ia play

A recent conversation with a friend generated shock (and even a little scorn) that I’d been producing wireframes. I was firmly entreated to sketch instead. Around the same time a recruiter approached me with information on a job that would require detailed annotated UI specs of around 40 pages every fortnight.

The profession is still judged, by and large, by the quality of our documentation. Most recruiters and hiring managers seem more interested in the quality of annotation than the quality of thinking.

I’m rather inconsistent in my approach to documentation. Mostly the medium is picked for the context. Is the project agile? How good are the developers? Is there a remote team? Do lots of people need to be consulted? What are their reading preferences?

Whilst I’m happier with pen and paper  than computer, I think it is far to say that I doodle a good deal more than I sketch.  Now there’s always a way to get chickens into a blog post… this little trio were sketched during a conference presentation, presumably a scintilating one and probably about something 2.0 related given the labelling of the fowl.

In fact, it appears I doodle most when irritated by the speaker. In this case , rather than asking an insightful question to highlight the cliched and superficial nature of the argument, I wrote “blog, wisdom of the crowds, whatever”. That told him, I’m sure. I do still want this mug though:

None of this is what my friend had in mind though. She’d like this more: part user journeys, part concept map, but mostly not very pretty. Not really for sharing (apart from with you lot, of course) but it could be re-jigged into something more respectable.

I do these little pages all the time but again they aren’t for collaborative purposes. This one was so I could sanity check we had all the functionality we’d need on the product backlog before the supplier drew up the drawbridge.

Then of course, there’s cheating. Those search forms I shared recently were created in Visio but with the sketchy stencil:

I very rarely do this kind of documentation anymore. My business stakeholders are bored by them and the developers are best told what to do by pointing over their shoulders.

I do still do content models. This kind of specification still gets traction with the developers:

But, horror of horrors, a lot of my documentation these days is actually reasonably high-fidelity mock-ups. These are really aimed at the business stakeholders. Colours and fonts are pretty much fixed by our visibility requirements, so the business units know better than to ask for their favourite shade of puce.  And they worry less if they don’t have to try and visualise from wireframes. It doesn’t take me any longer as I’ve got a colour stencil and the choices are pretty limited.

Is this ironic? I’m working for an organisation of and for blind people and I’m producing the most colourful deliverables ever.  But then you should see the colour of the office floors.

I had the opportunity last week to attend a brilliant course called An Introduction to Visual Methods.

“The aim of this workshop is to provide participants with a step-change career enhancing skills in visual methods; and to provide an ongoing and integrated visual methods resource for researchers with experience in visual methods at intermediate level that is stimulating, challenging and grounded in ‘best practice’.”

Dr Jon Prosser and friends are running an ESRC funded initiative to “build visual method capacity across the social sciences. Part of the initiative was these dirt cheap training courses, aimed at academic and non-academic researchers alike.

The two days involved three hands-on activities and a number of presentations covering:

• Katherine Davies : photo elicitation and family tree drawing to explore family resemblances and sibling relationships
• Stuart Muir: video diaries to explore contemporary rituals
• Rob Walker on children’s photo diaries
• Andrew Clark on map making and walkabouts to understand urban social geography
• Tessa Muncey on auto-ethnography through writing and photos
• David Gauntlett: making documentaries with kids, drawings of celebrities, identity models made of Lego
• Steve Higgins: using cartoon templates to find out childrens views
• Ruth Holliday: using video diaries to explore gender identity
• Jon Prosser on the ethics of visual methods.

There’s a Visual Methods Symposium in July that will explore some of these themes in more depth.

The Big Draw kicks off tomorrow with a mission to show that drawing is “enjoyable, liberating and at everyone’s fingertips”.

This is conveniently timed as I’m on a mission to spend more of my time drawing at work (part of a larger mission to spend less time with my computer). Step one was completed when I moved to my (huge) new desk and decided to keep it pretty much clear, bar the computer and an A3 sketch pad. Admittedly a lot of what gets scribbled on the pad is phone numbers and to-do lists but it has seen a fair bit of drawing too. It has been on a few trips to the cafe downstairs too. I tried taking it to a couple of meetings but that felt plain odd. So I also need to replaced my ruled notepad that goes to meetings with a smaller sketch pad. I never stick to the rules so the latter is pretty pointless.

Khoi Vinh wrote of doodling designers:

“The last thing you want to do, if you’re a designer in a business environment who wants to be taken seriously, is spend your time in meetings doodling like an idle schoolboy. “

But drawing isn’t always doodling (‘to scribble aimlessly’) – if we’re allowed to write down our thoughts in meetings then why not draw them.

Perhaps it is time to copy David’s ‘A Drawing A Day‘.