So we're back again in concepts and we're just going to go through some quick tips just to kind of wrap
everything up in terms of sketching.
So let's just give ourselves a little title here.
You know, I'm going to repeat a couple of things that I've been talking about that I really want you
all to understand how important they actually are.
Number one is, don't worry about them being messy.
Go jump right in.
Ask yourself those questions and just keep going.
Like you saw, I created a home screen pretty quickly and I started understanding that maybe we do need
these elements here.
They're going to probably be useful.
And I start learning about what content I can actually get from just like a quick sketch like that.
And from there we can actually go in and start refining that a bit more, you know, add icons, figuring
out maybe that's an avatar, figuring out what type of information goes in here.
Like we found out that we needed a heart and maybe we need a price tag.
Most definitely need a price tag.
But this is the kind of stuff that it's just a natural progression.
You don't worry about drawing something like this because eventually it's going to get to something
even better than to the product that we eventually built.
Don't worry about being messy.
Like I said, be lean, agile, sketch quickly and save yourself some time instead of worrying about
the detail.
The next tip is, you know, it takes a little practice, but only a little, you know, think about
it as building blocks.
All you need are some squares, rectangles, maybe circles, and you can build a fairly decent UI like
we've done before, like our card screen is just just an X whatever text we have there, we have a square.
Some lines, another square to us.
We understand what we're building here and we can refine that if we're going to present it to teammates.
We got a fairly good understanding of what we need to build a screen like this.
Don't worry about it too much, if you want to have a little bit of practice, like you can go and open
an app that you love or a website that you love and try just sketching that out, just using some shapes
or like some basic type.
And eventually you'll just develop your own type of system for sketching.
And there really is no wrong or right way to do it is just whatever is going to work for you.
Next step.
Keep your sketches safe.
Buy yourself a folder, please.
I mean, if you're doing it digitally, that's that's great, too, because, like, services like this
will allow you to export it and JPEG or whatever file format.
It doesn't really matter for sketches like this.
If you're using paper stored in a folder, scan it right away.
Take a picture, please, because I can't count how many times I've lost sketches that I really needed
or I really liked.
And sometimes you lose details.
Just remember, keep them safe.
Always be prepared, keep a sketch pad near you, pencil a pen with you on my desk at home, I always
have my sketchbook.
It's a dotted line sketchbook, so it's really easy for drawing wire frames and stuff like that.
So keep something with you.
If you like to draw digitally, like on an iPad or if you have a tablet that you draw on, like a whack
on tablet, keep that by your side because, you know, you never know when an idea is going to come.
You just never know when you need to sketch.
Keep it by your side.
Another thing I'd like to do is I like to hang my sketches up so like, say, if I have some sort of,
like, board beside me or a wall, I just like to hang up my sketches for some inspiration and then
I just write additional notes.
If I'm working from home, I have my whiteboard that I hang up and it serves as a daily reminder just
so I can see what I've been thinking about.
I can maybe scrap some ideas.
I can maybe take this new idea that I have and or this old idea I have.
And, you know, maybe something else comes from it because I've taken some time to just take some breathing
room, you know, just put it up for yourself.
And if you're working with teams, they help as well, because other people can kind of get into it
and they can start to provide some valuable insight.
You want to keep people in your team participating.
So that's the best thing I've always found, is just put your sketches up, share them.
And that leads me to my next tip over here.
My next step is to communicate.
Just please communicate.
Don't hide these gems that you're making.
I call them gems because like every product starts from something like this, you know, that may not
seem true, but that's what really is the skeleton of your product.
They'll always start from like a messy sketch.
So share them with people because this is a collaborative process.
Share them with your team, talk to every team.
It doesn't matter.
They'll always provide valuable insights.
We talked a little bit about like a certain feature over here.
Where there was going to be a carousel, it will just quickly draw it again, and if a user swiped left.
The new image would come in, and if I were to develop a feature like this or build a feature like this,
first person I would talk to would be a developer.
And I would like to understand, is this feasible for our timeline?
What's the best way to do it?
And you can have those conversations early on.
Next thing I'd like to do is I mentioned it briefly about like putting your sketches up, but some people
like to get a big whiteboard and sketch on a whiteboard, and that's totally fine, too.
I love sketching out whiteboards.
Now it's very collaborative.
It's easy to involve team members in this discussion.
And when you're just drawing screens, everyone can kind of just come in, point certain things out
because it's and nobody really gets tied to the details.
Everyone's thinking about like the overall flow.
You have so much space.
Sometimes you'll be surprised at how fast you can actually fill that up with your whole team.
And what I also like to do is I like to pen my sketches there as well.
So maybe they have some sort of relation to a certain screen.
It's a good jumping off point for yourself so you can kind of go back to your desk or wherever you're
working and start thinking about different things.
That could relate and one of the last tips I have, and I do this fairly often, sometimes I'll grab
a sketch so if I have our search experience.
Like, so it's easy to you know, it's easy to just sketch these out, but sometimes you don't necessarily
get like a feel for the product.
That's natural because it's on paper.
It's just static.
And sometimes you want to understand, like, how does that feel when the user actually clicks this?
So what you could do is you can export like individual frames any which way you want to do it.
Like you can export this whole thing here in concepts, this whole canvas, and you can kind of duplicated
and crop it to each individual frame and you can bring it into Fidelma and link it together in a prototype.
And bam, you have like something super simple.
And it give you a little more context on how it will actually work in the digital product.
So sometimes I'll do that or I'll scan in a sketch and that would really help me to figure that out
if things actually work while I'm tapping it on the mobile screen.
Also, give me a sense on how these elements need to be bigger than I thought.
Maybe it's not going to work here.
So like on a home screen, we thought about things like the little hearts.
But, you know, maybe we'll realize that that's not really feasible for a user to tap.
Maybe it is for larger images on a mobile screen.
But maybe if we're thinking about smaller ones, maybe we leave that out there because it's a little
confusing and a user may go to tap that and then actually tap into the image when they didn't want to.
Where do they go?
They go do it like that product description page that we've been talking so much about.
All these different tips are going to really help you create a much better user experience, is going
to help you drive that communication throughout the whole team, create that collaborative process.
At the end of the day, it's going to make you a better designer.
It's going to make your users happy.
So follow these tips.
Follow that process we talked about earlier in the lesson and you're well on your way to sketching some
amazing interactions and different types of flows.