As part of my Design Computing class, I am introducing my students to video sketching as a prototyping tool. For most of the students, this is new, but something they will end up doing repeatedly throughout their time at the School of Design.
Today, John Zimmerman gave a guest lecture on video sketching, complete with successful and not so successful examples, to kick-start the project. Zimmerman first introduced the method to me and my classmates last year during Interaction and Visual Interface Design.
With each video sketch that I have created during my time at school, the process have been refined and the result has improved. My first video sketch I don’t even show to employers because I find it embarrassing, which is why I think this project is important for my students. It’s an opportunity to get their feet wet and learn some lessons before creating something that they will want in their portfolio.
But I didn’t just create this assignment so that they could survive design school and have nice portfolio pieces, video sketches are indeed a good prototyping tool. Whether you are communicating an idea internally or to a client, it’s an effective means to quickly prototype an experience and discover or plug holes in your concepts. Invariably as you begin to tell the story of a product or service in use, and think about the images and sounds that go along with that, you discover issues that the design team had not fully considered during the concept stage.
Video sketches aren’t just for design school either. Many companies use them in the same way we do. In fact, the Charmr project I worked on at Adaptive Path this summer culminated in a video sketch.
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2 responses to “Teaching Video Sketching”
“Video sketching” sounds like a new term in the CMU lexicon.
Do you mean something like sketchcasting? It’s clearly both video and sketching, but doesn’t seem like it would be useful for prototyping complex interfaces.
http://www.basement.org/2007/09/sketchcastcom.html
Or is video sketching a new term for animations that communicate how an interface would work using something like AfterEffects? Or maybe a low-fidelity animated scenario? Something that doesn’t necessarily communicate the interface, but the value the user experiences by using the interface? These things don’t seem like “sketches” if they’re how the project culminates.
Do you have any examples?
Using videos to demonstrate the experience of a product is nothing new. But a video sketch is a bit different.
Rather than a full-fledged and polished video, a video sketch is typically made up of a series of still photos in a movie format. This allows designers to quickly create a movie that demonstrates the experience of the product, and along the way discover areas where the concept may need to be more fleshed out, as they try to place the concept in a realistic context.
“Sketch” is used not in terms of drawing, but rather in reference to the prototyping nature of the method. You can use whatever tools you want to make one, from Flash to AfterEffects to iMovie.
The fidelity and the purpose of a video sketch can vary, however, from an internal document that the design team uses to flesh out an idea to a concept that is shared with a client. But the sketch nature of the video is also meant to suggest a work in progress and a point of conversation rather than a fully developed design.
If done well, a video sketch will communicate both the experience and the interface, though again, not every possible interaction, but rather one possible path a user might take.
One example is the Charmr video.