Scribble with your user to learn exactly what to build

When, how, and why to use sketching as a participatory design tool.

You don’t have to be good at drawing to communicate an idea.

Elephant in the room: nobody can draw

The point of a design sprint on the ideal breakfast experience is not for the 70 year old oil company CEO or the 25 year old assistant teacher to sketch the solution. The point is to EXPLORE the problem and potential solutions.

Before starting atFacebook, I organized design thinking workshops for people in government, industry and nonprofits. The first rule of sketching is that you can’t take it too seriously.

Which is a genuine Picasso, and which is a genuine hand-turkey?

NOBODY can draw. Look at this late Picasso drawing, next to my hand-turkey.

EVERYBODY, on the other hand, has relevant judgement and ideas. Sketching can help people organize and express themselves.

In this work I found one of the hardest barrier to overcome, regardless of the type of person, is a fear of judgment of their sketching skills. To set the right tone:

1. Define success. Let the participant know what type of information is helpful — not a perfect sketch, but you understanding their ideas and the experiences that inspired them. Sometimes I start the segment by saying we’re going to have some arts and crafts time, but that my goal is for us to have a good conversation about what they’re thinking.
2. Draw the world’s worst thumb. To illustrate how sketching works, I sometimes demonstrate by giving an example of ‘sketching’ a known feature. I describe my ‘need’, and then I draw the world’s worst thumb. A thing of nightmares. I openly admit that this is, indeed, the world’s worst thumb. And I point out how the terrible thumb is fine, because I’m just trying to sketch the idea behind the Like button.

If you’re going to draw the world’s worst thumb and make fun of it, be ready for your participant to make fun of you too.

I drew this thumb, and lived to tell the tale.

The Basics: How to use sketching

I use sketching as a tool to have good a good conversation. The prompt (or design challenge) shapes the type of conversation you’ll have and the ideas the the participant might come up with. I try to keep my prompts broad, but connected to my team’s goals for the product.

Here are my top three sketching scenarios (if you have favorites, please mention them in the comments):

1. What’s currently in this spot? Asking the participant to draw what they remember will reveal existing mental models, feature familiarity, and can create good conversations about actual (rather than perceived) use of of certain parts of the product. For example, I had a user draw a search bar under the existing search icon on FB for WinPhone. One note, be sensitive because this question can feel like a test. It helps to explain that there are no wrong answers, or that you are curious about what ‘made the biggest impression’.
2. What would ideally go in this spot? I ask for blue-sky ideas when I want to discuss unmet needs, or the ideal use of that product real-estate. Usually, there are some design constraints, so I lead into this section with a discussion. For example, when exploring WWW bookmarks, we discussed navigation priorities, then unmet needs or frustrations, then sketched with the prompt “what would help you reach the things that are most important to you, or that you use most frequently?”
3. What’s missing from this spot? I ask people to sketch solutions to perceived deficiencies in the design when I want to discuss unmet needs, or mismatches between their mental model and actual functionality. Often, we overlook pain points because we’ve technically already created a feature to solve a problem, but users aren’t using it because they haven’t discovered or don’t understand it.

Targeted questions, messy responses

I’ve had the most success when I keep the resolution/production value pretty low, and invest my energy in follow-up questions and analysis. This makes participants most comfortable, and yields the richest data.

The drawing will be inevitably be bad, but the conversation can be incredibly informative!

To keep things low-key and comfortable, I do the following:

• print off a template. If I’m in a hurry, I just draw a block over a screenshot in Keynote, but you can also make a lower resolution ‘wireframe’ version.
• use a Sharpie. Everything is messy and low-stakes with a Sharpie
• if the participant makes a huge mistake, slap a post-it note and call it a re-do
• ask the prompt question a few times to make sure you’re getting 2nd, 3rd, and 4th round ideas
• invest more interview time in analysis/conversation than sketching

Follow-up and Analysis

The sketch is just the starting point. I follow two lines of questioning for analysis to get richer, qualitative data.

1. Why’d you draw this? I try to get the participant to draw a line between their feature idea and a real-life experience that motivated it. I acknowledge that it is easy to get excited by participants drawing ideas the team has already discussed, so I try to make sure I understand the parameters of the need, and the scope of the participant’s imagine solution. I ask, “can you describe a time that you needed this to exist?”
2. How would you rank it? Sometimes, a minor element of a design is most important to the participant. After the sketch is complete I ask the participant to rank the elements of their design in order of importance, or severity of problem. Stack ranking the features or related pain points helps give more structure to very qualitative data. To do this, I usually write each element on a post-it note and have the participant move them around. The process of ranking also reveals themes and groupings, as the participant tries to spatially arrange.

Take it to the next level

Sketching is just a first step — a conversation starter. But the activity can roll right into your next steps and priorities.

• use the qualitative lessons you’ve learned about mental models to design a card sort and follow up on your interpretation of the sketches.
• draft a survey to more quantitatively rank pain points or feature requests.
• hang the sketches on the wall in your workspace and use them to talk through issues and ideas with your design and engineering teams.
• use participant-suggested features to inspire a product brainstorm.

LEARN MORE

• IBM Research: Participatory Design, The Third Space in HCI — Muller, Druin
• Journal of Medical Internet Research: Is Participatory Design Associated with Effectiveness (digital games) — DeSmet, Thompson
• Case Study: Participatory Design as a Research Method — Ane Sharma

If you have other advice on sketching as a research tool, or successful case studies, please share it in the comments!