How sketching can benefit your design practice
There is always a good reason to draw.
This article is part of a series about how to get your design practice more visual.
Any opportunity is good to put a sketch on paper; as a matter of fact, I think everybody should draw as much as possible. I am not only saying this because I’m fond of drawing since childhood; I found in visual note-taking a playful way to focus my attention and get information to stick in my mind. A quick Google search will allow you to find the many scientific studies that back up the benefits of drawing, from increased creativity and strategic thinking to the ability to focus and calm the mind.
Yet, many designers rely solely on digital tools for our creative outputs, either for lack of time or confidence in their drawing abilities. In my opinion, this is a missed opportunity. In this article, I share why I use visual thinking in different parts of my design practice to inspire you to grab the pen & enjoy the many benefits of drawing ✏️.
When drawing, we actively use both sides of our brain, the right for creativity, and the left for logical thinking. This helps the brain build new connections and pathways.
Sketching & Service Design: a love story ❤️
Drawing was a natural part of my practice in my early career as an industrial designer: it was a fast way to visualise products & packaging that didn’t exist yet. Now designing services & experiences, visual thinking has turned even more important.
As a service designer, I design human experiences; and the raw material I aim to shape is human behaviours and emotions. To communicate a current or desired experience in a holistic way, I often create huge maps with a vast amount of details, including various interactions with tools, systems and other humans. This output can be text-heavy and feel process-orientated, creating a risk to disconnect the viewer from the context and the human, experiential aspects.
This is where visuals come into play. They are not merely illustrations; they truly anchor your processes, maps or user flows into the human experience by bringing some tangible aspects. Where is your user? What are they doing? How do they feel? Visuals and drawings create great conversations as it uncovers unseen connections and articulates the bigger picture. Visuals are the best to make sense of complex, ambiguous situations to build stories and spark ideas. ✨
There is always a good reason to draw!
I’m a fervent advocate of the power of drawing as a communication tool. Everyone who ever ordered Ikea furniture noticed that the instruction note is purely sketches of the different steps; removing the need for words and making this easy to understand, no matter your native language.
A common blocker for drawing is a lack of confidence. “I cannot draw” apologise most adults just before doing a sketching exercise during a workshop. This is untrue: you can visualise anything from people to interfaces using basic shapes such as rectangles, arches, circles and spirals. Everybody can draw.
Unless you wish to be an artist, your drawings do not need to be beautiful: they need to be able to convey your point.
There is plenty of content out there from talented designers & artists aimed at teaching you how you can improve your drawings skills; here I will focus on. why & when you can use sketches to boost your projects.
Bring your research insights into life
Using sketches to visualise your research findings can make it more relatable and memorable. This is especially useful when working in a sensitive context where privacy is important and you cannot use pictures from field research.
During my Master’s Thesis in 2014, I worked on the topic of sleep apnea, a health condition that affects millions of people and for which the treatment is highly intrusive. I was uncomfortable with associating pictures of patients with the description of their ailments or having people posing with their masks. Instead, I decided to create illustrations to represent difficult situations that were part of sleep apnea patients’ daily life and build empathy for users.
Sketching is also a good way to streamline the information you want to communicate: sometimes a picture has too much information. A couple of years ago, I worked on a project about ATMs. We were conducting guerilla research and taking pictures of user behaviours wasn’t an option. Yet, we needed to communicate the following learning: the availability of machines for depositing cash is critical for business owners, as they are anxious to carry around subsequent sums of money. Being able to visualise this in the form of a drawing allowed me to remove the unwanted details and emphasise emotions.
Translate complex information into memorable bits
Visual note-taking, besides being really fun to do, helps to process information: you need to listen actively or understand a topic to be able to capture the idea and translate it into an image that can be easily understood.
The inherent nature of pen and paper, with limited space and the time required for its creation, is a nice invitation to capture the essence of the information.
When I dive into a new project, I often need to gain a holistic understanding of the topic at speed, which means consuming a lot of content. To offload my brain and help me makes sense of complex topics, I always sketch quickly different important points. This forces me to summarise information, and get it out of my head. Visual information is processed 60,000 faster than text by the brain so it is really useful to discuss research learnings with team members, spot gaps in our understanding and unseen connections.
Taking visual notes is for me the best way to remember things. I use this to take meeting notes and capture insights from training & conferences. This technique, known as graphic recording or ‘sketchnoting’ is not only about drawing things, it is about representing how these things, or atoms, are connected to convey the story. This video explains the basic of graphic recording so you can get started.
Sketchnotes are a good way to efficiently share information with others. Something I like to do after a meeting is to share my visual notes with others straightaway — to ride the momentum and create a nice memory… and you don’t need a lot of time for this!
Build better experiences and get stakeholders on board 🤗
Good service design is rooted in the understanding of user needs, which are materialised in the shape of ‘personas’ or archetypes of users.
When designing an experience, I find powerful to draw the persona going through their journey. It allows stakeholders to better understand the ‘experience to-be’ by building rapport with the persona and its needs in order to design better experiences and products. It also materialises how ideas are woven into the experience.
Like the example above, the sketched user journey can be really low-fidelity and messy. The point is to put yourself in the shoes of the user, provoke meaningful discussions and create a holistic understanding of all the steps and touchpoints that creates the experience.
Another reason for including visuals in your output is engagement. Previously I wrote an article about how many of the projects I work on are cross-organisation. This means that your stakeholders may need to convince and gain traction to take the project to the next step, and a communicative visual document is a great way to engage people.
Of course, the deliverables shouldn’t be a goal in themselves: they are a tool. Still, as one of my previous design lead always said: “your work is as good as you communicate it”. And a picture worth a thousand words.
I hope this article will inspire you to grab a pen and start sketching. Our brains are wired to process visuals; drawing not only help us to understand and memorise information, but also enable us to be better communicators. Sketches engage with research insights, inspire creative design solutions considering the context and enhance meaningful discussions. You don’t need to be an artist to start expressing yourself visually; just grab a pen and start practising!
Let me know how you embed drawing into your practice and feel free to share your sketches or inspiration at marjoriebroudieu@gmail.com.
In the next articles, I will dive into how to visualise user experience and build your visual muscle. Keep tuned!
