Contributed by Lizzie Kinross, Copywriter

Pat wanted to give us all a workshop. He was VERY keen. He’d been to UX London, to 3 days of workshops in ‘Inspirational Learning for User Experience Designers’, and wanted to share what he’d learnt. While it didn’t sound wildly exciting, it had to be better than the tricky brief I was working on, so I went along for a nosey.

The workshop was about a process called ‘sketchboarding’. Often, because of time/budget  in both creative and production, people tend to go with the first idea that works, rather than putting that to one side and continuing to explore other ideas, to see if anything more interesting comes up. As the morning’s workshop showed, this is a mistake. Often, it’s around your 3^rd or 4^th attempt at an idea, and then when you collaborate with others ideas, that things start to get interesting. Here’s how the workshop went.

We were all given a brief about designing a website, and asked to sketch how we might create the user journey.  We were shown simple techniques for good sketching; shading around pop-up boxes, how to imply buttons, pictures, videos etc. All news to me as a copywriter, and thinking about it, I’ve done some pretty dreadful scamps of sites over the years! Sorry guys…

We were asked to sketch as many rough designs for the website as we could think of on A4 pages, divided into 6 boxes (called a 6-Up template). We then pick our favourite and refine that on a single A4 page (a 1-Up template). Then we stuck up our ‘refined’ sketches on a large sheet of paper to get an overall idea of what people were thinking.

Adopting different ‘hats’, we discussed, criticised and complimented how our different executions met the brief, and with such a smorgasbord of ideas in front of us, it was easy to see what different ideas worked and what factors were fundamentally the same. Between us we agreed on a mish-mash approach of all our ideas, taking the best bits from all of them, generating some highly creative, interesting ideas.

By having stuck all our ideas onto one large bit of paper, the whole sketchboard (in a more refined state than the one shown here) could then be presented to the client, to pin down a definite approach for the user-experience. Unfortunately (as this was only a hypothetical exercise) I think our ideas were only headed one way. For the recycling bin!

Here’s a clip to take you through it in more detail.

Thanks to Pat Ashe, UX Designer, for a great presentation!

Sketchboards: Discover Better + Faster UX Solutions:

http://adaptivepath.com/ideas/essays/archives/000863.php

Lizzie Sherwood-Smith - Senior Copywriter

Lizzie joined ICAN back in 2004, and has been happily writing copy (and making John tea) since!