Buy Ativan C.o.d.

Hi Kenny. Thanks for the comment. You raise some great points that have been limitations of the sketchboard approach. I think sketchboards could work in the digital world as long as the tools and methods reinforce what’s good about the approach:

1. You can create a framework for the types of ideas you want to generate.
2. You’re forced to have many ideas, and not settle on your first idea.
3. The ideas are expressed in a pictorial form that everyone can understand, reference, and improve upon.
4. The approach makes design an activity that everyone can be involved in.

Pictures of ideas (item 3 above) can be easily addressed with digital tools.

For a digital approach to be generative (item 2), I think you really need to embrace pen and tablet entry. The bonus you get from sketching is speed and an imposed lack of detail.

For a digital approach to engage everyone (item 4), you’d need a good shared space for review, plus some excellent annotation tools. We’ve started playing around with tools like ConceptShare, which seems promising. The trouble is you need a low barrier of entry for a sharing tool so that anyone reviewing the ideas can “pick up a pen” and mark up what they like, don’t like, or what needs changing. The effectiveness of sketchboards comes from having that visual map of what your team wants to take to detailed wireframes:

And this brings me to the most subtle issue, having a framework for what you want to sketch (item 1). There are many workarounds for this. A simple list would work fine. But what you loose with a distributed team is the group awareness that is provided by a shared space for idea generation. There’s a benefit to seeing someone else’s ideas and playing off them to generate new ideas. You avoid thinking and sketching the same solution, and you can also focus on filling up the empty space with additional new ideas. Again, there are workarounds for this including Smartboards, but the team should think carefully about a light-weight way of achieving it.

There’s also something interesting about the ability to associate a sound recording with a sketch, or to possibly make the sketch interactive. Interactive sketches will truly help us focus on some of the harder aspects of interaction design and create much better solutions much faster.