When designing a product, we must always consider the experience that the user will have while interacting with it, and we do this by visually sketching the product and our vision of how a user would interact with it. A pen-and-paper sketch helps us to conceptualize abstract design ideas more effectively, communicate these ideas to others, and get feedback. Regardless of your artistic skills, you can effectively, quickly, and inexpensively communicate design ideas by sketching; it is much faster (and cheaper) to modify or throw away a pen-and-paper sketch than a full prototype.

In this course, you will learn numerous techniques to improve your sketching skills in order to more clearly convey your design ideas and improve your design. In your course project, you will sketch many design ideas so that you can explore alternative ways of meeting the user requirements. You will also create a design concept based on one of those sketches, then expand the idea into a full scenario and storyboard of the user completing several tasks. Additionally, you will develop a user interface design concept to better envision how your users will actually interact with your design. Finally, you will update your sketches to better fit your user's mental model, as a designer's concept of the design doesn't always match with how a user thinks about it.