I always sketch things, ideas, todo items; I actu­ally can­not use any todo list soft­ware because of this, my todo lists are not lists, my todo items are not text, they are sketches, post-​it notes with some key words, arrows and other symbols.

I regard sketch­ing as think­ing, I don’t sketch some­thing once, I do it over and over, refin­ing what it means, and in the case of sketch­ing inter­ac­tions I do a whole series of “frames” sev­eral times until it “feels right.”

And I use dif­fer­ent sur­faces for dif­fer­ent things, some will force me to keep it simple (small sur­faces, thick pens), some will encour­age iter­a­tions (black­board), etc. Here are some stages I passed through for the idea I’m work­ing on at the Knight-​Mozilla Learn­ing Lab.

Post-​it notes on the wall with inter­ac­tion ideas.

Then iter­a­tions on a blackboard.

Then a lot of small sketches, thumb­nail sized, done over sev­eral even­ings, mostly in bed while fall­ing asleep. (I’m using a MUJI Sticky Memo with 4 Frames)

From this point I take most of the ideas on a big­ger sketch­book, where I use post-​it notes to con­strain the size; also it is easy to replace a post-​it note when iter­at­ing on a whole page (interaction).

Also, I can stack the post-​it notes where I have other ideas and I’m not yet decided on how it should be.

Finally, I usu­ally do a marker sketch to get a bet­ter idea (and it is also a lot of fun play­ing with vari­ous shades of grey).

From this step I would move to high qual­ity wire­frames espe­cially if I have to com­mu­nic­ate them to, and iter­ate on them with oth­ers. In this case I’ll move dir­ectly to an HTML prototype.