Before starting with sketching, it is helpful to know about techniques and processes of finding the right design and what exactly to sketch.

In order to get a right feeling for the design of new interfaces, so called „Mood Boards“ or „Inspriration Boards“ might be of huge help. They are widely used in the field of fashion, but can be also applied for your interaction design. These are basically boards on that you stick various items which shall represent the „mood“ of your idea. Usually you would create various mood boards and discuss them with the client or other stakeholders.

You need:

• Graphics software or
• white board and printed images.

You do:

• Choose a color scheme
• Collect photographs, screenshots, pictures etc.
• Paste collected items to your white board or into your „canvas“.

Tool Support:

• Adobe Photoshop

Mood board with various items which give an idea about colors and theme:

A so called „template mood board“ which is a bit more specific for later mock-ups:

A white board with physical objects and printed pictures:

• Supports the process of brainstorming.
• You can involve the project's stakeholders at a very early stage.
• Might reduce the number of required prototypes, because the stakeholders can refine their specifications when analyzing the mood boards.

A good design needs to be elaborated from various possible solutions. This is the basic idea of the „design funnel“, defined by Stuart Pugh in 1990. The design process consists of iterations. At each iteration, you create new concepts, analyze and reduce them and create new ideas after the reduction.

You need:

• Drawing materials

You do:

1. State your problem that you want to address.
2. Create at least 10 design concepts which solve the defined problem.
3. Reduce the number of design concepts.
4. Show and explain the remaining concepts to others.
5. After discussions you might create more concepts and repeat the previous steps.
6. Eventually choose the most promising concept.

This is a real-world example from the development of a customer relationship management (CRM) application. They started with several different sketches, then created mock-ups of a reduced number of the sketches and eventually built a prototype based on the most promising concept.

• Discussing various ideas in advance is faster and cheaper than later changing the only available prototype.
• Produces many ideas which leads to higher innovation.
• Iterations allow more interaction with stakeholders and hence, to a better and earlier approval by them.