All of my designs start with pencil and paper. There are a variety of opinions for/against this method, so here are some of mine! Pencil and paper is very cheap (both in terms of cost and time). It allows you to create and scrap designs quickly and you instantly have a record of those designs. A lot of the counter arguments are, if you have a drawing tablet, you can sketch digitally, and keep an electronic record. In theory, if you can sketch at the same speed there should be little difference. However, we put more value on digital designs (whether we intend to or not). It becomes slightly harder to discard digital designs rather than paper designs. The recommendation of the majority of my instructors has been to work with paper first, and I agree.

In this project, I began with just itemizing the tasks that need to be carried out by the kids playing our game.

I just sketched out as many ideas as I could think of for implementing those tasks. Everything from sliders to toggle switches, and even including what to do with the space around the Nexus 4 screen during editing.

For each setting implementation, I tried to consider all of the ramifications. What happens when a toggle is triggered? How does the interface respond during the process? Every question I could think of I also sketched out.

For each screen, I considered as many possibilities that I could think of. How would users first enter the menu? How would they return from the menu? The more questions I asked, the more ideas I would sketch.

Further down the road I began to sketch ideas for each setting, such as changing colors of the various blocks.

We wanted to include extra functionality for automatically selecting colors that worked well with each other.

For each setting I would go through, write down what needed to happen, write the questions that came to mind, and sketch all the ideas that came to mind.

In the end, I had a scrapbook full of sketches, notes, comments, and critiques. I used my own heuristic evaluations to ensure my choices had some merit.

Of course, sketching is not a sprint. In an Agile development cycle, you do not have time to sketch out every screen or every interaction before moving on to medium-fidelity. I would take one bit of functionality, sketch out the ideas, evaluate and select, create that functionality in some medium-fidelity prototypes. From there I would evaluate with the developers and the rest of the team and prepare the high-fidelity prototypes before moving back to sketching the next bit of functionality.