Get better design feedback with vignette sketches
Here’s a simple but really effective technique I’ve used for a while, that I thought might help you and your team in your critique sessions: the vignette sketch.
If you’re a designer, or indeed even if you’re just part of a multi-disciplinary product or service team, you’ll know how important it is to share your work early and often for critique, guidance, and just generally making the work better.
Critique sessions can be amazing. You can get great guidance on whatever you’re working on, and there can be some genuine moments of collective insight, and even brand new ideas as a result. Win!
They can also be absolute disasters. The HiPPO is throwing his opinions around, the Coroner is nitpicking on tiny details that don’t matter right now, and the Grandstander is off on some soliloquy that bears no resemblance to actual feedback, as you watch those precious minutes of your feedback session waste away.
The key to great critique sessions
It’s worth looking into how you run your critique sessions, and there’s plenty of great guides around for that. You can also use various techniques to ward off any biases going on in your group, to help everyone give better feedback.
But by far and away the key to a better critique session I’ve always found (from being in tons of critique sessions) is this: giving everyone the context of the design.
Whether each person giving you feedback is super familiar with the project, or from another team and seeing it for the first time, it’s so important to get everybody acquainted with the background and story of your design, before giving feedback.
Context is:
- Who: who is this design for? Whether it’s an existing persona, an archetype, a market segment, or an actual individual… who is this solving a problem or meeting a need for?
- What: what is the actual solution you’re proposing for them? How is it different to what is there already? How is it tackling the problem/need?
- Why: why this solution above others? What is the benefit to them, and/or to the business/team/product/service?
- When: when are they going to be using/seeing this solution? What triggers this solution to come into play?
- Where: where are they when they would be seeing/using this solution?
By getting everybody across this information first, feedback and discussions can then focus on what matters most.
Vignettes give context visually and instantly
Now, if you’re thinking “that’s a lot of information to get into people’s heads before they even start giving feedback”, you’d be right. User stories and job stories are an effective way to encapsulate a lot of this information, but there’s often more nuanced stuff to get across as well. And it can take a fair chunk of your critique session time.
Thankfully, visuals are often better (and faster) than using a lot of words to get that contextual information across to others. And of course, you’re already using visuals! You’re showing your solution as wireframes, prototypes and mockups. But it’s much better to show your solution in its natural habitat first.
And that’s where vignettes come in. ‘Vignette’ isn’t just a photo effect in Instagram. A vignette is a small scene (usually in literature, film or TV) that leaves a big impression, because it focuses tightly on one moment or character or setting. By starting your critique session with a vignette drawing, you can rapidly set the scene, and get the ‘context movie’ that’s playing in your head (the who, the what, the why, and so on) playing in everybody else’s heads too.
Take a look at the example vignette drawing above. Straight away you get a sense of the situation, the main actor, the main goal, and the problem. The scene is now set for you to show your solution, and how that plays out. A vignette brings several pieces of design sketching together as one snapshot. It brings a UI design (of course) together with a bit of storyboard to set the scene, plus some other details about the person you’re designing for.
How to sketch a (user experience) vignette
I know that drawing can strike fear and dread in some people, while others love it. Rest assured, what I want to emphasise here is drawing for context, not drawing for Instagram likes! Simple drawing is perfectly fine, to get the main ideas across. A little bit of neatness goes a long way, too.
Let’s start with what you’re probably most familiar with: the UI sketch. If you’re going to be presenting a sequence of UI sketches to a group in a critique session, start with the first one.
Next, draw the device around it. Are you focusing on a mobile experience? If so, what sort of device would your persona be using? Or is your UI design being used on a laptop screen, or a large monitor?
Now, draw something of the persona using the device. If it’s a mobile device, how are they holding it? What does the hand, the way they hold it, their clothing, or other details, indicate about your persona?
Check out Pinterest for some handy (sorry) reference sketches and ideas, but here’s a simple 5-step way to draw a hand holding a phone:
If it’s a laptop or a large monitor, what simple things can you draw that are right next to the screen, that indicate details about the persona, where they are, and what they’re doing? Are they working at a desk at home? Cooking in the kitchen? Sitting on a bus?
Here comes the most challenging bit! Steel yourself… you can do this! Draw a few frames of a storyboard as a background ‘behind’ the device and those close-up details in the ‘foreground’. These storyboard frames set the scene for your critiquers, and illustrate what’s going on around the persona, their device and your design. You can use these frames to really bring the context to life. Where are they? What time of day is it? Who else are they with?
In case you’re wondering, I did these sketches on an iPad using Procreate. But honestly, any materials that give you a neat clean shareable result are great.
Here’s another example. This one takes a bit more of a schematic treatment to the persona:
Start your critique session with your vignette
The next time you have a critique session, draw a vignette like the examples above, and start your critique session by presenting the vignette by way of establishing context. From then on, you can present the rest of a sequence of designs, knowing that everyone now has that ‘context movie’ playing in their heads, as they look and discuss your work.
If you’re presenting online, reserve space in the online canvas area of whatever you’re using (e.g. Figma, InVision, Mural, Miro), or the first slide in a slide deck, to display your vignette image.
And if you’re already using this technique (it’s by no means new!), it’d be great to hear how you’ve used it, and what benefits it’s brought you and your team.
If you liked this post, please give it some applause 👏 to help others find it and read it too 🙂. Thank you! And if you’d like to find out more about using sketching in your work, you might like to:
- Get my book Presto Sketching: The Magic of Simple Drawing for Brilliant Product Thinking and Design
- Check out sketching and facilitation tips and tricks on the Presto Sketching blog
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