The visual collaboration
A critical part of a project is the "collaboration" part when the people involved need to align the vision, the scope, and, why not, tools to achieve a better "next step".
I had the possibility to collaborate as a UX designer (if you don't know so much about User Experience don't worry, more articles coming soon) with Simone Rossi (PO of the case study project) on a quite small project that didn't involve the whole team into a 6 months sprint but sufficiently wide to reach a significant level of complexity.
So how did we collaborate to manage this increasing level of complexity that involved PO, Designer, and Dev?
During this project, I really appreciated the solution adopted by Simone, the PO, that basically decided to start from a Miro board composed of boxes and arrows to organize our "building site" and get the focus just on the logic that moved the projects. No matter the tool used, Miro in this case, a simple sketch can explain all you have to know. The easier the tool is, the better you can focus on the core part of the reasoning.
Is this the reason why I appreciate it so much the sketch way?
This is the real question. Nope, this is not the single reason why I appreciated the sketch way. We can consider the sketch, a real framework and this allows us to visualize the product before building it.
The power of a sketch is extremely underrated but even a PO that probably doesn't have hard design skills (or maybe has) compared to a designer, can show and build a product in low-fi and allow the designer/stakeholders/everyone involved to visualize and share the next step. From a designer's point of view, this is an incredible fastlane that allows us to continue to iterate the design in a short time. A sort of testing and validation tool.
So basically having collaborated with a PO who sketched had an impact on the work of the whole team (PO, Designer, Developer):
- clear and visual logic
- possibility to evaluate the results before starting to develop
- discuss about the solutions
- designer level skills not required
- no extra details that can be distracting
Maybe more articles about sketching coming soon :)