This article explores a technique that helps teams find simple, elegant solutions to the projects they’re working on.
The design team in AO works in a fast-moving environment. We believe it takes a village to create a great product. Involving all our digital experience teams in the design phase of projects helps us achieve excellence. This often includes project managers, developers, product specialists, business analysts, marketing & merchandising executives, and business stakeholders. With this approach, we’ve been able to find elegant and simple solutions for our projects.
Workshopping with members of these teams has brought everyone together and created a shared understanding of the problem we are aiming to solve. We get to take advantage of everyone’s expertise and hear their opinions on how the project could succeed.
How do we achieve this?
By sketching, with good old fashioned pen & paper. We use these tools to create multiple ideas with a design thinking technique called Crazy 8’s.
It may have a funky name, but it’s a powerful tool. Knowing how to use it can deliver fantastic results.
Why sketching?
This video from The Founder (2016), entertainingly illustrates how a fast-food company designed the layout of their kitchens so that burgers in their restaurants could be made quicker. They didn’t just settle for their first idea, but one that they got to after a lot of exploration. It’s a great example of how sketching can be used to work through the problem. Because they did, they found a very elegant and simple solution.
We believe that sketching in digital product design is about:
💡 Finding new and brilliant solutions
👫 Group thinking & collaboration
✏️ Enough drawing to solve the problem
Finding new and brilliant solutions
This diagram explains why sketching is so important. Sketching helps you go wide with your thinking. To identify the ideas that aren’t obvious at first so that you can find new ideas that are simpler and more elegant.
It’s very easy to run with the first idea you think of when you start a new task. Unfortunately, this is usually the most obvious solution, which can be clunky or complicated. By pausing, and taking the time to consider other options, you may find a better option for the problem. The more you dig into the problem, the further from the obvious solutions you get. To the fringe ideas. These are the ideas that we want to find. The ideas that might be innovative, that haven’t been done before. Ideas that are better for the customer and our business.
When we start to design a prototype, we can have a couple of options that we can take to the customer. We can battle the fringe ideas with the obvious ideas to see which the customer prefers. Even if the obvious idea wins, at least we have done our due diligence and explored all options.
Group thinking & collaboration
Gathering a talented group of people with a diverse background in the company means that we can draw from a wide range of experiences. This helps us generate a wealth of different ideas. If it was only one person coming up with ideas, they may not fully consider every aspect of the problem because they can only see it from their own perspective. Working as a group fills in more of the blanks.
While getting everyone’s perspective is important, the time benefit to group work is also important to note. If you workshop a task with 10 people for 30 mins, that’s 5 hours of work you have organized into a 30 min slot in your calendar. The project will have more benefits than if one person spent 5 hours sketching by themselves. Don’t be afraid to ask people, we’ve found that most people are more than happy to help out when asked.
When working together, we’ve found that the people end up with a shared understanding of the project. We have found that the people involved in the session feel like they have contributed and had a chance to express their creative side. When it’s their turn to pick up the project for their department they understand the thinking that went into it, which is invaluable. It’s better than any email or meeting to organize a handover.
Enough drawing to solve the problem
Sketching has more to do with problem-solving than it does with fine art. Don’t worry about how beautiful or ugly your sketching looks. Sketches are just a tool to help you figure out the solution. You‘re aiming to solve a customer problem, not render a perfect user interface with a Sharpie.
If you find yourself shading in between the lines with a beautiful set of coloring pencils, just STOP! Draw the detail you need to get the idea across. Boxes, lines, and circles are great. Add some text and you’re done. Like in The Founder clip, their team didn’t try and draw a perfect oven or hob. A rectangle with text was perfect. It was clear.
On the other hand, furiously knocking out quick messy drawings and calling them sketches won’t work. Sketches need to be readable. They are brilliant tools to share ideas early. But if no one can read them, what’s the point? They should ultimately be able to speak for themselves.
👋 That's its folks
Hope you found this informative. I'll probably follow up with some other articles on different ideation workshops like Crazy 8's or Fat Marker sketching in the future.
The AO.com design team has found sketching to be a powerful tool in helping us design new features, ideas, and concepts. It’s helped us leverage everyone’s experiences to generate ideas that we simply wouldn’t have thought of without them. We’ve used this technique to create one-off designs, improved existing features & navigation, and for transformation projects.
We’ve found that the team involved in these workshops will get a warm fuzzy feeling towards the project because they have contributed to its direction.
Hopefully, within all the sketches that have been completed in your own session, you’ll have found the best way to solve that problem.
