Tech-Comm core competencies and the Five Sketches™ ideation-design method
by JeromeR
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Small- and mid-sized companies often lack a design process that leads to successful, usable products. Technical communicators have skills that can help their project teams succeed. Learn how to help ...
Small- and mid-sized companies often lack a design process that leads to successful, usable products. Technical communicators have skills that can help their project teams succeed. Learn how to help your team design software and web pages that work, by following the Five-Sketches™ method. Five Sketches™ was developed for and with cross-disciplinary teams—including technical communicators—from Canada, the USA, Australia, India, and South Africa. Five Sketches™ walks design participants through a series of individual and group tasks—some creative, some structured, some spontaneous. It ensures you have a clear design problem and business constraints, enough ideas to saturate the design space, a way to analyse and rapidly iterate the ideas, and a ready design that can be validated and approved before developer coding begins. Come learn how Five Sketches™ was developed, how it works, and how you as technical communicators can use it to make successful design possible in your workplace. This is a more detailed version of a presentation from the 2008 annual UPA conference, which was also presented at the Banff Centre for the 2008 annual CanUX conference. Both times, it got excellent audience ratings. This version of the presentation is focused on developing transferrable skills that technical communicators can use to enhance their value in the workplace.
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babuegg
Comments from a Technical Communicator with background in negotiation and conflict resolution:
Harvard mathematician Howard Raiffa called negotiation the science and art of collaborative decision making; my former employers and mentors called it the art of collaborative solution design. Interestingly, Five Skethes™ identifies and addresses the same concerns negotiation does: crafting the problem appropriately, diffusing the tendency to defend one’s idea, promoting cooperation, co-creating possible solutions, dealing with divergent ideas, managing conflict, and agreeing. Since negotiation and conflict resolution is supported by literally thousands of empirical studies, I would say that Five Sketches has way more scientific support than you like to admit.
The classical orange conflict, illustrates this overlapping nicely: two kids are quarrelling over the last orange in the house. As the parent, if you define the problem as “there is one orange for two kids who want it badly”, you will probably split the orange in half. But what if the boy wants to make orange juice and the girl wants it to make orange peel candy? The very definition of the problem can constrain creativity and hinder agreements.
There are more overlapping areas, but for now you got me interested in usability research! 4 years ago