The pressure cooker
Every once in a while — when I am designing something — I find myself staring at an empty screen while my mind is drawing blanks finding a solution for the design problem I’m trying to solve. Sounds familiar?
Whenever this happens to me, I do a little exercise that helps me get my creative juices flowing. I call it the Pressure cooker — A time-based sketching exercise that focuses on coming up with as many ideas as possible within a small set of boundaries.
Here is how it works…
1 . Write down the problem
Grab a piece of paper and write down the problem you are solving, the target audience you are focussing on and possible solutions described in keywords.
For example
Young couples that want to buy their first house together but have no idea how this works and where to start.
Possible solutions keywords
- Roadmap
- Checklist
- Notifications
- Virtual assistant
- Peer advice
- Experts advice
Try and write this down in 5 to 10 minutes. Don’t worry about the spelling and grammatical correctness of your sentences — It doesn’t have to be perfect, you are only writing this down to set boundaries for your ideas.
#2 . Set a timer and start sketching
Try and sketch at least 3 or 4 ideas for a possible solution — A sketch can be a user flow, a single screen or even one single component, it is up to you.
Set a timer for 10 minutes per idea. When the timer is done, finish the component you are working on, take a 5 minute break and start with the next idea. Avoid falling in love with one specific idea - You will end up going too much into detail and spending too much time on it.
Quick note: If you decide on sketching in a design application like Figma — be careful that you don’t lose yourself in the details. It really doesn’t matter that the design elements don’t align perfectly on your 8-pixel grid or that the spacing between elements is inconsistent. Again — we are focussing on quantity, not on visual quality.
#3. The result
Now that you have a bunch of ideas, pick the one you think that is the best suitable solution for the problem and continue with your design process as you’d normally do… And if it turns out that the idea you’ve picked isn’t the best suitable solution, you still have plenty of other ideas to work with.
And that’s it — You have cooked up ideas in minutes.
For me personally it doesn’t actually matter if the exercise didn’t get me to the best suitable solution. What matters to me is that it gets my creative fluids going and helps my overall problem solving proces.
It often happens that afterwards I continue thinking about the problem and come up with a totally different solution that wasn’t even remotely in my initial sketches. And that is pretty much the point of this exercise — it helped me solve the problem.
Hopefully you found this article useful.
Thanks for reading.
Dennis Kramer
Product designer and co-founder of Kersvers, an on-demand product team that design, build and launch products for startups, established companies and ourselves. I‘m also co-founder of In2Event, event management software that is used by the biggest names in the festival industry worldwide.
Clients include Facebook, Schiphol Airport and Sanoma Media.
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