 How can something so simple like sketching save you hours and hours in every single UX project? Let's find out. I'm Chris, a product designer to an entrepreneur, but before that I wanted to be a cartoonist. Yes, I love sketching and still do it daily. In this video I'll be sharing some pro tips on how to level up your sketches that can save you hours on your next UX project. Stick around till the end to find out three sketching techniques every designers should know. Let's start with the problems. Do you find it difficult sometimes to share ideas of brainstorm with your clients? Are you having trouble aligning objective and expectations? You probably need to implement sketching into your workflow. UX sketching is a method that designers frequently use to explore, suggest, iterate and convey their proposed design solutions. Compared to moving immediately to a digital version of the solution where there is a higher fidelity and complexity, sketching takes less time and overall is less expensive. You might be wondering should you spend extra time sketching when you can just start working on the final solution? Just hold on. Sharing sketches enables collaboration and creativity across the whole team, resulting in a shared understanding and alignment from start to finish. Sketching makes complex ideas easier to understand. It encourages creative explorations. It takes less time and less effort. It keeps you focused on keeping the best idea without gaining attachment to discarded sketches. Sketches visually captures an archive of ideas that you can refer back to. Sketching prevents technological distractions and overall it helps you become a better visual storyteller. There's a lot of pros to sketching. So how do you get started with UX sketching? There are three main techniques that every designer should know. The first technique is scribbling. It's an excellent form for capturing your core ideas and it gives you a holistic view of the UI components. The second is layering, focusing on the importance of the hierarchy before progressively building layers, elements and details into your UI. The third one is interactions. It helps you define multiple interactions in one sketch. You can easily change the placement of each interactive element without having to redraw everything. When sketching, choose whichever tool you're most comfortable with. You can start with an A4 piece of paper and a pen. Some designers pick pens which are different line weights. Here are some of my favorite. The brand is Sakura Pigma Micron. Next, state the problem and goals you want to solve and define your audience. Ask the following questions. Why am I doing this sketch? Who is this sketch for? Set a time limit and get your creative juice flowing. The most important thing is to write clearly when sketching. So how did I use sketching to collaborate with my clients? Well, starting a new project is exciting and to help create momentum, I want to visualize the solution as fast as possible. So I used to dive in right into digital tools like Figma and the first version is never the final version, obviously. So what happened was endless rounds of feedback meant that the solution always was evolving and I ended up focusing on individual elements rather than the bigger picture. This is also true when I reviewed with clients. Clients were super distracted. Most often than not, they would miss details and we end up going back and forth with design revisions. I wasted hours and hours in the process of exploring different approaches and getting slammed back into the first idea that we approached. Then I tried sketching. It was a game changer. Not only did it help me produce more ideas quicker but showing and collaborating with clients actually became way more fun. We quickly put down what was in our heads and iterated together. Bringing them into the process through sketching made the process much more enjoyable and with fewer revisions. Finally, don't invest too much time in producing sketches. Sketches are not meant to be a detailed representation of the object. You want to use this method to quickly visualize a solution. Remember it's meant to be messy and that's kind of the whole point. In general, UX sketching is a good technique to help conceptualize and communicate ideas. Sketching can help you think differently and collaborate in a different way you are used to. There's no right or wrong way to do it, just do what's best for you. If you're interested in learning more about UX sketching with detailed guides and templates, check out the link in the description. Or for everything else, you can hit the big red button for another play-by-play breakdown of UX frameworks. Bye!