I agree that sketching is an invaluable tool that we use constantly. Nyein Aung, our industrial designer has saved us significant research by sketching new robot designs at the conference table.

Besides the examples of sketches above, are there any other resources that show UI/app sketches? Is there audio/slides of the above presentation available somewhere?

By the way, I am an avid reader of Bill’s work and always enjoy his talk. Yes, I agree fully that ideation need to be unobstructed by constraint. To my knowledge, UI design, prototyping tools are countered productive in that sense.

I don’t know if I succeed expressing my idea but you seem to agree: having designer with great skill in evaluation. I believe that those skills make ideation more effective and productive because they come into play before emergence of an idea. We should not call that skill evaluation at this stage because they are ingrained before the idea.

Music is a good example because practice, training and learning history do not impair creativity.

When designing complex system, similar idea bill express applied (in fact we try hard). We called this approach “problem separation technique” where ideation comes into phase in order to remove constraint. Similarly, in UI design at the initial stage you might be interested mapping the task flow and would not care about visual aspect. In a way you remove constraint for more effective ideation.

This subject is of great interest for me and I am always looking to exchange these topics.

I agree with some of what you said.

I believe that design, business analysis, task analysis all need to consider usability issues. But, I wouldn’t go so far as to say usability process includes those things. If you make usability process include everything in the design process, then it loses its meaning as a term. (In your definition, what part of design *doesn’t* include usability processes? If nothing, then why differentiate?)

Bill’s point was that ideation suffers in the early stages if you impose too much evaluation on it. At some point, you need to fantasize what *could* be, without regard to the constraints. His point was this needs to happen quickly and be very disposable. Evaluation introduces constraints, slows down the ideation process, and leads to investment in design, reducing the disposability.

By keeping reducing the upfront evaluation, you get better initial ideas, which you then start to reduce to a set that will benefit from the evaluation process.

Bill also mentioned that designers need to spend more time learning the fundamentals of what was done before. He talked about his music studies (he’s an accomplished musician) and how you studied fundamental composition and music history in addition to experimentation techniques.

Maybe we shouldn’t let UI designers design anything until they’ve sat through thousands of hours of usability testing of other designs?

If not “ideation”, what would you call the process at the beginning of design where you explore different ideas?

Yes!

Sketching removes designers/developers from the one on one Design relationship with the PC and electronic tools. It can bring everyone into a place which is familiar and potentially encourages collaboration. Perhaps something to be learnt from the process of making cartoons?