UX Sketching

This is the process I prefer to use in tackling user experience and user interface projects – UX Sketching is a visual manifestation of my process.

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This project could involve: 

  • User & Ethnographic Research
  • Heuristic Evaluation
  • Market Research
  • Persona / User Journey
  • Strategy Formation & Documents
  • Business Objectives Quantified
  • Gamification
  • Information Architecture / Sitemap
  • Illustrator/Photoshop
  • Annotated Wireframes
  • Interactive Wireframes

  • UX Strategy: Skye & Client’s UX Team
  • UI Design: Skye & Client’s Visual Design Team
  • Input from Client
  • Presentation to Stakeholders
  • Working Closely with Client’s Development Team

In a perfect world, every project I did would have a similar flow:

  1. 1. User research and discovery of insights.
  2. 2. Strategy creation. This can include identifying the top 5 tasks, writing up business strategy and/or market research, discovering user objectives, or running a contextual enquiry to identify any issues with an existing product.
  3. 3. Create personas and identify user journey and flow through the app/wireframe (including alternate flows)
  4. 4. ‘UX sketching’ (process illustrated above) to unify all the UX assets together in one document
  5. 4b.  An interactive or clickable wireframe is often useful, especially for marketing and early user testing.
  6. 5. Formal on-the-grid user interface documents (wireframes with annotations) for the purposes of development requirements. This phase is best done in close conjunction with the programmer of the interface.
  7. 6. After a minimum viable product is produced, user testing and validation would be utilized to continually refine the user interface.

Many companies I work with use my skills a la cart, utilizing me for various parts of this process. I can certainly work within whatever business constraints exist.

Contact or hire Skye »

The interactive sketching notation is an emerging visual language which intends to enable designers to tell more powerful stories of interaction. Through a few simple and standardized rules, what the user sees (drawn in greys and blacks) and does (drawn in red) are unified into a coherent sketching system.

Jakob Linowski

I enjoy Mr. Linowski’s way of sketching out ideas for 4 reasons:

  • I can work fast but not messy
  • I can combine 4 essential UX assets: personas, business and user objectives, user stories (scenarios / journeys), and UI wireframes.
  • I can make user actions and flow the focus, not static graphics
  • I have the ability to easily iterate on different interface patterns.

 

A big thank you to Jakob Linowski (of Wireframe Magazine) who pioneered this ‘Interactive Sketching Notation’

Watch his video here »

 

CLOSE-UPS OF UX SKETCHING (Please click on the slides to enlarge):