Sketching sessions are great for a number of reasons. You can use these activities as a tool to understand your client’s vision and to gain alignment on their needs. It’s also great for generating ideas quickly with your team. Over the course of our fellowship, we’ve done sketching activities with both our product team and business clients.

One of these team sketching sessions focused on the design of test answers within the e-MIB. We wanted to generate possible solutions for balancing familiar inbox design patterns with best design practices for short answer tests. We timeboxed each activity and shared our sketches.

How we did it

We reviewed existing product patterns and practices. Since we were designing a tool that would simulate an existing product, we wanted to make sure that our designs are familiar enough to a new user. We researched common email client providers and dove into the specific layouts and interactions for each.

Timeboxed sketching sessions. After reviewing research, we set up a timer and each sketched out what we believed the e-MIB inbox should look like.

Share our designs with the group. When the timer rang for each session, we would finish up and present our sketches. We talked through our design choices.

Create a final design. From everyone’s designs, we would pull out the pieces that made the most sense and do a final sketch together. This final design would be the starting point for our designer to create digital designs and to share with any other relevant stakeholders.

Sketching sessions might look different each time, depending on the needs of the team and the purpose for the activity. We tailored our scoring sketching session to suit our needs, but here are a few other formats if you’re interested in hosting one of these activities with your team:

• https://www.madebymany.com/stories/how-to-run-a-sketch-session
• https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/collaborative-sketching-sessions-framework
• https://medium.com/@rjgoose/how-to-conduct-a-sketching-session-a6f38bcae9e3