All great ideas start with pen and paper, and digital products shouldn’t be an exception. Taking inspiration from Google Venture’s ‘Design Sprint’, we’ll sketch out early ideas for your product or feature with your key stakeholders and a cross section of our team. It’s a really quick way to generate lots of ideas and get early feedback. The idea is to create quick, rough wireframes so that no one is precious about what they’ve drawn, and including people from different disciplines brings a wealth of ideas to the table.
We use a trick from the Design Sprint called ‘crazy eights’ which involves folding the paper into eight sections to sketch out multiple ideas. Encouraging people to think beyond their initial preconceptions more often than not brings out some of the best ideas.
Once we’re finished sketching, everyone gets the chance to explain their ideas before voting on their favourite concept. Once we have a idea of the strongest concepts we have everything we need to mock up vanilla wireframes ready for the first round of user testing.