Are you looking to gather feedback from people before a design? Use a sketch (co-design) session as a generative user research method to design with your users before development. Below is a quick "how-to" guide that explains how to run a sketch session.
Before
- Select a product, system, process, or environment to improve
- Determine user research goals and answer what do you want to learn?
- Understand the specific user it impacts and create a persona of the end-user
- Write up background or constraints impacting the project, e.g., timing, tech
- Craft scenarios the user might encounter with the product, system, process, or environment
- List the considerations that the product, system, process, or environment should have to function
- Find a date for the session and reserve a spot for 90 minutes
- Recruit people you want to collaborate with in the session
- Gather items needed
- If physical, you will need paper, pens, post-it notes, voting dots, masking tape, and a timer
- If virtual, you will need a video conferencing tool and a digital whiteboard tool
During
- Open the event with an icebreaker
- Review the goals of the exercise and what is being improved
- Go over the logistics of the sketch session
- Do a warm-up exercise of drawing a regular everyday object
- Review the personas, scenarios, and considerations
- Shift to doodling rough drafts of the product, system, process, or environment to improve
- Run a rapid ideation exercise
- Conduct a solution sketch exercise
- Post solution sketches for everyone to see
- Each person takes a moment to describe their idea
- Each person gets five dots to place on specific elements that resonated with them
- The facilitator then tallies all the top areas
After
- The decision-maker reviews the results and determines what is viable
- The designer uses the information to create a rough concept
