UX, Team Innovation, other

Sketchbook Interface Design

I designed This sketchbook for an architectural engineering studio to improve their innovation culture by inspiring more off-screen creative discussions.

The Challenge

The challenge was to design a Sketchbook (physical interface) to inspire creativity, help the team collaborate, and follow projects’ progress. They wanted it to be “non-digital” to encourage everyone on their team to get physically together, sketch, discuss ideas and keep the creativity flowing.

I approached this project as any other Digital UX project because at the end, that’s what I was creating: a user experience, just using a different media.

The Process

The design process included creating wireframes and three prototypes, going from basic sheets of paper, plus stickers to an actual book that I bound myself.

 

Over a year we tested the prototypes, improving each of the iterations. User testing was challenging because it’s impossible to accurately measure users’ behaviours like I usually do with analytic tools, so I had to rely on the test users’ anecdotal feedback.

Insights

Getting away from the design for screens helped me reflect on my practice as an Interaction Designer. Interaction design aims to define the users’ behaviours when interacting with an object, service or device, through an interface. Those interactions have an impact on the users’ experience beyond that interface. And we as designers have always to consider the effect that the behaviours we design have beyond our screens. Are we helping humans be more productive while killing creativity?

Tests and prototypes

Sketchbook Interface Design