I recently posted about Bill Buxton’s book, “Sketching User Experiences“, so I thought I’d share an example on using these kinds of techniques on a recent project.

The problem at hand involved concepting a number of new features for an existing website, and sharing these concepts with a remote team. (When you can’t get everyone in the same room, it’s key that the team can quickly share ideas.)

For this session, we used:

  • Whiteboards
  • Paper
  • Markers, scissors, and tape
  • iPhones
  • Keynote

The goals were to:

  • Tell a story
  • Leave room for creative thinking
  • Validate concepts
  • Align thinking

After open brainstorming and traditional white-boarding, a number of concepts were quickly sketched on paper (generally one sheet per screen.) These screen sketches were taped to a whiteboard, allowing quick note-taking and annotations:

photo of whiteboard working session

After walking through the concepts (and iterating) with a number of local victims, the screens were captured with an iPhone camera and pulled-into Keynote to create the storyboards. With each screen as a slide, a story can be told within the presentation format:

bringing images into Keyboard

Using this approach, stories can be shared globally, and changed in minutes. The hand-drawn images ensure that no-one gets hung-up on colors or copy writing, and they require a little creativity on the part of the reader, which gets the gears turning and leads to fantastic questions.