Tuesday October 13, 2009
Sketch The Right Problem
Recently, I helped a large law firm make some adjustments to the UI of their corporate intranet. The most urgent problem was their information architecture. Departmental initiatives were being crammed into their top-level navigation because of company politics. They were confusing meaningful way-finding with promotional content.
The client asked me to present a handful of different navigation concepts that would de-clutter the interface and still appease the political machine. Instead, I opted to restate the problem.
How a doodle hi-jacked the conversation
A sketch, no matter how rough, can make the difference between important ideas getting buried in politics or going to production.
We had to talk about how an attorney views his firm and his job. Pictures are easy to talk around. This sketch took me five minutes and had little (or no) production value, which made it okay to beat it up. I learned the client’s web team had previously conducted some in depth user research, but it was buried in reports that never got talked about. They lost sight of the people who had to use the website and this little sketch got them to re-focus. I was able to move forward with relative confidence and intelligence instead of just whipping up comps and crossing my fingers.
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Comments on “Sketch The Right Problem”
EMC helps organizations create superior IT environments, from infrastructure solutions all the way up to software development and user experience design.
Learn more…About This 404er
Matt Donovan
Matt is a Visual Designer at EMC, who hails from a background in photography and videography. He loves communicating. Whether visually or verbally, connecting with people is his passion. In every design, his goal is to understand and be understood by his audience.
It’s funny because the sketches like this work for non-business related issues as well. I was discussing money matters with my girlfriend and we needed to figure out how to map out the next three months. Instead of just jabbering, we sat down, drew a couple sketches (highly similar to yours actually) and figured the proper way of doing things in 10-20 minutes. Definitely an underused item in the arsenal
Nice example, Mike. I’ll bet if you guys ever get off track (not that you will, bit IF you do…) that sketch would help assess what went wrong.
Hi!
you gave such a nice example and its very nice analysis of problem so thanks for sharing your thoughts!