Why it’s important to test your design with a simple sketch

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“Hello, my name is Lana from the illustrations team,” I said, holding out my hand to the man in front of me.

He shook my hand and introduced himself. “Arya. IT governance. ”

As I talked, I tried to remember his position. From his expression, I knew that he was doing the same thing. He then repeated my name to make sure he’d remember correctly.

“Lana, my team needs an illustration,” Arya said, making clear the purpose behind that afternoon’s meeting. “We want to tell the whole office about a campaign we’re working on.”

As far as I know, Arya and his teammates help protect our office network from cyber crime. “Can you explain the campaign you made? And can you explain what you need?” I asked.

Arya explained his campaign (which was about proxies), while I took notes of certain important keywords in my sketchbook. “Perhaps the illustration could be a hallway, yeah? As well as people surfing the internet,” I summarized Arya’s explanation.

“Actually, not a hallway,” disagreed Arya. “You should illustrate a cable connecting one computer with another because there really is a cable,” Arya chuckled.

I laughed too, “Yeah, you’re right! There is a cable.”

“Then you can illustrate a person browsing the internet on his laptop,” said Arya, giving me another idea. From his expression, I could tell that he was a little worried that our coworkers won’t understand his campaign.

“Arya, what if I gave you two sketches? One with my idea and another with yours? Then we’ll ask some people about which illustrations they find easier to understand,” I said.

“That’s a good idea,” Arya agreed.

In the design process, user testing is useful to find out if our designs work as intended. In this case, we wanted to test if the illustration’s message comes through to the audience. Thus, I made a sketch and showed it to Arya before the two of us visited several of our colleagues to get feedback.