Five Sketches™ Method for Usable Product Design
Designing Software and Websites Without "Designers"
Mar 26, 2009
How do you create usable, well-designed products and websites when you are one of a two-person usability team at a company where developers are responsible for designing the product? If you're Jerome Ryckborst, the creator of the Five Sketches™ method, you empower the team members who are not trained designers to think like designers.
Creating a Design Process for Non-Designers
While working as a Usability Specialist at a Vancouver software company, Ryckborst found himself in a just such a situation. Although the developers were intelligent and creative people, Ryckborst struggled to find a method that could reliably and repeatedly produce usable products
His first attempt was to teach basic usability design techniques to the development teams, but without a design process in place, it was impossible to get consistent results. In addition, Ryckborst faced challenges in the developer's very natures. The characteristics that made them great developers (analytical, logical, systematic) often stood in the way of a good design process.
Challenges for "Non-Designers"
When designing a new product or feature, the developers would often:
- Analyze the requirements and come up with 1 or maybe 2 possible designs, then pick their favorite and begin coding. If they later discovered flaws or improvements that could be made, they had already invested a lot of work and resisted making changes.
- Take ownership of their design ideas and become defensive if someone else suggested modifications.
- Limit the range of ideas generated in brainstorming sessions by analyzing ideas too soon in the process.
Design and Psychology Theories Offer a Solution
To address these challenges, Ryckborst turned to the experts in design and psychology theories. Drawing on concepts from generative design, parallel design, cognitive preferences, Six Thinking Hats, and Sketching User Experiences, Ryckborst came up with a method to encourage his team members to step out of their comfort zones, generate more ideas, and combine elements from different ideas to form the best possible solution.
The Five Sketches™ Method
In the Five Sketches™ method a facilitator runs the process. Although this person might be a designer who can guide the team to develop their ideas, they do not contribute their own design ideas.
The method involves the following steps and requires all team members to approach the problem in the same way at specific stages of the process, for example, at the idea generation stage, team members are not allowed to analyze or critique presented ideas.
- The team meets to discuss the problem and craft a problem statement. (fact sharing stage)
- Individually, each team member comes up with five sketches—five distinct solutions. Before the process can continue, each team member must have five ideas and they cannot favor any one of those ideas. This requirement forces the participants to exercise their creative brains and reach for less obvious ideas. (parallel design stage and beginning of generative design stage)
- The team meets to share their ideas. Each person presents an idea and is thanked for their contribution. The group continues taking turns presenting ideas until each person has presented five ideas. (generative design stage)
- The team mashes up the presented ideas. The group creates new sketches by combining parts from different sketches and adding something new. The team continues to mash up ideas until all possibilities are exhausted. (generative design stage)
- Each individual sketches and presents a “pretty good” solution incorporating the ideas from the mashup phase. (generative design stage ends)
- The team analyses the pretty good solutions. The team makes one positive comment per sketch, "This idea may succeed because…," rotating through all the sketches until all comments have been made. Then the team makes one negative comment per sketch, "This idea may not succeed because…," rotating through all the sketches until all comments have been made. The facilitator captures the negative comments, for example, on Post-it™ notes. (evaluation and analysis stage)
- The team does another mashup of the ideas in response to the comments. After presenting the second mashup, the design participants have usually all sketched versions of the same solution. The team checks this against the original requirements, writes up the solution, and gets it approved and validated or tested, before any code is written. Occasionally, after presenting the second mashup, there are two solutions, in which case the facilitator guides a thorough discussion to help choose one. (evaluation and analysis stage)
Benefits of the Five Sketches™ method
Five Sketches™ offers the following advantages:
- Team members develop skills and exercise their creative thinking abilities.
- Employees are more engaged in the product development. They can see their contribution and have a stronger sense of ownership in the end result.
- It illustrates that there is never only one solution to a problem and that good ideas can often be improved by incorporating different points of view.
- It encourages less confident team members to contribute ideas and produces a greater range of possibilities.
- The company saves time and money by uncovering potential issues at the design phase and before coding starts.
- It results in more innovative solutions.
Although hiring trained designers is the best way to ensure high quality product design, the Five Sketches™ method offers a solution to companies that have limited design resources but still want to develop usable products.
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