The One with Sketching For UX

Mindfulness and meditation are great ways to get out of a funk, to see things from a different perspective and to fight stress and negative emotions. Another way for doing that is doing something creative. That’s why I jumped on this Sketching for UX Challenge as soon as I was made aware of it.

I have participated in 3 or 4 Sketchnoting sessions at various Open Spaces or Barcamps but never really incorporated it into my daily life. I still think it’s a great way of capturing meeting notes, but I can’t really get into it. Maybe by building a little sketch library for myself, I can?

So far I have sketched up until day 4: Schedule, Deadline, IoT, Cognitive Load, Feedback, Form, Error, Target Audience, Onboarding, Checkmark, Future and Chatbot. I had problems coming up with anything for almost half of those prompts, so I googled pictures for some of them and then adapted stuff that I found. I am using just a black pen and I am trying to make them not too intricate (it says icon on the website, so …) and it really is a lot of fun.

There is a channel in the Software Crafters slack where 2 others post their interpretations of the prompts. One also doing just black pencil, the other person uses an iPad app for digital sketching with colours and lots of details. I do not peak at their solutions before I come up with my own (or let Google help me), but it’s also a lot of fun using their interpretations and coming up with another solution.

How does this relate to my work? I don’t know, really. I am about to start doing some mockups for my dashboard project, but I doubt I will need these sketches. But maybe they will help me with some on-the-spot sketching to illustrate some ideas sometime.