Sketchboarding is a rapid, flexible design method, which delivers results fast. It’s a technique which Leah Buley from Adaptive Path teaches extremely well via Adaptive Path’s workshop ‘Good Design Faster’, which I managed to catach while at the recent UX London 2010. For a full description and great video check the Adaptive Path blog post Sketchboards: Discover Better + Faster UX Solutions.

While I’ve always been an advocate of sketching out wireframes, when it comes to sitemaps and therefore structure, I tend to sketch these out on a layout pad. I had to start a brand new project and seized the opportunity to put into practice what I’d learned from Leah. Locking myself away for a couple of hours with post-it notes, markers and Tea resulted in the following.

How the morning started

Current thinking

Basic persona’s & user journey’s

Basic persona’s & user journey’s, revised

Revise site content in two sections – Company Info &…

…Product Info

Review search & browse methods

Revise search & browse, add user journey

Revise user journey again.

And after that I needed another cup of tea. Using Leah’s method, certainly helped. Being able to move the post-it notes around made it very easy to try alternative routes. The one bit of advice I didn’t follow was to use a large strip of brown paper to stick all the notes to. This would have made it a lot easier to move, but as we didn’t have any, I had to make do with photos.

This is a very lo-tech way to work things out, but allows for rapid and agile idea progression.

Read part two