If you’re a designer, you’re likely familiar with the dread that accompanies most review processes. You think you’ve done a good job and delivered exactly what they asked for… only to find out they want a tweak here, a change there, and - oh wait - they want it completely redone, RIGHT NOW.

How do you escape this vicious cycle? Turns out, all you may need are a few pens and large pieces of paper. Leah Buley is an experience designer for Adaptive Path, and she will be running a Bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo New York to teach others how they can more productively and efficiently work together to create great designs and better user experiences. Her approach, outlined below, is at odds with the frequently used wireframe process. If you’re at all involved with the design process in your company or on a project, you need to check out Leah’s approach to solving your team’s collective problem.

Leah recently spoke to us about her approach and how designers can apply it to their own situations. If what she has to say strikes a chord with you, you should check out Good Design Faster’s page and sign up for the Bootcamp.

Before you read the interview, check out her approach in action:

Kaitlin: So give me your pitch. Why do I want Good Design Faster? What’s wrong with the traditional approach of having the designer steadfastly work on multiple wireframes until they get it just right?

Leah: I don’t object to wireframes per se, but they’re often the first and last step in the interaction design process, which means that there are some vital exploratory steps that may not be happening.

As it happens, the traditional approach of having a designer steadfastly work on wireframes is NOT really the traditional approach. In other design professions like architecture or industrial design, it’s actually more common to start out with an exploratory phase where you go through a lot of quick and dirty sketching and evaluate lots of directions before you get to a higher fidelity of design.

The problem with wireframes is that they put you in that higher fidelity right away, which often has the effect of immortalizing your first design idea for the rest of the project.

I started to see that this was a problem when I was always going into wireframe reviews with a feeling that can only be described as Defensive Dread. I was anxiously anticipating whether the big decision maker would “get” what was special about my big idea, or whether I’d have to go back to the drawing board.

Ideally, though, if you’ve done the right kind of exploratory work up front, you should be able to talk through a lot of different possibilities and understand why you’re recommending what you’re recommending.

Kaitlin: It’s interesting that you push for heavy team collaboration. Why should non-designers be involved in a design process? What feedback can a person who doesn’t think visually give to a highly visual process?

Leah: What I’ve realized is that non-designers will always have their say in the process, whether you invite them, or not. The question is just when.  Will it be at the beginning, when you can take their feedback and incorporate it into the process? Or later on down the line, when they veto, change, and fail to implement parts of the design? Earlier is infinitely less costly than later, so why not take the initiative and open the doors wide right at the beginning?

Kaitlin: Speaking of inviting the team in for collaboration, how does a designer manage his or her bosses during the sketchboard phase? If a higher up wants something done in the design, but you as a designer know it’s “wrong,” how can you convince them your approach is correct?

Leah: One of the big differences of the sketchboard process is that we don’t assume that anything is “wrong” or any approach is inherently “correct.” Higher ups sometimes have funny ideas for how to implement something, but even bad interface ideas have real needs behind them. Sketch out the bad ideas as well as the good (or, better yet, get the idea’s owner to sketch it out).

A designer’s best weapon is not words, but designs. Make even the bad ideas real (sketchy, low-fi, but real) and it becomes much easier to have a conversation about goals, benefits, and tradeoffs.

Kaitlin:  Have you worked with or consulted for a company whose team was spread out across the country or the globe? How do you collaborate on a Good Design Faster style process when you have, for example, your execs in Palo Alto, your developers in Israel, and your marketing team and designer in London? Is it even possible?

Leah: Sketchboards kind of got their start when we did a project with a local client, and it was very easy to take all of our sketches, roll them up in a bit sheet of paper, and take them over to their place.

But a very interesting example is a project that we did last year for a non-profit in Washington, DC called Changemakers.  Changemakers is a site that features competitions for social entrepreneurs. Whoever has the best idea for how to solve the world’s problem wins.

For us, what made it really interesting was that the team was distributed across four cities and two countries, and even in that scenario we were able to use sketchboards to get the benefits or early, rough low-fidelity exploration.

Here’s what we did:

• We started out by sketching lots of ideas. Sketching clearly and prolifically is one important part of the sketchboard concept. I’ll be teaching lots of detailed sketching techniques in the Good Design Faster bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo.
• After we did these sketches, we scanned them in and shared them via online remote collaboration software. (In this case we used a product called ConceptShare, but there are others on the market). In ConceptShare, our clients annotated our sketches, and added their own virtual sticky notes with ideas for what they wanted. They even did their own sketches, which we scanned in.
• We had scheduled conference times to talk through all of the ideas and figure out which ones seemed right for further evolution. We did these over the phone, while everyone was logged into ConceptShare looking at the sketches.
• After that, we’d create more detailed sketches. Or, if the idea was far enough along, we’d take it into detailed design (i.e., digital wireframes). In the remote collaboration tool, it was really easy to see the evolution of an idea – how a low-fidelity sketch became a detailed sketch, which became a wireframe. Very cool.

Here’s what really fascinated me about this whole process:  the ideas that our clients had contributed their own thoughts to tended to be the ones that grew and flourished in the final design. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising, but often we think our job as designers is to “wow” with innovative brilliance. Here, the Changemakers folks understood the problems much more intimately than we ever could as consultants just coming in for a short time, and our job was to help turn that understanding into clever, interesting, achievable solutions.

This really reinforced for me the idea (discussed above) that if the boss or the client or whatever higher up you’re working with feels heard and has an opportunity to see their ideas come alive, it becomes much easier for them to own and foster the success of the design.

Kaitlin: Are you finding resistance to your technique in companies whose designers you train, or is your approach catching on fairly quickly? What advice do you give to designers who are having trouble convincing their team to work together on a design?

Sketchboards are actually surprisingly easy to assimilate. Generally what I’ve seen is that after you do it once, people get it. Plus, it’s more fun than your typical meeting because it gets everyone up out of their seats and moving around and brainstorming and interacting.

Sometimes designers worry that clients or bosses will see sketches as unprofessional, but when we go through the sketchboard process, that never seems to end up being an issue. Quite the contrary. People are often unhindered by its low fidelity format to actually give more input and share their own ideas for the design, which is what it’s all about.

The one complaint I hear sometimes is that it takes too much time. If you’re really going to do the sketchboard process right, you’ve got to invite everyone in and take the time to work through the designs with them. And getting a team of people to spend a lot of time in a workroom together can be a lot of man hours.

That’s a tricky complaint to address. Using this method, you can achieve Good Design Faster over a shorter period of time, but I don’t really believe that you can actually get good design solutions without putting in the time, in one form or another, to understand the problem.

What I tell people is that even if you can’t get support for an extensive sketchboard process, at the very minimum, plan one working session where you invite people in to experience what it’s like to discuss and explore designs together in a very low-fidelity, visual, universally accessible format. And offer yourself up as a facilitator of that conversation. That first session is often interesting and surprising enough to get people interested in the process, and create an appetite for doing more of it.

Kaitlin: Thanks, Leah! See you in New York.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e.

Leah Buley is an experience designer for Adaptive Path. Her Bootcamp, Good Design Faster, takes place on Monday, Nov. 16.

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