Key habits of highly effective designers
Make it a habit to externalize your design work
Move faster by revealing the process through sketches, whiteboards and by printing your work out
As designers, we have the superpower of making the future concrete. When we’re deep in the work mocking something up, it might not feel like we’re doing anything special, it’s just part of the job description. And yet, not everyone has this ability.
By giving shape to ideas we can get feedback quickly, align the team and save time pushing pixels.
Here are a couple of ways you can become more effective by:
- Sketching and taking notes
- Whiteboarding during meetings
- Printing your work out and sharing it broadly
Carry a sketchpad
Should designers sketch? You don’t have to be an artist to draw but thinking visually can help you explore new ideas quickly.
A few years ago I took a course called “Methodologies of Visualization” or as we all called it that sketching class with a fancy name. From day one we’ve been instilled to carry a sketchpad everywhere. You never know when a moment might strike to do a quick drawing. Just like the perfect camera—any size sketchpad would do as long as it’s on hand.
These days I carry a sketchpad with me while at work. Having free-form, non-lined, large sheets of paper is immensely helpful in not only staying organized but also in capturing rough ideas visually.
Aside from drawing I also use it as a dedicated place for:
- Writing down key points during meetings
- Planning the week and capturing key goals for each day
- Highlighting key themes, issues, and positive notes throughout the week to be revisited during the weekly retro (more on that in the next article)
Not an artist? You don’t need to be. The main goal here is to have everything in one place at first and you can develop your sketching skills over time. My favorite sketchpad size is 9 x 12 inches. It’s big enough for a large sketch but small enough to carry around with a laptop in hand.
Aside from the notepad I also have a sketching kit that I’ve assembled over the years. It doesn’t have to be anything expensive, just a collection of things like pens, pencils and markers to help you get your ideas across.
I usually don’t carry the kit with my everywhere but it sits comfortably on my desk and is useful for when I need to elaborate on an idea beyond a simple line drawing.
Getting into the habit of sketching and thinking through abstract ideas quickly will pay off dividends when you do sit down and dive into hi-fidelity work.
Lastly, a side benefit of writing things down is the chronological aspect that they take on. As you look back on your work after a week and after a month, you start to see how you’ve progressed and how your thinking has evolved over the years. So don’t throw those notebooks out!
Whiteboard during meetings
Believe it or not, whiteboards are actually useful beyond just whiteboard design exercises. Aside from using a whiteboard to sketch out ideas for yourself it’s also an invaluable tool to get the team aligned in meetings.
Sketching on a whiteboard during meetings helps everyone come to understanding faster and ensures everyone is talking about the same thing.
By taking a marker and stepping up to the whiteboard you become a leader if only for that brief moment of time. This is your opportunity to facilitate the meeting—you can either passively take down notes or invite others to join.
If getting into a regular habit of whiteboard sketching seems intimidating, try sketching on your own first. If you can—get your own personal whiteboard.
So next time you’re around in a meeting and it seems like things are going in circle—get up to the the whiteboard. Write down key points, no matter how rough. Be explicit with gaps and open questions. Lastly, close with takeaways and next actions.
Print your work
Today’s digital products are always changing. They’re never “done” and new requirements loom on the horizon. By printing your work you can capture a snapshot of the experience as it once was. These types of snapshots are invaluable for large projects that live across several touchpoints in the customer’s journey.
Here are a few examples of when taking the time to print the work was helpful to align the team.
Observing common patterns
A coworker and I were testing divergent prototypes in order to better understand customer behavior. As we were moving into the second phase of testing I’ve printed the key screens from the prototypes and taped them to a whiteboard.
I then added specific research insights that we’ve heard from customers to each screen. By stepping away and looking at the journey in its entirety we were able to spot common trends and patterns helping us zero in on potential solutions for the next round of testing.
Exposing cross functional complexity
Because designers have to think about the product form the outside in, it is inevitable that projects overlap with other team initiatives. To ensure that design ships the best experience as opposed to shipping the org chart — it’s important for everyone to be aligned on the experience.
Lastly, this can can act as a great conversation piece to get everyone excited about the work at hand. In one of my projects that spanned multiple quarters I’ve used the product myself as a user, collected screens across the experience (and different platforms) and shared the work with the broader design team to make sure we’re aligned on the features we’re shipping.
A side outcome of this was having people drop by and realize the complexity of this project across all stages of the customer journey.
Of course not everything needs to be printed. These days certain tools like Miro and Figma can also help you achieve similar outcomes. However there is something to be said about creating a shared space and lowering the friction in accessing the work—no logins or passwords, just paper.
This is the first part in Key habits of highly effective designers. In the next part, we’ll take a look at how to show progress in order to get feedback and grow faster as a designer.
