Discussions

Sketching Interaction and Experience Design: How do You Represent the Conceptual, Structural, and Temporal?

Session Title

Sketching Interaction and Experience Design: How do You Represent the Conceptual, Structural, and Temporal?

Presenter

David Rondeau, InContext Design

Session Type: Discussion

Sketching is an important part of every designer’s work. We use it to help us think through problems, to conceptualize solutions, and to share or communicate our design thinking with others. But we aren’t taught how to sketch — we all adapt our own ways of doing it and for different purposes. Especially with interaction design and experience design, I think we’ve all developed different methods and techniques, but we don’t really share them and we don’t really talk about them.

* At what points in the design process do you sketch? (Understanding the problem, brainstorming solutions, sharing your ideas with others) What do you represent in those sketches? What are you trying to achieve?
* What level of detail do you capture? Does it vary for different intents?
* How do you sketch the structure of design? (whole system, individual screens, discrete functions)
* How do you represent different interaction paradigms? (drag, tap, click, roll over)
* How do you show changes in state to the same screen? (Rollovers, pop-ups, modal dialogs)
* Do your sketches try to communicate sequence, time, or experience?

Bring some of your own sketches and be prepared to share. We’ll discuss our different approaches, techniques, and goals of sketching to understand what works and what doesn’t. It will be a great opportunity to learn from each other and have some fun!

Biography

David is the Design Chair at InContext Design and has 18 years of design experience that spans graphic, visual, and interaction design. He oversees design at the company, provides design expertise and training to project teams, and coaches clients in the Contextual Design process. He has worked on software, web, mobile, and consumer products across a variety of industries — including medical, financial, legal, enterprise, IT, automotive, sports, entertainment, and collaboration.

His areas of expertise include paper and interactive prototyping, interaction design patterns, and helping others understand interaction design.

He’s interested in the structure of interaction design, how to make “good” design decisions through clear design thinking, and improving how we communicate about design.