“There is not one answer.” Anyone who works on product development needs to read this MIT Technology Review article, which mentions some intriguing research by Professor Maria Yang on basic product design lessons, including sketching:
“Yang has found that the very existence of those visual representations matters greatly: designers who do even basic, preliminary sketching consistently generate more design ideas. As she and a coauthor wrote in a 2007 paper, there is ‘an important interplay between a designer’s ability to sketch and their ability to visualize in their heads or through prototypes.’ She has even found that if designers aren’t highly skilled at drawing, that doesn’t affect the quality of their final design outcomes; it just matters that they draw at all.”
I am not a designer, but I have been working in product development in online media and publishing for decades. Sketching is a requirement for prototyping everything from charts to websites, and fits into the Lean Media approach to making media that matters. The example below is a real sketch that eventually resulted in an innovative genealogy fan chart that includes children of the primary couple.
Typically, after the sketching phase, I seek out feedback from what I call “test users” to solicit qualitative and quantitative insights about the conceptual sketch or diagram, before passing it off to a professional graphic designer. Here’s an example, which resulted in the diagram used in the book (Google Drive & Docs In 30 Minutes) being greatly simplified:
Google apps users: Working on 3rd edition of Google Drive & Docs In 30 Minutes. Going to use a new conceptual diagram to illustrate how everything connects. Does this draft sketch make sense to you? Feedback appreciated!#gdrive #googleapps pic.twitter.com/ebFUjQxXpj
— Lean Media (@leanmediaorg) July 21, 2020
In the article, Yang also talks about the four primary drivers that guide product design:
- Technology inspired
- User inspired
- Market driven
- Follow-on designs
The last product design lesson was interesting. It’s basically following inspiration from existing designs … not as sexy as Jobs or Da Vinci, but as Yang explains, incremental improvements and efficiencies drive progress, too.