Getting coached by an awesome Google Designer (Pt 2- Sketching)

Quick recap from part 1 of this post

In October, I started working 1:1 with an amazing designer named Xander Pollock.

Xander is a badass.

He worked on Inbox by Gmail… and before that, he co-founded a company (Punchd) and sold it to Google.

Xander’s been teaching me about Google Venture’s process of UX design

The first phase in the process is unpacking. I wrote about that yesterday. 

But my favorite part was phase 2- sketching

• I did an activity called Crazy 8’s, where you divide paper into an 8-part grid.

• You get 1 minute to sketch a version of an idea for each grid (8 mins total).

• Doing this with Xander was super fun (we did this part in-person) because he rolled up his sleeves and did it with me. We would show each other our ideas & Xander’s a genius so he really inspired me and got my creativity flowing.

• Plus, once you get to the 5th sketch, you really want to stop, but Xander pushed me to finish & sketched 6, 7, & 8 were usually some of the coolest

• I learned that words are design too

• I took the best Crazy 8 ideas (some of them sucked but others were surprisingly nice ideas) and fleshed them out in Solution Sketches.

• Again, Xander did these with me & seeing how an ex-Google designer sketches, really helped me get my own ideas out of my head & onto paper

And then I took those sketches and started Part 3- the Decide phase…