All language subtitles for 18 - Sketching Tips

So we're back again in Concepts and we're just going to go through some quick tips just to kind of wrap

everything up in terms of sketching.

So let's just give ourselves a little title here.

You know, I'm going to repeat a couple of things that I've been talking about, but I really want you

all to understand how important they actually are.

Number one is, don't worry about being messy.

Go jump right in.

Ask yourself those questions and just keep going.

Like you saw.

I created a homescreen pretty quickly and I started understanding that maybe we do need these elements

here.

They're going to probably be useful and I start learning about what content I can actually get from

just like a quick sketch like that.

And from there, we can actually go in and start refining that a bit more.

You know, add icons, figuring out maybe that's an avatar, figuring out what type of information goes

in here.

Like we found out that we needed a heart and maybe we need a price tag.

Most definitely need a price tag.

But this is the kind of stuff that it's just a natural progression.

And you don't worry about drawing something like this because eventually it's going to get to something

even better into the product that we eventually built.

Don't worry about being messy.

Like I said, be lean, agile sketch quickly and save yourself some time instead of worrying about the

detail.

The next tip is it takes a little practice, but only a little.

Think about it as building blocks.

All you need are some squares, rectangles, maybe circles, and you can build a fairly decent UI like

we've done before.

Like our cart screen is just just an x.

Whatever text we have there, we have a square.

Some lines, another square to us.

We understand what we're building here and we can refine that if we're going to present it to teammates.

We've got a fairly good understanding of what we need to build a screen like this.

Don't worry about it too much.

If you want to have a little bit of practice like you can go and open an app that you love or a website

that you love and try just sketching that out, just using some shapes or like some basic type.

And eventually you'll just develop your own type of system for sketching.

And there really is no wrong or right way to do it.

It's just whatever is going to work for you.

Next step, keep your sketches safe.

Buy yourself a folder, please.

I mean, if you're doing it digitally, that's that's great, too, because, like, services like this

will allow you to, like, export it in JPEG or whatever file format.

It doesn't really matter for sketches like this, if you're using paper stored in a folder, scan it

right away.

Take a picture, please, because I can't count how many times I've lost sketches that I really needed

or I really liked.

And sometimes you lose details.

Just remember, keep them safe.

Always be prepared.

Keep a sketch pad near you.

Pencil a pen with you on my desk at home.

I always have my sketchbook.

It's a dotted line sketchbook, so it's really easy for drawing wireframes and stuff like that.

So keep something with you if you like to draw digitally, like on an iPad, or if you have a tablet

that you draw on like a Wacom tablet.

Keep that by your side because you never know when an idea is going to come.

You just never know when you need to sketch.

Keep it by your side.

The other thing I'd like to do is I like to hang my sketches up.

So like, say if I have some sort of like board beside me or a wall, I just like to hang up my sketches

for some inspiration and then I just write additional notes.

If I'm working from home, I have my whiteboard that I hang up and it serves as a daily reminder, just

so I can see what I've been thinking about.

I can maybe scrap some ideas.

I can maybe take this new idea that I have and or this old idea I have, and maybe something else comes

from it.

Because I've taken some time to just take some breathing room, you know, just put it up for yourself.

And if you're working with teams, they help as well because other people can kind of get into it and

they can start to provide some valuable insight.

You want to keep people in your team participating.

So that's the best thing I've always found is just put your sketches up, share them.

And that leads me to my next tip over here.

My next step is to kind of communicate.

Just please communicate.

Don't hide these gems that you're making in.

I call them gems because like every product starts from something like this.

And, you know, that may not seem true, but that's what really is the skeleton of your product.

They'll always start from like a messy sketch, so share them with people because this is a collaborative

process.

Share them with your team, talk to every teammate.

It doesn't matter.

They'll always provide valuable insights.

We talked a little bit about like a certain feature over here.

Where there was going to be a carousel, you'll just quickly draw it again.

And if a user swiped left.

The new image would come in.

And if I were to develop a feature like this or build a feature like this, the first person I would

talk to would be a developer.

And I would like to understand, is this feasible for our timeline?

What's the best way to do it?

And you can have those conversations early on.

Next thing I'd like to do is I mentioned it briefly about like putting your sketches up, but some people

like to get a big whiteboard and sketch on a whiteboard and that's totally fine too.

I love sketching on whiteboards now.

It's very collaborative and it's easy to involve team members in this discussion.

And when you're just drawing screens, everyone can kind of just come in, point certain things out

because it's marker.

Nobody really gets tied to the details.

Everyone's thinking about like the overall flow.

You have so much space, sometimes you'll be surprised at how fast you can actually fill that up with

your whole team.

And what I also like to do is I like to pin my sketches there as well.

So maybe they have some sort of relation to a certain screen.

It's a good jumping off point for yourself, so you can kind of go back to your desk or wherever you're

working and start thinking about different things.

That could relate.

And one of the last tips I have and I do this fairly often, sometimes I'll grab a sketch.

So if I have our search experience.

Like.

So it's easy to you know, it's easy to just sketch these out, but sometimes you don't necessarily

get like a feel for the product, you know, that's natural because it's on paper or it's just static.

And sometimes you want to understand how does that feel when a user actually clicks this?

So what you could do is you can export like individual frames any which way you want to do it, like

you can export this whole thing here in concepts, this whole canvas, and you can kind of duplicate

it and crop it to crop out each individual frame and you can bring it into figma and link it together

in a prototype and bam, you have like something super simple and give you a little bit more context

on how it will actually work in the digital product.

So sometimes I'll do that or I'll scan in a sketch and that will really help me to figure that out.

If things actually work, if while I'm tapping it on the mobile screen, it'll also give me a sense

on, you know, these elements need to be bigger than I thought.

Maybe it's not going to work here.

So like on a home screen, we thought about things like the little hearts, but maybe we'll realize

that that's not really feasible for our user to tap.

Maybe it is for larger images on a mobile screen, but maybe if we're thinking about smaller ones,

maybe we leave that out there because it's a little confusing and a user may go to tap that and then

actually tap into the image when they didn't want to.

Where do they go?

They go to like that product description page that we've been talking so much about.

All these different tips are going to really help you create a much better user experience.

It's going to help you drive that communication throughout the whole team, create that collaborative

process.

At the end of the day, it's going to make you a better designer.

It's going to make your users happy.

So follow these tips, follow that process we talked about earlier in the lesson, and you're well on

your way to sketching some amazing interactions and different types of flows.