Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

Via Konigi and probably a few others, I found Design Commission's stencil kit. It consists of a beautifully cut metal "widget stencil," along with a pencil and a pad.

This thing is definitely sexy and, in some ways, appeals to my lust for geekery. A Levenger for User Experience Designers would sell this. And I would never use it.

Why? For starters, I'd forget it or lose it. But that's not the main problem.

If I'm in a sketching stage, I'm going to grab the nearest piece of paper, Post-it or wall and draw on it. Nothing is really precious in this stage, nor should it be. Hell, I can't even keep a regular sketchbook because most of my sketches are on the back of old printouts for completely different projects.

The stencil kit makes things too precious, unnecessarily. It's taking something as direct as a sketch--a rough, exploratory expression of an idea on paper--and making it concrete too quickly. You start to feel dirty if your freehand explorations aren't as precise as those the kit produces. And as we all know, there is a big difference between precision and accuracy.

Using the kit also suggests, "in this design, widget X will be such-and-such shape and dimension." It becomes arbitrarily constraining and unnecessarily so. Your designs start to get tied to what the kit can produce quickly.

On that note, using this thing too much is going to slow you down. You'll get caught up in making sure the rounded rectangle box is correctly drawn, rather than whether the info in the box is correct. You're fiddling with the presentation and not with the experience. It's a premature waste of time.

Further, it starts to suggest that the person who owns the design is the one who possesses the stencil. Sure, anyone can contribute, but the mere existence and use of the stencil starts to degrade collaboration. The one who has the stencil in hand effectively owns the design, boxing out other would-be contributors.

Overall though, the ultimate question is what is the wireframe going to be used for? Are you really going to hand off these renderings to a developer or to a client? Test them?  Besides that, how often are you going to iterate on something you've invested so much time meticulously rendering?

While this is a sexy little tool, c'mon, we're not a 1950's-era architecture firm with slide rules and French curves. Keep this on the shelf and get out the crayons and sharpies.

But if you really want one, don't let me stop you.

I'll be up front--this post is somewhat (ok, mostly) half-baked. If you're ok with that, then read on.

For websites, I've been thinking about what each one's "mug shot" is. What is that basic, fleeting image that makes a site memorable and recognizable? What are the immediate cues that help you identify with and orient yourself on them? And, what features are important? Eyetracking studies sort of get at this, but not entirely.

So that was the windup for this pitch:

I want to see people draw (from memory only) what they think the Amazon.com looks like. Email them to me (tmoy at capstrat dot com) or upload and tag them on flickr as "amazon-most-wanted". Link them up in the comments if you're cool and saavy like that. And if you want, include some thoughts. But be brief.

I'll post the results in a few days or when I get 10 submissions, whichever comes first. I won't cite your name unless you want me to.

A few guidelines:

1. Use your head. Don't look at the site or anyone else's ideas before drawing yours. It will be way more fun to see the difference in interpretation. 
   
2. Finish fast. I'll give you 3 minutes. Trust me, I can spot cheaters.
3. Ugly=beautiful. Keep them rough and incomplete.  Visio or illustrator is fine. Even better is some crazy hackjob in powerpoint. If you've got a  cameraphone shot of a napkin sketch, hook it up. If you can't draw (really, you can), write me with some phrases and keywords that help explain what comes to mind when you think of Amazon. 

Lets see 'em.