experience Design with Simple Lines and Circles
User Experience Design is a very complex career, it requires years of training, learning, research, and practice. However, don’t be afraid, the field of user experience design has a basic requirement that is fun and quite easy to learn: Sketching!
Why do you need to sketch?
Sketching is extremely important for User Experience Design, but it is also helpful for Product Managers, Developers and Business Analysts to help visualize a concept and relate to the various stakeholders in a project.
If your function within your team is not that of a designer, you can still learn the basics of sketching and simplify the way to make your ideas known. Don’t be afraid of starting with very simple exercises.
I would recommend reading this book. “Sketching User Experiences” by Bill Buxton. It’s a textbook for various classes and has the basics of learning how to sketch. However, if you don’t have the budget to purchase this book right now. Here are some simple exercises that will be helpful to power your sketching abilities.
Basic Elements of Sketching
Think about any application you use on your phone. Let’s start simple, your email. When you first open your email you see some indicators or labels that tittle the page you are currently interacting with. Take a blank piece of paper and draw a rectangle, that’ll be your canvas.
Now, there are certain elements that you want to make sure your email page has. A simple list would be; title, actionable buttons, icons, and other label indicators. Let’s do it!
See, that wasn’t that hard. The simple landing page contains only lines and circles and some text to provide more indicators or affordances.
When to Sketch?
You might have more questions related to when is important to use this new skill you just learned. Let me walk you through some scenarios.
Storyboard
When you are working on a new product or designing a new feature for a current product, you might want to try to storyboard key interactions and customer touch-points that will be particularly important for the user. This will help you work in specific behaviors and responses for the user.
A storyboard can have a few scenes, they don’t have to be highly detailed and can be done simply by sketching lines and circles. Here are some examples of Storyboards that I think are very simple and some that are actually quite the artwork, don’t be intimidated, take it as inspiration!
Wireframes
There are plenty of wireframing tools out in the market right now, and they all provide a service for various skill sets, but if you can’t use any of those tools or don’t have quick access to a laptop and your brain is just flooding with ideas. Take a piece of paper and a sharpie and you could wireframe a concept fairly easy. Just remember, lines and circles!
Paper Prototyping
Another key use of sketching is when constructing workflows and new interactions. Sketching can be used as a key component when constructing paper prototypes for rapid testing. To put together a paper prototype you only need paper and a sharpie. Think about all the hours and resources you can save by doing this simple exercise.
Communication
In the end, it all goes back to communication. A picture says more than a thousand words and if you think you can sketch it, maybe you’ll save yourself and your team members valuable hours if you sketch it first. Don’t be too detailed in your sketch, you’ll have other stages to detail specific interactions and flows. Just let your sketch do the talking!
I believe everyone can sketch, indeed some sketches will be more elaborate than others, but is a wonderful skill that only grows with time. Start sketching today and try sketching something different every day! If you don’t know where to start, you can try subscribing to this website http://www.dailyui.co/ they’ll be sending you a design challenge for 100 days, and you can start polishing your sketching skills!
Thanks for reading and share in your comments what else you would like to read about!
