What do you get when you mix mind maps and sketches together? Well, Sketch Maps, of course. Catriona of InspireUX just shared an interesting approach to organizing your sketches around a central idea. Awesome big canvas sketching! I’m a firm believer that your workspace affects the way you think. How you structure your screens will affect what you end up with. In the case of these Sketch Maps, it’s clear that the structure guides the designer to maximize the number of alternative ideas. It forces the designer to explore more alternatives in a playful way as opposed to thinking about a concrete unified solution. Two thumbs up. Thanks for sharing.

Credits: Catriona Cornett

Abstracting away from the way the interface looks, we begin to face higher level goals, functions or activities that the design ought to support. Eugenio here has done just that by using Mindmeister software to generate a high level mind map of the activities users will be able to accomplish. Thinking about functional requirements such as these before jumping into wireframing is a divergent design tactic as it allows more flexibility in interpretation. In other words, by being more ambiguous these functional mindmaps can generate a greater variety of new ideas. Comparatively, wireframes or sketches which are more concrete, are a convergent tactic which steer us in a single direction with the aim of getting us all “on the same page”. In my opinion, a design process that makes room for both divergent and convergent tactics, generates the best results. I guess, Eugenio’s sample here is a nice reminder to think a little bit bigger beyond the boundaries of the wireframe.

Credits: Eugenio Grigolon

Just made some slight adjustments to the existing alternative sketching technique, aiming to steer more in the direction of brain storming or mind mapping. This resulted in something I’ll call a sketchstorm. Wanting to feel less constrained in the explorative stage of a project, little frames were sketched on a larger paper size (11×17) without any “alternative numbering”. Simply, the interface ideas which were more related to each other were grouped more closely together. As alternative concepts emerged, they were drawn outward away from the center. The center of the page still contains a focal idea which the sketches try to support. Overall, I can say that the larger sheet size combined with small interface representations did feel more free.

Credits: Jakub Linowski

Recently as I was thinking about an assignment of designing a new playlist system at work, a number of ideas collided all into one and resulted in this design sample. The desire was to explore alternatives, quickly, of high level activities, which would have to support interactions between a number of actors or people. So I jumped back into pencil, paper and marker mode. As simple or obvious as it may seem, what I think might of worked well worth noting is the use of colours to denote different (or same) people. Another thing that perhaps worked out was the use of one activity as a starting point in the center and then branching out toward alternatives.

I think this little sample was influenced by other’s work as well worthy of noting. First of all, here at TU Delft we were exposed to quite a bit of mind mapping exercises which in a way resemble the interface sketches of Jonas Löwgren. Then again, this sample also shares the high level characteristics of a user journey submitted by Steve Johnson. Finally, as I’ve written in my personal blog I’ve also began questioning the sterility of one path user flows wondering about how to explore the diversity of activities.

The sample isn’t perfect, and as is argued in Pencils before Pixels, the lower the fidelity of the sketch the harder it is to use it to communicate with others. However when I showed the sketch to others, and supported the sample verbally, it enriched the conversations.

Credits: Jakub Linowski