Most designers know that hand drawn sketches is the best way to communicate the essence of an idea or the initial interface solutions. Since I use paper sketches a lot people frequently ask me what material to use. Following years of extensive testing I have found a sketching kit that lets me focus on the idea and avoid details. Let me present the perfect companion to any creative professional.

Since 2008, I have used paper sketches actively in all aspects of my work as a designer. I started out with a notion that paper sketching was generally good, but at the time I had no idea how to actually use it in live projects. Like most designers nowadays, I felt more confident using my computer as my preferred sketching tool.

I realized rather quickly just how fantastically useful paper sketches are when you quickly want to communicate the essence of an idea without being caught up in details. Based on my own experience, I would even go so far as to claim that when designers open the lid on their computers, they start producing and stop thinking.

My initial fear that clients would frown upon my new way of working proved to be unfounded. As it turns out, they were more positive towards the ideas when sketched on paper. I have since then realized that clients actually feel more involved in the process when they evaluate paper sketches, compared to computer sketches that look too finalized too early in the process.

Over the years I have tested tons of sketching material thoroughly and have found the material that works best for me. People often ask me what tools to use. When I started teaching my technique to others, I therefore created a sketching kit that has been very appreciated. Here is what I recommend and why I recommend it:

The clip board

A simple one sided cardboard clip board is the most convenient arrangement for drawing and organizing the sketches. I use ordinary A4 printer paper found in most offices.

I have found that there are two kinds of paper – interactive and analogue. The analogue versions are any conceivable arrangement of paper that are glued together on one side. Of course, this is handy in some ways, for example it does not fall apart. However, it has proven to be utterly unpractical when sketching grand ideas and presenting them to others.

In order for paper to be interactive, you have to be able to constantly rearranging the order of your sketches and present the sheets in front your audience to visualize a complex line of thought. The perfect solution seems to be a simple, A4 size, one-sided clip board. It is lightweight and has the same size as your laptop. I avoid the kinds with a lid that folds over to the back when drawing, since the lid tends to get in the way.

Go for ordinary printer paper
I believe it is important to not get too comfortable with fancy art material. If you do it right you will soon run out of paper. I am content with ordinary printer paper since you can get hold of it everywhere. Just visit your local grocery store or blag your nearest printer and you are good to go. I find A4 sheets will also be very easy to scan or reproduce when you want to share your sketches to a wider audience.

Pens

I have found only two pens qualifying for my own sketching kit. Pitch black and reliable. I never leave home without them.

In order to express your ideas in meetings with others, what you draw needs to be instantly visible and cannot suddenly run out, having to be refilled or needing to be sharpened. This narrows down the types of pens I will look for. I never use pencils since they draw pale lines and make my creations hard to scan.

Since I started in 2008, I have tested most pens on the Swedish market and I have fallen in love with two of them, complementing each other very well:

Pilot V-Ball 0,5 Black
This pen is suitable for drawing very sharp lines and smaller objects with greater precision

Pilot Green Ball 0,7 Black
This pen feels almost like an old school chalk marker. It leaves slighty jagged edges and is suitable for more creative drawing, bolder lines and larger objects.

Limit detail & remove color!

One of the coolest things with concept sketching is that you do not have to pay too much attention to details. By focusing your efforts on details in the key elements of the sketch and at the same time being more brief on the less essential parts, you can work more effectively and at the same time do a better job. As it turns out, by simplifying, your audience will focus on what you wish to convey. This is also true for colors.

On the internet you might find numerous examples of sketches in great color. These are great to look at but for most people adding color in this way it takes way too long time and requires more skill and equipment. In situations where colors are a key component of the idea, explaining your intentions or showing examples such as a mood board works so much better. If your client approves of your idea, there will be plenty of time to explore color options later. Therefore, I go for only pitch black ink in my sketches. On rare occasions I use some gray marker to create light shadows. That’s all.

Correction tape

Ctrl-z in real life! With the correction tape I can afford to make mistakes and correct them immediately.

Yes, people still use Tipp-ex! Thankfully, the small bottles with a tiny brush attached to the lid and life-threatening disolvents, have been replaced with easy to use correction tape in a tiny dispenser. I usually try different approaches when I sketch so I tend to use a lot of correction tape. Almost like Ctrl-Z in reality. I have found the best product being Correction mouse from Tipp-ex. This specific product has the best adhesive qualities and leaves the least residue.

There is in fact one more thing you can do with correction tape. If you use it first and draw on it later, you can create a more smooth surface than the paper itself letting you draw extremely fine lines and details in your sketch.

So, get busy sketching on paper! If you are interested in ordering a kit of your own just send an e-mail and I will send payment and delivery information. The price is 22€ and it is available for immediate shipping world wide. If you are interested in attending one of my courses in conceptual sketching technique, Just let me know!

Here are some words from my sketching course attendees:

• NetRelations: Mårten’s sketching siminar was like creativity in a box
• Creuna: Mårten’s sketching techniques improved our design process
• Cloud Nine: Cool sketching session with Mårten

/Mårten Angner

We at Box Experience have been selling experiences for every possible occasion since 2003. We offer our products both through physical stores and our web site. What differentiates Box Experience from our competitors is the product itself -  experiences handpicked for their quality and exclusivity, presented and packaged in a very exclusive box.

The web site is our primary channel for promoting and selling our products. Our previous site has been around for quite some time and has served us well. However, some users have experienced difficulties performing basic tasks and seem to have had problems finding their way around the site. We suspected usability problems in the ordering process. Some of our customers called customer service after trying to claim their gift but couldn’t figure out how to do it with the help of the site. We decided  to redesign our web site to make it simpler, with fewer steps and each screen less cluttered.

We asked our web agency, Paregos, to help us with this. Our goal was to design a site that was super simple and that all our customers could use without effort. Paregos recommended a Usability study as the first step of this process.

Heat map presentation of the eye tracking data recorded for the start page during the study of the Box Experience site. The users showed hesitation when trying to figure out how to book their experience: They did not seem to understand the menu item “Activate” presented in the main menu. The alternative way, the banner “I have received a box”, was mistaken for a simple advertisement. The many horizontal objects on the site gave some users the impression that they viewed the end of the page. Consequently, they did not start scrolling to see the offers on the bottom of the page.

For the task Paregos called in the interaction designer Mårten Angner to evaluate the site. Mårten is one of Sweden’s most experienced usability consultants and an expert in conducting eye-tracking studies, and has an impressive track record in the field.

I must say that it was fascinating to watch a user in action on my site! The study of the Box Experience web shop was both professionally planned and executed and was truly interesting to be a part of. I participated during a test session. As it turns out, users had problems with things we until now didn’t even think of and the experience gave me new insight into my business.

Perhaps the most interesting fact unveiled in the study was that I discovered that the users did not understand the wide range and number of experiences in our assortment. The users focused on the featured experience and were disappointed. After this negative impression the users were reluctant to explore the site further. This gives great insights into how to improve the site. Or, as Mårten concluded:

On the experience page the users did not seem to notice the list of experiences listed on the bottom of the page. Due to the layout of the page most users focused on the most popular experiences listed on the top of the page.

“We have to show an abundance of experiences right of the bat. The users seem to have a fixed budget and by arranging the experience by price we can let the users scroll through the experiences until they find the ones in their price range. Maybe we could add some filter functionality at the top of the page, but this is truly secondary. Based on the test data, this must be the most natural interaction for the users.”

The test data recorded by the eye tracker was the analyzed by Mårten and the design team at Paregos. After a few days the full result of the study was presented. The test concluded that both major and minor adjustments were needed in order to make the site easier to use. Here are some of the main issues put forth:

• The users had difficulties finding where to claim their received gift on the site. A simpler and more intuitive process needed to be created.
• The site used the word “Activate” to describe how to book the experience. No user seemed to understand what this implied. Technical terms needed to be replaced with simpler and more direct words.
• Users perceived the option “I have received a box” as advertising and it took a long time before they found this option.
• The design did not encourage the users to scroll the pages, which made them miss important offers. Use more of the page width to present the key content was needful in order to inspire the users and give them the incentive to explore the pages.

The conclusion from the study more or less confirmed what we suspected beforehand based on feedback from our customer. Still, having it all in black on white was of great importance for us. I see the value in applying a scientific approach. Moreover, the study report itself proved to be almost like a how-to guide for creating a successful site.

Mårten’s eye tracking study provided, in great detail, the supporting evidence we needed to move forward. In fact, the study report was presented with all suggestions of improvements arranged in a step by step fashion, almost like a how-to-guide on how we could improve our site. With all these good advice it was the most natural thing to invite Mårten to, together with Paregos, continue the work in the redesign process of the next generation of Box Experience web shop.

Mårten came across to me as very committed and knowledgeable within this field and I would recommend Mårten to other managers in my position.

/Jonas Persson, CEO, Box Experience

Hi, I’m Jonas Björkman from The art of  job. I had the pleasure of  working with Mårten Angner during the redesign of merajobb.se. This was my first project with Mårten and his way of working was both productive and efficient. Sometimes effectiveness can stand in the way of creativity but in this project I would say quite the contrary, Mårtens input did always contribute to my work.

I’ve been working as an art director and designer for many years and in a great number of projects. I work mostly with print but sometimes also with digital media. A couple of years a go I designed the first version of the merajobb.se site, I was therefore pleased to be engaged in the redesign. It was needed, obviously a lot has changed on the internet in the past few years and giving the site a new look would most definitely help the site to thrive.

The sketches was presented in a wiki accompanied by descriptions. I found them to be very informative and they made the different parts of the future site easy to grasp and it was clear how they were to be put together.

To get more of the overview I needed in order to design the site I printed all the sketches and mounted them on A2 papers.With all the sketches in front of me the design process could begin.

The project mood board was put together in order to get a sense of design direction and the aesthetics quality of the future site.

The site should have a new and updated feeling to it, but I still wanted it to be similiar to how news papers look and feel since the site is a collaboration between Sweden’s three major morning papers Sydvenskan, DN and GP. I created the project mood board to assimilate the sites purpose in one clear vision.

The final design of the front page of the merajobb.se site

Mårten is full of energy and great ideas, I would recommend him in a heart beat. In his field of profession he has  clearly gathered a lot of working experience and with Mårten at the steering wheel there isn’t any doubt where the project is heading. This added confidence and calm to the entire team and helped me focus on the esthetics aspects on the site without distractions. In some projects the structure can suficate the creative part but that wasn’t the case when working with Mårten. During the entire re-design we kept close contact and I often used Mårten as a sounding board to clear ideas since his input always contributed to my work.

/ Jonas Björkman

I choose not to sit by the same desk every day, therefore I am often found working at different cafés and hotel lobbies. But sometimes when I am installed at a new office for a project, I end up with what every consultant knows of far to well and dreads – the office chair from hell.

I love my job as a freelancer, I don’t have an office since I rather think of the entire world as my workplace. However some projects requier my presens at a regualr work place and eventhough I enjoy working in a team and having temporary colleges , there seems to be a curse that follows me around. I seem to have bad karma in terms of sitting.

It usually goes like this:

“oh, you’re the interaction designer, welcome!”

The office is huge and filled with desk from wall to wall. Behind every desk is a technician furiously hammering their keyboards. My contact person shakes my hand and then with just one sentences makes one thing clear: being the only usability expert in the room won’t give me any advantages.

“Let’s see.. There’s a desk for you over there”

He points the a dark corner of the office and returns to his seat, leaving me to see myself to the desk that seems to have been serving as an unloading space for quite some time. Empty boxes, used toner cartridges and other hunks of garbage crowned by at least three broken desk lamps.

The chair seem to have seen better days. I take a seat only to quickly  rise again. I realize the chair is loose and under my weight it tilts slightly to the right. I can stabilize it with my body weight but if I so much as breath it shifts out of place. When I  grab the armrest to move the chair closer to the desk, one of them falls right to the floor. apparently somebody has stuck it in place without bothering to reattach it properly. Somehow I do manage to get balanced and start putting my things in order next to the mess on the desk.

The chair is slightly to low and I fumble under it for the levers that controls the height. I pull the handle but seem to have grasped the one controlling the back instead and I am basically catapulted forward by the chair. I go through the numerous controls and find myself adjusting the chair in every conceivable direction except for the height. I must have  pushed something because now I’m falling. The journey towards the center of the earth suddenly stops and I  find myself sitting with my ears between my knees and all I can think is :

“Why oh why?”

Now, why is it so that at every office there’s a dysfunctional chair almost like in every family there’s a black sheep. If something breaks it’s much easier to make a rapid swap and hope that it goes by unnoticed rather than to get it fixed and the next person will surely do the same. In a matter of cause this means that the broken chair will end up at the empty desk if there is any. Giving any temporary inhabitants a warm welcome. The office chair from hell.

/ Mårten

DN, GP and Sydsvenskan has joined forces and gathered all their recruitment ads on one single site Merajobb.se, creating one of Sweden’s largest job sites. By mixing traditional media and a modern job site they strive to invite job seekers and possible employers to an open and efficient dialog. Its main purpose is connecting job seekers and the companies in need of their expertise. Since 2005 Merajobb.se has been striving to become the best platform for job seekers.

They decided that 2011 would be the year when they reinvent themselves and start the process of becoming an even better platform for job seekers and employers, which furthermore would attract a bigger crowd and more advertisers. In mid October 2010 the first step was taken in the direction of achieving this goal, by involving myself and the team from HR north. The challenge was to during an insanely short period of time make not only a “face-lift”, but to change the entire design as well as the technical platform.

The job seekers: Which job has my name written on it?, How do I get this job?, How do I not miss jobs like this in the future? and most importantly, How do I present myself so that the jobs come to me?

The first task was to determine what the site should contain. In order to narrow it down and be more specific, we created a mind map pointing out the direct relation between the needs of the target groups and the business goals. This is very handy and makes it easier to continue the process without losing any important factors on the way.

During workshops with the client we realized some fundamental facts for creating a great job site:

1. Not interested. The job seekers aren’t interested in actually applying for a lot of jobs.They want to be handed a job suited for them rather than searching themselves. To go online, attach their resume and applying for these is something they would rather not do.
2. The process is a necessary evil.The job seeker would prefer already having the job, the process of getting there is considered a necessary evil even though its not only preferable but down right necessary.
3. Not another cv database. The job seeker has already attached a CV into multiple databases without getting anything in return and has grown tired of constantly having to deal with yet another job site, one more complicated than the other.

This was an important discovery for us since it meant identifying that there is actually a resistance against what job sites are all about even though there are a lot of job seekers out there. The users dislike the process yet want the profit in terms of a job. Once we realized this, we knew what the new kind of job site should provide for its users.  The site itself should not be an obstacle or an exhausting task, it should be all about finding the job they want. Less clicking, more job opportunities.

The site concept created was focused around providing the opportunity to tell the site who you are and where you want to work. The site then gives you immediate response on how many jobs are for you. Right beside the job-box the sender newspaper logos are presented to provide credibility. Directly underneath the search box the top jobs, the newest incoming jobs and the jobs that have to be applied to immediately are presented

My way of working is based on the importance of defining the technical solution, the user interaction and the graphical concept simultaneously. This is done by gathering the major stakeholders in conceptual workshops, in this case the developers and the client, and follow the user’s way through the system sketching screen by screen with pen and paper. Problems can therefore be solved immediately as we go.

By giving the user multiple choices in their search process they can provide an ideal search result than normally in a regular text field.

Enabling multi select of professions and areas were they user would like to work, the user is immediately presented with a number of suitable jobs without even having to press the search button

According to our conclusions the search fields should provide options rather than being based on free text. This means instead of them having to search for the right jobs, the site provides this for them. This prevents spelling errors and the intention is that multiple choice will provide a better search result.

When the concept was approved by the client the detail design and the technical development phase was initiated in parallel processes based on the sketches. The talented, extremely efficient and precise designer, Jonas Björkman from The art of job provided the art work. The timeless design managed to tell the story of the newspapers and at the same time included all the the trappings of top modern interactive products and apps. The code equilibrist developers At HR-North managed to create a site with an astonishing speed and immediate response delivering the intent of the concept forward to the user in the best possible fashion!

Here’s the result. Enjoy.

The Concept was converted in to full color design by Jonas Björkman

/Mårten

Holiday autos is the world biggest rental car provider offering their service all around the world. I evalutated and redesign their site with the goal to make it more user friendly. After the redesign the time it took to rent a car was reduced to 60%. Read more about that project here.

When I conducted usagetest on the current site I found that all women stopped during the test when they where faced with lack of information and chose not to follow through. Men on the other hand, when faced with the same problem would in some cases read again and look for evidence of their action but when they can’t find anything, they still push the next bottom as a way to get further in the purchase. Not one of the women in the study did so.

When SIFO, a non-bias governmental institute that conducts consumer research and testing in Sweden did a survey asking men and women what they value most when it comes to online stores and their sites they found some of these varieties.Women states that most importantly, the site has the make them feel safe. They value information that is easy to grasp the highest, about every part of the company it self and the purchase they are about to make. If the information lacks in clearness or seems complicated to understand, women will chose another option in the form of another site.Men on the other hand values their fellow consumers opinions the highest and is most likely to make a purchase if the site has a forum or some sort of rating system where they can make sure the product itself lives up to their standards. This is an important fact since it states that the sites structure and comprehensibility will determine weather or not women will be consumers.

The female design heroes from Volvo, posing with their new creation. The Volvo YCC that never managed to see the light of day

When Volvo engaged a group of women to help them design a new car, the Volvo YCC, they did so to meet the needs of the most demanding target group out there: independent working women. During their study, they found that women had the same expectations regarding performance and prestige but had higher demands when it comes to design and storage for their belongings. The only  difference between the genders is that the women wanted some place to put their purse so that is would accessible but not in their way while driving. Based on this, they launched a thesis

“If you meet the expectations of women, you will surpass the expectations of men”

Not all studies are created alike. Janet Shibley Hyde, a psychology professor by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has conducted several studies and feel confident in her statement:

“There are massiv amounts of researching stating that men and women are very much a like, but people like to believe that gender makes a huge difference since it makes life more foreseeable”

Although my own researched included to few participants to make an assumption about women and men in general about their online shopping habits it does fit well in to earlier research made in this area. but an important part of designing an interface is to design for the weakest users in the target group. Maybe the Volvo women is right after all.

Now, what do you think?

/ Mårten

The students are at the Interactive Art director class. They are right now involved in a four-week module focused on Client Design Strategy and Branding. This part of their education is focused on design strategy, interaction design, digital brand construction and visual communication. The question is, how do we use design as a competitive tool? How does a trademark earn money through design and digital packaging?

Here is my presentation. Enjoy!

/ Mårten

Cloud Nine is one of Sweden’s largest independent provider of web solutions. The company has been around since 1999 and apparently they know how the web works.

Mårten Angners seminar in sketching was really valueble for us. We thought that although the separate building stones in the process were basically “old knowledge”, tied together this way it became a bit of an eye opener.

Many sketches have been made and customers have already become involved in our creations. One customer felt it was wonderful that it doesn’t look as “finished” as a sketch made in Photoshop tend to. This way we can focus on function, not design.

We have now acquired brown paper rolls so we can sketch, cut and move the site flows around, in the sketches. Our walls are covered in works of art, which soon will find itself competing with snazzy brown paper sketches.

/ Martin Bystedt, Creative Manager/Art Director, Cloud Nine

Hyper Island is a school of digital media that started its journey as early as 1995 in the small town of Karlskrona, south of Sweden. Since the start the methodology has been truly successful and today, Hyper Island runs a whole spectrum of digital media programs in both Stockholm and Karlskrona.

I have been interested to teach at Hyper Island for quite some time now, and this week I finally got the opportunity as I got invited to present how eye tracking and usability testing could be applied to e-commerce. The students all attended the e-commerce Manager program in Stockholm. This 40-week educational program is aiming to teach how to lead and develop projects and businesses within the e-commerce field.

From my perspective creating successful e-commerce applications is a really complex task, demanding to communicate a clear value proposition to impatient users in a very limited time frame. Providing logical means of navigation and intuitive tools for finding is essential for the user in order to find the desired products. Finally, to get through the check out process all the demanded steps needs to be kept to an absolute minimum.

All usability problems will have a negative impact on both the order value and conversion rate in the application. As it turns out, the only way to get to know how your application actually works is to actively invite your users to take part in usability tests. If you choose to use eye tracking to support your tests, you will get clear cut instructions on how to improve the experience. Not only usability issues, but also if your graphic design is guiding the user to focus on the right things within the interaction.

Here is my presentation. Enjoy!

/ Mårten