(@mmonna)

Ever wonder what speed dating is like? Laying out all your best assets up front and center for the person sitting across the table to absorb in all but 5 minutes (8 minutes in some cases) pretty much sums it up. You go through a series of prospects and sell yourself by the minute. If the 5 minute package looks appealing, you seek it out and refine the conversation.

We can apply these efforts and gains to a design technique that appears simple in theory but is very gruelling in practice, very much like speed dating. The said design technique is speed sketching. Speed sketching is a solutions based technique that allows you to iterate many different possible UX concepts once armed with business, human and technological factors. Once you sketch a myriad of potential interactions on a homepage or critical page concept, you build upon and refine a winning concept. The exercise can lead to a wireframe, allowing creativity to make its mark before the IA process. Adaptive Path talks about speed sketching, or sketch boarding. They highlight the value really well.

Yesterday, Lindsay (@elledog) facilitated a speed sketching design exercise with Matthew (@mmilan) and myself (@mmonaa) for a health/medical client. We used Adaptive Path’s sketchboard templateThe task: 6 homepage concepts/sketches in 6 minutes, i.e. 1 homepage sketch a minute. Like speed dating, you evaluate all your constraints and put your best foot forward, so to speak. You aim to convey an image that accompanies a positive experience. You do this 6 times a minute. After the exercise you essentially take the best one, or the one you like the most and refine it. So, you pick a potential mate that you felt you connected with in under x amount of minutes during the speed dating and you refine that experience in hopes that a relationship will materialize.