I spent a little time today watching Bill Buxton's Nov. 2006 Boston CHI presentation on sketching. Buxton talks about the distinctions between sketching and prototyping, in orderto discuss why sketches are valuable and need to be emphasized during the design process.

I was intrigued by what he calls the right process for ideation. When speaking about the sketching process for industrial designers, he says that designers need to come to the review table with 5 sketches, of which she cannot have decided in favor of any one. This practice contrasts with the method of doing 1 design and iterating over it with usability improvements, what he calls a spiral process in a single direction. The purpose of sketching is to find the right design, and the purpose of prototyping is to get the design right.

This doesn't say that usability testing and prototyping is wrong, but the approach to getting the right design is a process of sketching and critiquing, and it's an essential part of the process of generating ideas and is a bridge between ethnography and prototyping. By bringing out 5 sketches, you work on multiple directions in parallel until you find the direction that is best suited to the problem -- the one that is "right."

I've always used sketching to find the right design, but rarely showed the sketches, tending to simply discard the ideas that don't work and using finished wireframes and storyboards created in Visio or OmniGraffle for the team critique. But that goes against the purposes of exploring ideas as a team, I suppose, if the team never gets to see them. After hearing this presentation, I wonder what is being missed by not sharing more of the sketches. Often times, the ideas are generated in discussion while I sketch at a meeting or conference call and then I flesh the sketches out on my own, exploring different alternatives. But my team usually only sees what I deliver in the document created in the drawing tool.

This is one of the downsides of working in different locales and relying heaviliy on technology. I've become accustomed to deciding on and refining designs and quickly putting them in a drawing program, so the decision making process of sketching never gets seen. I've talked to a colleague about how to get my sketches to the group, and am considering the process of scanning and distributing sketches as PDFs, but this adds so much time and effort to the process.

When we talked about doing this, I though the value of scanning drawings would be for me to save time by skipping the wireframing part of the process when I could so we could work with agile methods. But I'm beginning to see that the problem is not the effort to do the wireframes. I think I'll always do them as part of the process. The problem is that the sketches aren't being seen enough and that people need to see the low fidelity creative part of the process in order to push the design direction in as many ways as possible and drive innovation a bit more. This, as I'm sure other designers know, is hard to do with finished looking documents.

I stumbled across the Pen-It device, which takes sketches and transfers them via Bluetooth to your Mac as vector drawings. I'm going see how I can make pencil sketches a more visible part of the design process with the larger team again. In any case, I expect to try to tweak my process a little to make more of the idea creation visible, so that sketches and annotations are seen more in their rough state, rather than editing out those details in the documents I deliver.