Keep on sketching!
Get out of the AutoLayout and get onto paper or a whiteboard
Sketching ideas quickly & roughly is quite simply the essential skill for any designer at any level — not Figma, sorry! 😇 🙏🏽
Sketching is not just about quick, expressive generation of ideas to solve a problem. It’s more importantly about probing a problem space visually. This includes re-articulation of the problem statement, usually as a confirmation of what was heard or interpreted via the Product Manager or Tech Lead. That goes right to a fundamental paradox of designing: to understand a problem, you often need to create something suggestive of possible solutions — which are knowingly “wrong” — yet they help tease out latent constraints, hidden dependencies, or even surprising opportunities, in a way that tedious spreadsheets or dense charts/graphs just can’t. 🤷🏽♂️
To break out of a self-perpetuating cycle of “analysis paralysis” — and I’ve seen designers do this, writing gobs of words on stickies, or endless diagrams or models, basically spinning in circles — it’s better to start sketching out something, which will activate other parts of your brain & senses. By roughly sketching an interface or scenario, you may likely discover something new that either re-frames or expands your understanding of the original problem! Therein lies the profound benefit of sketching to explore & challenge, not just “solve a problem” like a mechanic fixing a broken pipe.
Design is not a linear 1:1 process, as we all know! 🙃Also, taking things a step further, there’s the collaborative (or more precisely, co–creative) nature of sketching on a whiteboard (or digital canvas tools, for remote teams) in real-time with cross-functional colleagues. That sketching activity encourages a dynamic of quickly thinking, judging, assessing, filtering collectively, sparking additive notions or supplemental considerations from multiple perspectives. That’s a very good thing! Hopefully others (non-designers) will jump up, and in that moment will take a pen to sketch out something that builds upon what you just drew. Or offer something that’s a contrasting idea. The meeting then becomes less of a “what’s the answer” face-off, and more of a team journey of achieving shared understanding or alignment, with assorted epiphanies visually sparked along the way. Genuine dialogue and exploration is happening. That is valuable progress! ✨ 🙌🏽