Shared understanding is important to any team working towards a common goal. Ensuring every member of the team is on the same page can be difficult. Sketching is a quick, lightweight method for communicating design ideas or interactions. Starting with sketching early in the design process lets everyone share the same vision.

In this week’s UIEtips, I discuss how great designers use sketching for notetaking, to convey their ideas in meetings, to record their conversations with their co-workers, and to support their design research. Here’s an excerpt from the article: Words are powerful, but sometimes they don’t cut it. We can try to describe what we’re imagining, [...]

Join us on March 28, when Kevin Cheng presents Storyboarding: Communicating Your Ideas with Comics & Drawings. Storyboards capture an experience in a visual way. They communicate complex ideas in succinct, understandable ways—whether for planning a feature film or the user experience of an application. Kevin Cheng uses comics to make storyboards more understandable. In [...]

In this week’s UIEtips, Nathan Curtis shares 6 tips on storing and organizing sketches. Here’s an excerpt from the article Sketches enable us to quickly depict and share ideas with each other, but are also considered disposable. Sketches represent an intermittent state leading to something better, more refined. As artifacts, they are fleeting renditions of [...]

With collaborative sketching techniques to orient and unify teams, it’s no surprise that you are embracing sketches to explore design ideas earlier in a creative process. But what are your goals for sketching, and how do they translate to your organization or team? And what are some great techniques you can start using right now? [...]

During the first half of 2013, you’ll hear the latest thinking from the best speakers in the user experience design community. Get your team into all the live seminars from January-June, plus their recordings at the lowest price. You’ll save over 25% off the regular pricing. Sign-up Once. Pay Once. All live seminars January through [...]

In this week’s UIEtips, Nathan Curtis will share how he shifted the design direction of a large project with just 5 index cards. Here’s an excerpt from the article The concept was a dramatic shift from anything prototyped, discussed, or even sketched during the studio. It was safe to say: the client had never seen [...]

At times, getting a team to produce good ideas is like pulling teeth. You try to inspire, create, promote, even cajole people to dream up great design ideas. Some times it works. Other times you’re sitting around a conference table feeling clueless. That’s not the case when you bring Adapative Path’s CEO, Brandon Schauer into [...]

Gamestorming can allow collaboration to happen. It quickly gets a lot of people working together, sharing ideas, and getting creative. Words may be tricky because you’re not certain if someone has interpreted what you’ve said the way you meant it. The beauty of Gamestorming is it gets people to think visually and physically express their thoughts and ideas on paper.

In our ongoing research into design excellence, we’ve come across an interesting correlation. The designers who are at the top of their game are mostly people who sketch. Even though every designer we talked with had completely different backgrounds, training, and work habits, they all shared one common element—they sketched their work. In addition, they [...]