Sketching

Learn how to sketch to present your product ideas

Sketching is an easy way to visualize your ideas of a user interface, test out different versions and discuss them with your stakeholders. The imprecise nature of a sketch let’s you hover fast over concepts and focus on what is important. You don’t need to be good in drawing to master this aspect of product management.

There are a lot of ways to create user interface concepts. Sketching is a low fidelity and often directly after the ideation process. Learn about the differences and figure out yourself when and why using them is suitable for your project. See here for more details.

Now let’s take a look at nicely done sketches. Focus on the details and especially the elements the creator has used to represent the parts of the ideas.

It’s time to put your knowledge on paper. Take a look at this video from DevTips and start creating you own library of UI-elements. The only thing you need for that is a pen and a paper. A pencil works better for me than a ballpen. Later on you can improve your artwork by using some thin liners and felt pens used e.g. of drawing manga comics.

Using sketches is not always the right choice to picture a concept. Read in this article how it can fit into your design process and where the drawbacks are.

Getting the dimensions right on paper is pretty hard. Overloaded information on paper can look very empty in a design and vice versa. In order to address this there are a lot of sketching templates that helps you on this. Now choose any web site or app and create and sketch on a template for training purpose.