The work of the modern designer lives in the abstract world of the computer, where every move we make is precise and effortless. Precision has its place, but not in the early stages of the creative process, when our ideas are still nebulous. There’s danger when creative exploration starts with perfection.

Perfection can create the illusion of certainty, something architect Frank Gehry avoids as he begins a project. It’s discovery he craves. Craig Webb, Design Partner at Gehry Partners, has heard Gehry say many times, “If I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t go there.” To Gehry, peak creativity lies in the unknown.

His process begins with rough concepts. He and his team sketch, make models, then reflect. If the outcome isn’t right, they throw it out to begin again. Crude outputs early on make the work less precious and completely malleable.

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I’ve worked out my language through the sketches and through the models.

Frank Gehry

Gehry Partners

“I’ve worked out my language through the sketches and through the models.” @FGehry

The hundreds of models and sketches that cover the walls and surfaces of Frank Gehry’s studio are the artifacts of a creative process that starts wide, where there’s space for discovery of the best ideas before committing to a single direction.

Though Gehry’s work is unique, his process is not. Many creative thinkers start wide and narrow down. Unfortunately, many software design teams take a different approach—they start narrow and refine too soon.

Steve Jobs once famously likened the computer to a bicycle for the human mind. Computers help us make short work of complicated tasks and connect us to vast amounts of data—superpowers indeed, but when misapplied they can hinder the creative process.

Computers let us jump straight to pixels—a space of precision where everything aligns to a grid, vividly colored and fully formed. Precise outputs are precious and hard to abandon. This narrows creative exploration to just a few ideas well rendered.

To find the best design solutions, we should follow Frank Gehry’s lead: crudely render many ideas to find the solution worthy of a more precise investigation.

We can make more space in our creative process for critical thinking and better design by putting pencils before pixels.

The power of a pencil

The pencil is a humble tool that’s sparked millions of great ideas. It’s the inverse of a computer; it’s simple and limited in functionality, but its limitations make it effective.

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I start everything important with pencil and paper.

Russ Unger

18F

“I start everything important with pencil and paper.” @russu

Pencils are important to the creative process because:

1. Pencils are inclusive. They’re not just for designers—anyone can use a pencil to express their ideas clearly. The pencil is the great equalizer.
2. Pencils are low-fi. Quick sketches give no impression of a complete thought, signaling to all that it’s okay to offer feedback.
3. Pencils aren’t fiddly. Instead of getting lost in software settings or style, you’ll focus on your ideas.
4. Pencils are fast. You can explore vastly different solutions to the same problem in minutes, and you won’t feel bad throwing your sketches out because you invested so little time.

There’s a magic that happens when we put our ideas on paper. Dave Gray, Founder of XPLANE and co-author of Gamestorming, describes sketching as “a conversation with yourself.” Gabriela Goldschmidt, professor emeritus at Technion Israel Institute of Technology, made similar observations in a study of the sketching practices of architects published in the Creativity Research Journal. She discovered that although sketches start from ideas already within the mind, they can mutate into the unexpected—forming new ideas. Sketching is a thinking activity!

Gamestorming together

The bestselling book Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo includes more than 80 games—many of which involve sketching—to help you get your whole team working together to generate new ideas.

Many product designers already know this intuitively. Stanley Wood, Design Director at Spotify, told us, “Many of our designers sketch, but just so they can think through various ideas. Most of the time they don’t show them to anyone.”

And sketching, of course, is also a powerful communication device. The design team at Slack shares sketches with colleagues to invite conversation about concepts without getting distracted by style.

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We all start on paper at Slack and then explore from there. It’s rare that people are so good with a tool that they can think within it. Having squiggly lines on paper keeps you focused on real problems.

You can move through ideas much faster, and there’s also something about the fact that a sketch is so clearly not the final product. People don’t get confused by the style and instead focus on the concept.

Diogenes Brito

Slack

“We all start on paper at @slackhq … It’s rare that people are so good with a tool that they can think within it.” @uxdiogenes

The MailChimp design team discovered that sketching is an important bridge to engineering colleagues. Todd Dominey, MailChimp’s Director of Design, noticed that “Pixels freak people out!” When engineers see a high fidelity design comp, they get the impression that the important decisions have been made without them, and now they’re expected to simply execute the design. But when a sketch is presented, it’s clear that the creative process is still wide open for their participation.

No art degree required

Depending on your background, the term “sketch” might conjure images of an artist in a Parisian cafe, leisurely capturing a scene with loose lines and precise shading. But you don’t need a beret or an art degree to sketch a quick UI or communicate an idea for a product (a cappuccino won’t hurt, though). If you can scribble some text and draw boxes, you’ve got all the skills you need to sketch.

Sketching is something anyone can do—it’s not the sacred territory of designers. Inviting others to participate in the design process will help you produce a more diverse set of design solutions. Engineers, product managers, executives, lawyers—anyone with a stake in your product—can help you turn abstract ideas into concrete solutions by sketching.

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Sketching lets everyone participate. Business stakeholders can contribute to sketches, as can developers. This gives people beyond the design team buy-in on the final product.

Fred Beecher

The Nerdery

“Sketching lets everyone participate…This gives people beyond the design team buy-in on the final product.” @fred_beecher

How to trick someone into sketching their idea

Have you ever had someone try to describe an idea so abstract that you just can’t see it? You ask them to sketch it and they respond, “Oh, I can’t draw” No matter how you reassure them, they won’t risk looking a fool by making a simple sketch. Dennis Kardys, Design Director at WSOL, has heard this from many a client and has a simple trick to get people over their fear of drawing. Dennis begins to draw his client’s idea for them but intentionally gets it wrong. “Is this what you mean?” he asks. The client tries to explain it once more, and again Dennis draws it the wrong way. Finally, frustration drives the client to snatch the pencil from his hand and draw it themselves. “Oh! I see!” Dennis responds. With the ice broken, Dennis finds that clients will let go of their reservations and continue to sketch additional ideas. For most people, sketching doesn’t come naturally. You’ll need an activity to spark creative thinking and get colleagues comfortable with exploring ideas on paper.

Sketching ideas together

A simple activity with tight constraints can be the catalyst you need to get your team comfortable. Todd Zaki Warfel, Senior Director of Design at Workday, created a team sketching activity called 6-8-5: you and your colleagues will generate 6 to 8 design solutions per person in just 5 minutes. No one will have enough time to get lost in fancy renderings, and that’s important. After all, the idea is to focus on ideas and ditch misgivings that “I can’t draw!” In this exercise, everyone’s sketches will be messy!

Here’s how it works

1. 1. Get your team together—designers, engineers, product managers, and experts with important domain knowledge. Limit the group to 8 or less to keep the discussion productive.
   2. Give each person a sheet of A5 or 8.5” x 11” paper. The paper will be folded 3 times to create 6 boxes (for 6 sketches). If you want to generate more ideas, fold the paper into quarters and give everyone 2 sheets.

3. Frame the problem for everyone, and clearly state the desired outcomes of this project. “We want to help customers become active in this app more quickly. How might we achieve that?”
4. Set a timer for 5 minutes, and instruct everyone to sketch solutions individually (and silently, to help everyone focus).
5. When the timer goes off, it’s time for each team member to present his or her ideas. Conversation about each idea is important here. Critical feedback will help you see what ideas are best. Every team member should be given the opportunity to share sketches.

If time permits, you can do additional rounds to go deeper into each idea. Working together to solve problems gives everyone shared ownership in the product vision and generates great results because so many diverse perspectives are present.

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Sketching is a big part of our process. We get everyone together to sketch so we have shared ownership and vision.

Aaron Irizarry

Nasdaq

“Sketching is a big part of our process. We get everyone together to sketch so we have shared ownership and vision.” @aaroni @nasdaq

You might be wondering why everyone’s sketching separately in this exercise instead of together on a whiteboard. According to repeated studies on group brainstorming work, we produce fewer ideas and of lesser quality when we work in groups. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

Remember, early in the creative process we’re best served by covering as much territory as we can instead of going deep on 1 or 2 ideas.

The right tools at the right time

The tools you use to sketch can influence how fast and far your creative explorations proceed. With fine line pens and mechanical pencils, you’ll be prone to create detailed sketches, which are slower. To avoid slipping into detail early on, Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, uses fat markers for sketching on large format graph paper. With fat markers, it’s pretty hard to draw a detailed UI. Instead, you have to focus on the workflow and how people will use your product.

Dave Gray, founder of XPLANE, speaks with Jason Fried of Basecamp about how he explores ideas through sketching.

As ideas are refined, a medium Sharpie or—my favorite—a Staedtler Triplus Fineliner can help you explore your ideas with more precision. Loose paper works best for sketches, as they can be shared, posted on the walls, or mercifully recycled rather than lingering for posterity in your sketchbook. Designers who sketch UI concepts in detail find Copic gray markers add depth and clarity to sketches.

Sketching with remote teams

Team sketching is an important part of the creative process at Lullabot, a creative agency that serves clients like SpaceX, The Grammys, GE, and Martha Stewart. Each new project they take on starts with a sketching session, but not of the sort described above—this design team is entirely remote.

Creative Director Jared Ponchot has devised a simple and inexpensive way to sketch as a team despite the distance that separates them. He bought each designer a simple USB document camera, the IPEVO. At just $60 each, Jared even buys the cameras for engineers, clients, and other key collaborators in the company so they can participate in early sketching sessions.

Like many remote teams, Lullabot runs their meetings via Google Hangouts. In their meetings, they share sketches by simply switching the camera source to the IPEVO. Each team member can walk others through their ideas, or sketch live to explain a new concept.

Ponchot’s solution is simple and effective. It keeps his team focused on a breadth of design solutions early in a project instead of jumping straight to pixels, where they would get lost in execution.

Related: Freehand–a fast, flexible new way to collaborate in real time

Ideas before execution

Sketching before we jump to the computer has many benefits, the greatest of which is that sketching keeps us laser-focused on ideas instead of the charms of design execution. Design is often described as the act of solving problems for others. We cannot live up to that mandate if polish eclipses exploration in our creative process.

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Throughout my career, whenever I start at a lower fidelity it opens the door for more participation from others and makes me focus on identifying the core concerns. I always advocate exhausting exploration/discovery at the lowest possible fidelity and only when you can’t reasonably make progress, going to the next level.

Josh Brewer

Abstract

“I always advocate exhausting exploration/discovery at the lowest possible fidelity…” @jbrewer

Putting pencils before pixels can help you bring others into the design process and win you allies. Gaining the broad perspectives of your colleagues early on will also help your team produce better design solutions.

Here’s your to-do list to put pencils before pixels into practice

• Generate dozens of ideas on paper before designing on the computer; sketching is a thought process that will help you discover the unexpected.
• Get engineers, product managers, and other key stakeholders to sketch with your team in the early phases of a project. This will clarify the project for all, and create a sense of shared ownership.
• If your team or clients are remote, use USB cams to share sketches and ideate as a team.
• Constraints like fat markers or time limits on sketching can help you avoid getting lost in detail too soon.

Have you ever watched a great chef at work—the kind of chef worthy of a coveted Michelin Star? Whether she’s in the kitchen, the field, or at the market, she’s always tasting the food. Her palette guides her to the right flavors, aromas, and textures that combine to create an unforgettable meal. The alchemy of great cooking can only happen when the chef gets feedback at each step of her process.

Similarly, design teams that produce great products have something in common—they habitually test their designs. Before a single line of code is written, they build high-fidelity prototypes and put them in the hands of colleagues and customers, collecting fast feedback and correcting course before development.

These product design teams have a huge competitive advantage over those that get feedback only after their product ships: they learn faster. They spot problems quickly and fix them. They talk to customers early and align the product to their needs.

Learning faster

Learning faster means shipping more polished products that attract customers faster.

The software industry isn’t the first to grasp this principle. The animation industry was transformed by an underdog studio in Los Angeles that found a way to learn faster than the big New York studios by getting fast feedback.

Learn fast, leap forward

In the early 20th century, the boundaries of animation had been drawn and the industry was happily operating within them. The medium was crude—settings were flat, characters lacked personality, and the content was often limited to slapstick gags.

Then Walt Disney Studios changed everything.

Disney’s faith in the medium as an artform pushed the studio to experiment with new ideas that lead to astounding technical achievements. In 1928, they introduced sound with the release of Steamboat Willie, and in 1932 they introduced full color with Flowers and Trees. Each is an impressive achievement, but it was the studio’s contributions to process that enabled animation to evolve into the rich medium we know today.

In 1931, seeking faster feedback on their drawings, Disney animators began making what they called “pencil tests:” rough drawings on inexpensive negative film that they fed into the Moviola, a device with a small screen for viewing footage.

This process let Disney animators meticulously refine their drawings immediately, not weeks or months later, and enabled them to learn the art of the medium faster than any other studio. Soon the animators began stringing together pencil tests to review entire scenes, the interaction of characters, and the delivery of the story.

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In our little studios on Hyperion Street, every foot of rough animation was projected on the screen for analysis, and every foot was drawn and redrawn until we could say, ‘This is the best we can do.

Walt Disney

Disney Studios

“…every foot of rough animation was…drawn and redrawn until we could say, ‘This is the best we can do.’” -Walt Disney

Walt Disney Studios’ prototyping method pushed the medium into new territory. While other studios produced silly gag films to make people laugh, Disney created art with emotionally complex characters that made audiences cry.

By building fast feedback into their creative process, Walt Disney Studios was able to make a huge leap. What worked for Disney can work for your design team too. Don’t worry, you won’t need to track down a Moviola on eBay. All you need is a high-fidelity prototype.

A pencil test from the production of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Prototyping and tools

Prototypes let us present product concepts to colleagues and customers without diving into the production process. A good prototype is a balancing act—it feels like a real product, but doesn’t require a lot of time to build.

I used to create prototypes using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It was a painful, time-consuming process that affected my judgement when testing. I’d spend a week or more producing a prototype that was vaguely realistic enough to show customers. When feedback called for big changes, I found myself reluctant to act, as the work seemed daunting.

That process seems ridiculous today, as we’re in a golden age of product design tools. We can now create prototypes that are much higher fidelity in less time without writing a single line of code. With less time invested, tweaks to a prototype come easy.

There are a number of prototyping tools on the market—more than we can cover here. Do some research to find the right fit for your needs. As you consider various prototyping tools, ask yourself these questions:

• Is it easy to focus on product design problems, or will I be fiddling with the tool or code?
• Can I deploy my prototype to various devices to create a realistic testing experience?
• If you’re working remotely, is it easy to share the prototype and conduct remote testing?

InVision and Sketch

As you might’ve guessed, we’re partial to prototyping with InVision. Before joining InVision, my product design team at MailChimp used InVision to prototype new apps and explore feature concepts. It helped us move fast and get the feedback we needed. We shared InVision prototypes with the engineering team early to get feedback and keep everyone in sync.

Many product designers have transitioned from Photoshop to Sketch, which lets you work on multiple screens in a single file. You can save common UI elements like buttons and forms as shared symbols to build a screen quickly. There are a number of great learning resources to guide you if you’ve yet to make the leap to Sketch.

Craft by InVision, a suite of free plugins for Sketch and Photoshop, creates a tight integration between Sketch and InVision, shortening the prototype design process. It lets you pull real data from an API, fetch content from a site, or grab elegant photos and drop them into your design file to make your UI more realistic. Craft even lets you build a prototype directly in Sketch.

Design tools today are doing for product design what Disney’s pencil tests and the Moviola did for animation—they’re shortening the learning process so the craft can evolve faster.

Keynote

Keynote, Apple’s popular presentation software, has become a go-to prototyping tool for many designers. It’s simple enough that almost anyone can prototype with it, and sophisticated enough to do elegant animations that make a series of images feel like a real app.

Install Keynote on your iPhone or iPad to run prototypes on the target device, making the testing experience more realistic. Design prototypes in Keynote faster with Keynotopia’s UI templates for both iOS and Android. If you end up doing a lot of prototyping, you’ll probably want to take some time to create your own UI template library so you don’t have to continuously apply your brand’s colors and style to stock elements.

UI kits

Use these free UI kits from InVision to make building a high-fidelity prototype fast and easy: NOW, Chat, Do, Relate, Tethr

Faster prototyping with a pattern library

Your product prototyping process can be accelerated exponentially when you work with a pattern library—a collection of standard elements that can be combined like LEGO blocks to create a new UI. Creating a pattern library is time consuming work, but it pays off with the design of each new product or feature.

Facing UI fragmentation across many products and platforms, the design team at NASDAQ revised their schedule to spend time creating a pattern library. The process was intense, but helped them unify the user experience across all of their products. There was an additional benefit they hadn’t initially anticipated—prototyping with a pattern library helped them move very quickly.

Spending less time noodling on UI treatments means designers can focus more on aligning the product to customers’ needs. Companies like Salesforce, IBM, Atlassian, MailChimp, Spotify, and Westpac have all developed detailed design systems that help them design new products quickly.

Getting feedback on your prototype

Testing internally

With your prototype built, you can start collecting feedback. Before you put your prototype in front of customers, spend time talking with your design and engineering colleagues. They’ll help you look at the UI with fresh eyes, and reconnect with the key objectives of the project. Now’s a great time to conduct a design review.

Deploy your prototype to the devices you’ll be targeting so everyone can get a feel for the real experience. It’s not uncommon for designers to walk around the building to grab a few colleagues for an impromptu test of a prototype. Great feedback can come from unexpected places, so look beyond the design and engineering teams.

With feedback in hand, revise your prototype accordingly and get ready to test with real customers.

Testing with customers

You’re going to learn a lot as you show your product prototype to your customers. Your ideas and assumptions will be put to the test, which may at times make you uncomfortable. It can be frustrating to watch users struggle with your design.

Your instincts might lead you to help customers figure out how to use your app, but you’ll taint the feedback if you do. Instead, stick to your testing script or work with a moderator who can conduct the tests impartially.

Michael Margolis, UX Research Partner at GV, follows a very simple process as he conducts tests with customers: a welcome, an ice breaking period, the introduction of the prototype, the test, and a debrief. Michael’s script is wonderfully simple and easy to remember. Dive into his process in more detail in the book Sprint from GV.

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Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.

Jakob Nielsen

Nielsen Norman Group

“The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.” @jakobnielsen @NNGroup

According to research conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, the majority of problems with your prototype will be identified after testing with just 5 customers. Instead of testing more customers, Jakob Nielsen recommends another small batch of tests after refinements have been made.

Recruiting customers

Running the test is actually the easy part of the feedback process. Finding test subjects is the hard part. If you have an existing customer base, query your database to find power users. Devout customers are often excited to see new design concepts, and will likely give more informed feedback. This is their chance to influence the design process!

If you’re testing a prototype for a brand new product, you’ll need to be more creative in how you recruit. Once again, the GV team has a clever solution. They create a form to screen customers that asks a few carefully considered questions. A worksheet guides them to create a screener that will target the right kinds of people. They post a link to their screener form on Craigslist, Twitter, Facebook, and send to an existing mailing list if available. Since you’ll only need about 5 test subjects, you don’t need a high response rate to the screener.

Be prepared to compensate your customers for their time—remember, they’re doing you a big favor by testing your prototype.

Alternatively, you could hire a professional recruiter to find customers for you. The downside is it can be very expensive, and it won’t be a hands-off process. You’ll still need to give them enough information to target the right customers.

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When we don’t have a live product built and we need to get feedback, we can send a prototype to researchers to have it tested. It allows us to get feedback not just from drivers in San Francisco but from all around the world.

Molly Nix

Uber

When we don’t have a live product built and we need to get feedback, we can send a prototype to researchers to have it tested. It allows us to get feedback not just from drivers in San Francisco but from all around the world.

Testing remotely

Not all the customers you recruit will live nearby. You’ll need to make plans to conduct tests remotely too. Gregg Bernstein, Senior User Researcher for Vox Media, has developed an elegant system to conduct tests with users remotely using inexpensive, freely available software—a rig that runs just $99, a small price to pay for fast feedback!

Here’s how he does it:

• Gregg shares a Calendly link with a potential test participant, letting her select a convenient test time. Calendly also lets Gregg ask for permission to record the session, and lets him send details on what the test participant can expect.
• The Vox design team posts a prototype to InVision.
• Gregg invites the participant to Zoom call where the customer can use the prototype while Gregg asks questions, observes, and takes notes.
• The session is recorded using ScreenFlow.
• After the test session is complete, Gregg re-watches the video to fill in gaps in his notes. He then shares those notes and his insights with his Product team via Slack.

This process is simple and fast, yet effective. It lets Vox’s remote product team get feedback from users anywhere without hopping on a plane.

A service like Lookback.io can also help you get fast feedback from both colleagues and customers remotely. InVision and Lookback integrate to let you test a mobile app prototype with customers. It records the customer’s screen, their interactions with your prototype, and even overlays a video of their face as they use your app, helping you read their emotional state.

When your app is built, your developers can integrate Lookback into your app so test sessions can be triggered any time. Users can shake their phone to reveal a secret button that triggers Lookback’s recording feature. All sessions are stored in a central dashboard for designers and developers to review and make revisions.

Lindsey Campbell, UX researcher at InVision, has a unique approach to getting customer feedback remotely. She’s set up a Slack channel to share prototypes with devout customers to get early feedback and bring customers into the design process. The design team monitors the feedback and tweaks the product as needed.

Related: Get stakeholder approval 46% faster

Better, faster product prototyping and testing

Like a chef sampling her ingredients, designers need to get a taste of the user’s experience while designing, not just after the product ships. When you shorten the feedback loop, you can learn faster how to make a product that will appeal to your audience. Here’s some guidance to get you started.

• When should I build a prototype? After you’ve done initial research and worked through many ideas on paper.
• How much of the app should I build in my prototype? Don’t waste time prototyping the entire app. Focus instead on the parts about which you have the most questions.
• How real should my prototype be? It should be real enough that customers won’t realize it’s just a prototype.
• When should I show others my prototype? Early and often. Don’t let yourself get too far down a single path before you start getting feedback from colleagues. Show your prototype to customers after you and your colleagues have ironed out the kinks.
• Who should I show it to? Start with the people in your design or product team. Be sure to get an engineer’s perspective to ensure the design you’re proposing is technically feasible.
• How should I present my prototype? It’s always best to show the prototype on the target device if possible. Frame the problem you’re trying to solve before you ask for feedback from others.

We’re fortunate to know the importance of testing, and to have access to tools that make capturing feedback cheap and easy. Whether remote or in person, your team can build fast feedback into your process so you can build better products faster.