Beginnings
Beginning a project is always filled with both questions and possibilities. Before jumping to solutions and locking in on a direction, it’s best to define the audience, develop use cases, facilitate brainstorming or design thinking exercises, and draw lots of alternatives.
Facilitating brainstorming is one of my favorite things to do. Once I get the team talking I capture notes by drawing, asking questions, and putting things down on paper. Drawing for me, is thinking out loud.
After interviewing financial advisers across Canada, we consolidated the comments and turned them into a strategy for who and how to use the tools.
You must understanding and defining an audience before you begin.
Discovery takes you in many different directions. Mapping persona's mental models can show exactly what people want and how they align their needs with applications.
Process maps and inventories.
Before developing a full taxonomy and information architecture for a large regional medial center, I worked with topic areas for natural groupings - I called it a topic cloud.
Working out flows for a new product.
Drawing as a fundamental design tool was taught in the Bauhaus. It's something I still practice and teach as part of Design Foundation. It's a great skill to have in the early stages of product development.