A transcript of Episode 234 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Eva-Lotta Lamm talk about sketching, visualisation, and using visualisations to uncover and explore problems.   

This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Ruth Atamenwan.

Transcript

James Royal-Lawson
With so many of us having to adapt to different ways of living and working during the COVID-19 pandemic, Per and I are having regular UX podcast feature breaks, visit uxpodcast.com/fika to find out when

Computer voice
UX podcast episode 234.

Per Axbom
I am Per

James Royal-Lawson
and I am James.

Per Axbom
And this is UX podcast, balancing business, technology and people every other Friday since 2011. With listeners in 193 countries around the world from Finland to Panama.

James Royal-Lawson
Today’s guest, Eva-Lotta Lamm is a Designer, Visual Thinking Expert and Trainer.

Per Axbom
She’s been holding sketching workshops for many years and you might well have seen some of our excellent sketch notes, which Eva-Lotta has even published in her book form.

James Royal-Lawson
On top of that, you could well have even seen her illustrations in content everywhere by Sara Wachter-Boettcher and the User’s Journey by Donna Lichaw.

Per Axbom
In our conversation with Eva-Lotta we learn about Sketching, Visual Thinking, and we get a lot of practical advice on how to work with the visuals, not only to communicate ideas, but to uncover and work on problems.

[Music]

Per Axbom
Eva-Lotta, When did you know that you were really good at visualising?

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Wow, what a question.

I don’t even know if I’m very good at it right now. I always keep learning new things, but I always like drawing and it always felt like a natural thing to do. While I was trying to understand things or explain things to other people and most people understood what I wanted to explain. So it always felt natural. I never thought about it if I’m particularly good or not.

Per Axbom
But for me, that’s the mark of an expert, isn’t it when you would respond like that? I don’t even know if I’m good at it. It’s your profession, and everybody loves it, what you’re doing and you teach and you sell courses. And so obviously, you have some proficiency.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Yes, yeah, sure. I mean, now that it’s my job, it’s kind of … I should be good at it. Right. And I do, and I do get compliments and there are people who sign up for my courses. So but I can’t trace it back to a certain particular point in time, I kind of glided into it. I did visualising and sketchnoting and visualising things for many, many years just for my own benefit before I ever started sharing or teaching it. So there was never this moment where I thought okay, this is a skill I want to learn because I want to have a career in it. So I just learnt it without having the pressure of having to be good at it.

James Royal-Lawson
I think that’s, it’s really interesting. You said about how maybe you don’t know if you’re good at it when, I mean, I know that both Per and I love sketching or using sketching as a tool in our toolbox when we’re working and encouraging others to do it. But that lack of confidence is something that we come across all the time, no matter who it is. People always say, I can’t draw, I can’t I can’t do this, and they’re reluctant to go forward. Is there anything we can do to help?

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Well, yeah, I mean, this is one of the things I noticed as well, especially in the workshops that I teach that the fear of not being good enough or being absolutely terrible, is the biggest hurdle that holds people back. So the first thing I do is I give people permission to just also do shit drawings or drawings that they don’t like very much. I mean, one thing is, you should get used to producing things that you don’t like, that is part of the journey. But of producing anything you know, when you cook, sometimes you cook a dish that’s not super great.

Or when you do UX, not all the interfaces you design are amazing. Or on the way to designing the amazing interface, you have lots of iterations that are not that good. It’s just part of life and part of creating. So when I take the pressure off people and say, well, it’s alright, if it doesn’t look great. But if it explains things well, or it works for you, then it’s fine. And people relax and go like, okay, I’ll try it. And by practising a little bit, they’ll see Oh, I can actually do more than I thought I could. Yeah, so this permission is really important, I think.

Per Axbom
Allowing people to fail. (Yes) I mean, it makes sense everywhere.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
It’s part of life. I mean, for example, I think I’m terrible at writing or I at least, I find it very, very hard to put thoughts in a linear order. And I give myself permission to write shitty first drafts anyway. That’s an expression I like a lot. It comes from a lady called Anne Lamott. She wrote a book about writing, and she calls it the Shitty First Draft and the Shitty First Draft has to come out because it’s the stepping stone for anything better to happen. And so getting over it as soon as possible. Also, your shitty first sketch is important, because from there, you can only get better.

Per Axbom
I listened to Tom Hanks talking to Alan Alda last week, and he was talking about how he loves typewriters precisely because you cannot go back and delete. You have to just keep writing. And in a sense, that’s maybe how digital has ruined us. We’re always trying to reach perfection. Before we’ve gotten anywhere, we’re not allowing ourselves to go on. And I’m thinking that that has to be the case, sort of for sketching as well. If you’re sketching on an iPad, you’re always deleting and trying to make it perfect. That’s what’s going on.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
That’s true. The temptation is always there to start editing before you have created a critical mass of any kind of content. And that’s also why I encourage people to start sketching with pen and paper when they start sketching so they don’t get distracted by the tools and by the possibilities.

And of course, when you must have the tools and you have the confidence and you have the skills, then you can use a tool like an iPad in an amazing way just to speed up your process and to make it easier to make edits afterwards, especially when you’re sketching more for production or for illustrations or for client iterations, of course, but it keeps you on your toes to sketch on paper and to actually be confronted with your own mistakes and having to fix them, you learn so much about improvising with space and improvising with your mistakes and just coming up with creative solutions for stuff that otherwise you would have deleted and fiddled about with endlessly and edited on your iPad

James Royal-Lawson
Well, that sounds interesting. So you suggest pen and paper rather than pencil and paper? (Oh yeah). So I just realised when you said you have to deal with your own mistakes. And of course, oh, that’s that’s really interesting.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
That really good for practising. I tell people don’t use a pencil. No erasers we only make marks. We don’t take anything away. If you make a wrong line, then you just put the correct line on top of it. And if you need too many lines on top of each other and it’s still rubbish, then you make a new sketch because it’s fast and it’s cheap. Like we don’t waste time trying to take away marks, we just add stuff we move on.

James Royal-Lawson
And I’m just thinking about over the years how many times I’ve sat next to Per in conferences when he’s doing a sketch notes and seeing how many times he’s press the undo button to redo a line or something on your iPad. I should sit next to Eva-Lotta more and see her do it with pens and paper.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Well, when I’m on an iPad, because it’s so quick and cheap to just do a two finger tap to go one step back. Of course, I do it as well. But I’m conscious…I’m conscious of the fact that when I work on an iPad, I first have to really get into collecting and putting down content because I don’t want to get into the trap of of constant editing and then just not not collecting stuff. So it’s a more conscious effort to actually have the rigour to keep going forward and not constantly taking things away.

James Royal-Lawson
So, I wonder if you think about now, you talk about visualising concepts or problems. So if you think about the move from sketching to visualising or visualising problems, where’s that boundary? What happens when I move from sketching to visualising?

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Well, I think it’s I think it’s fairly fluid. I mean, the use of language sketching, sketching is usually a drawing to figure something out. It is something when the thought is not formed yet, or the input, you don’t know the information beforehand. It’s just coming live and you’re figuring something out as you go along. In visualisation, a sketch is also a visualisation. It always depends if you’re making visuals for yourself or for others.

When you make visuals only for yourself. Of course you can be more loose and more vague because you have all the context and all the thoughts that go with it in your head, when you do it for other people, you need to be a little bit more explicit, maybe your sketches have to be a little bit neater. So just that they are readable for other people as well. And then of course, you think about if you’re going more into the realm of illustration, and you’re really doing something that is not just an artefact that you use in the moment in the process for a while, and then you move on but something that goes into a book or is going to be used for several weeks or months. Of course, you put a little bit more effort in to really make it very robust and understandable in lots of contexts, without you being there to explain it or without people having the tacit knowledge of the conversation you had while you were creating the sketch. So, it is a sliding scale of, how explicit and how clear you have to make the drawing without implying that somebody knows the context.

Per Axbom
Yeah, you’re saying make it good enough for the job it has to do.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Per Axbom
Nice. And how do you make it robust? Is that part of the iterations?

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Well, yeah, I mean, when I say visualisation is robust, I mean, that there are certain aspects to it. So, I like to talk a lot about clarity in my workshops, because the reason why I’m drawing or sketching is because I want to enhance the clarity of my thinking, my communication, whatever it is, I apply it to. So for me, there are kind of three layers of clarity that all need to come together for something to be robustly understandable.

So the first layer, I call that formal clarity, and this is basically just, is this thing readable, you know, when I make a rectangle, do I see that it’s a rectangle? Or did I rush it so much that it could also be a potato? It’s like with your handwriting, you know, when it’s so rushed that you can’t read the words, then your concept can be super clear but if you can’t read it, nobody will understand. So this is just the formal aspect. So this is more about your motor skills. How do you move your hand? How quick or how slow? How clear are your marks on the paper?

Then the second layer is what I call structural clarity. And this is really the question of what are all the different elements on the page? What is the relationship between the elements? Is that clear? Do you have all the elements? Are the more important things bigger, the less important thing smaller? Is that really clearly presented? This is more a question of visual perception, you know, how do we distinguish things from each other? And also a question of, did you pick the right elements to be on the page?

And then the last layer of clarity is what I call conceptual clarity. So are you actually talking about the right thing? Who’s the audience you’re talking to? Are you actually talking about the right part of the problem because every problem when you pitch something to a CEO, it’s different than a conversation with a developer, for example, the level of detail that you talk about the depth, the the context of previous knowledge that you can, that you can assume from your audience, you can have something completely nicely rendered and completely structurally sound. If you’re talking to the wrong person, and it’s not the right message for them, then the concept won’t be clear either.

So these three things have to come together in, in the, in at least a basic level for the thing to be understandable and clear, that makes a in my opinion that makes a sketch or any piece of communication robust when you have these three elements coming together and of course, more robust if you can’t explain it yourself. If in doubt, add in more redundancy. So add in more context information because you assume that somebody might not have the context.

James Royal-Lawson
I also like the redundancy. So yeah, of course, they’d be like a backup element to the sketch.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Yes. Also, what I need to say is when I talk about sketches, for me a sketch is not only the visual part, but also the labelling and annotations. So a sketch is always visuals and words. And adding words to sketches is an integral part and super important because the visual elements in a sketch are good for a lot of, to explain a lot of things. But for some things, words are stronger and more precise.

What I found out over the years when I looked at my own sketches, and when do I use annotations and what do I use words for and how do images and words really play together because I love language as well. What visuals are really strong at is they are great at showing relationships. Because we evaluate the relationships in our life and in our environment all the time through our eyes, you know, how far is this bottle away from me? Can I grab it? How quickly is this car passing by? Can I cross the road before it, so we evaluate all these relationships through the visual information.

So we are really good at it when we want to show a relationship like a time relationship. When we put two events on the piece of paper further away from each other and two are closer together we automatically read the distance the physical distance as a time distance as a longer stretch and a shorter stretch without even having to think about it. This is not only true for time relationships, but also for hierarchical relationships or conceptual relationships, functional relationships.

So visuals are great for showing relationships because we read them naturally. But then when you Come to precision, and data and naming, then language is unbeatable. Because if you put down a timeline and then really evaluating by the length of centimetres, if this is now three days or four days is really hard, so if you want to be precise and want to make things actionable, then it’s great to add words to it. That’s an example.

James Royal-Lawson
I’m just thinking about how I love standing in front of the whiteboard and drawing things and thinking through ideas and concepts in the workshop environments or team environments. And I’m just tripping, now, when you’re explaining this, that I’ll use words of course, to describe as I’m maybe sketching something to your timeline example there may be a draw, I’ll be drawing the line and that’s a kind of one day, two day three days and then I maybe finish it and that works in the in the room. But what we find out what I find is, very often people will do take photographs without their smartphones, at the end of meetings to record that moment, but maybe I should maybe spend a few minutes adding some labels at the end.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Exactly. And that’s what I meant by making it more robust. Because the people who were in the room, they will remember it, or maybe they will only remember it for two days, and then they will have forgotten because our memory just fades away. Mine fades away quicker than others. So yeah, making it more robust. If it needs to endure over time or over different contexts. Then, if in doubt, add labels. That’s always good, because even for yourself, if I look at some of my sketches that I did half a year ago for some reasons, like what was I thinking, and if you add labels to just help yourself and you help others

James Royal-Lawson
annotations,

Per Axbom
You could even argue that it’s a responsibility when you’re doing these things that you need to add labels for the clarity, because otherwise you’re contributing to confusion, possibly

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Yes, and you need to be the judge of what is adequate? And what is the use of this thing? How long does it live and if in doubt, make it more explicit and add labels or add additional visuals, whatever you need to make it more robust.

Per Axbom
So I have this theory now that I’m thinking of when I’m listening to you speak, because you’re speaking so eloquently about problem solving in a way that applies to everything. I’m thinking that you not only have practitioners at your courses and workshops, you have leadership as well, they are also interested in learning this, these things. (Yes). And they listen to you explain this. And this makes me think that sometimes UX has a hard time being listened to by leadership, whereas you are working with visuals, but in a way that they can understand.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
I noticed the things sometimes when I actually do client work, so sometimes I get hired by clients to help them visualise complex situations so that they can either express something in a clearer way or understand things in a different way. I sometimes notice that they hire me for visualising something. But actually, it very quickly turns into more of a consulting thing because in order to visualise something I have to ask, very precise, and often the difficult questions of so what are all the elements and how do they really hang together? And what does this relationship really like? How does that work and this usually puts the finger fairly quickly on some very strategic, high level questions that just need to be answered in some way, shape or form to be able to visualise it.

So that’s also why I love the challenge of visualising something as a way for exploration and a different way to uncover requirements because very quickly, because you can waffle it’s much harder to waffle with visuals. Then you very quickly get to the important questions. Because there is no way around.

James Royal-Lawson
I love that. So they think they’ve got a problem visualising a particular thing. Whereas was actually many of the times, the problem is that they haven’t come far enough in their thought process around a particular thing in order to be able to communicate it.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Yes, or that something in the system is broken, or something in the process is really complicated and convoluted. And for me, visualising something is not only to show solutions, but first and foremost, most of the time, I use visualising as a way to understand problems and uncovering problems and working on problems. That’s the beauty of, of making things visual. It’s a different way to access a problem or system.

Per Axbom
So do you ever get that experience where someone says, but hey, I thought you were supposed to teach me to draw but now you’re exposing how bad I am at planning.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
I usually try not to expose anybody and point the finger and say look, now you see how bad you are at xyz. But some people sometimes find it surprising how helpful it is. And that they think oh yeah, it’s most you know, they get attracted through the through the visuals and then they’re like, yeah, oh, wow. Now I see this problem in a different light. And I couldn’t see it like that before. That’s really great. When people discover that.

James Royal-Lawson
Eva-Lotta , we’re a podcast of course, so this is an audio medium. But (yes), I’d love for us to try and get you to teach us some or give some good tips on how we can draw a sketch some basics better through the medium of sound.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Okay, well, one important thing to not forget whatever you do, but especially when you sketch is keep breathing. A lot of people especially when they find sketching very hard, they hold their breath and they get really stiff and really nervous. So, you know, take it easy. Also I have just in terms of the formal clarity, you know some things that you can do for your sketches. If in doubt, slow down. Make your marks slower, because we often refer to sketch to sketching as a very fast technique. But sketching is not fast because we move our hand incredibly fast across the paper.

Sketching is fast because we are economical with our strokes. We draw, we simplify things. First, when we sketch icons, we simplify the icons to basic shapes so that we don’t need to make that many strokes so we are faster and then also when we get more experienced, we try to simplify systems and concepts to just the core of what we need to explain. And therefore we don’t have to draw that many elements because we are reducing the complexity, or the level of complexity that we show in something that we want to explain by reducing it to the core ideas.

So you can always benefit from slowing your hand down, because then your strokes will get clearer, your handwriting will get clearer you don’t have to write and draw things again. Usually our ideas overtake the speed of our hand and then things get messy. Also, one thing why sketches get messy and unreadable, is the biggest enemy of good form is pressure. Usually time pressure. You can also when you when you speak, for example, and you don’t have much time you start speaking really quickly, and then it becomes difficult to understand what you’re saying. Or when the stakes are high. When you’re standing on a stage, other people are watching, you know, the ermms and ahhs come in. And it’s just pressure is the natural enemy of good form in any discipline.

So what you need to do is, you practice the form and practice the clear strokes and the clear shapes that you’re drawing. So when you are under pressure, either by your own ideas streaming in, by having important stakeholders in a meeting by being under time pressure, that you have the good form in your hand, because you practised it so much that you can deal with the stress without it impacting your good form, like you do with public speaking, like you do with athletics or dance performances or whatever. So that is one tip. It’s practice.

Per Axbom
Wow, that was like a TED talk.

James Royal-Lawson
I definitely have to remember to breathe but I recognise the breathing thing. I mean, I do remember sometimes, how if you especially if you’re doing a long straight line, for example, and you kind of you realise halfway through. Now I haven’t taken a breath since the start of this line, but I really wanted to be straight.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
Well, one thing one tip for straight lines if you if you have wonky lines, one tip is especially when you work on a just on a piece of paper. Usually we have more control over our hand movement, when we actually pull towards our centre of gravity. So when we start away from us and pull towards our belly button, so if you need to make a very long straight line, then it’s better to draw towards yourself then pushing away or drawing sideways. That can be a tip when you draw on a piece of paper because you can always rotate the piece of paper so that the stroke will point towards you.

Per Axbom
Perfect, practical tip. Yeah, thank you so much. This This has been so enlightening and so wonderful. Thanks for joining us. Thanks.

Eva-Lotta Lamm
It’s a pleasure.

[Music]

Per Axbom
So I wasn’t joking when I said I felt that that was like a TED talk. Because actually, when she started speaking at the end, it was like she was giving me life lessons. This wasn’t as much about sketching as I probably thought, in the beginning and we were going to interview her but she was actually talking about things that made sense for everything for all aspects of life about when we’re talking about editing, you start editing, the dangers of starting to edit before you’ve created some critical mass of content, and you need, you need crap to make something beautiful.

And all that experimentation and adding redundancy if people aren’t understanding, all the way to actually remembering debrief, it was just a wow moment for me to be listening to it. I feel blessed having to learn those lessons, but in this roundabout way around, sketching

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, cos see you, right. I mean, I expected us to talk more around the actual sketching, although at the same time Eva-Lotta is a visual explainer and works like this. So, you know, it’s not a surprise in that sense, but I think what I was reflecting upon and was surprised about was how this captures so much of the essence of what it is to do the work we’re doing that you know, we, a lot of us, we do like sketching things and we do like, you know, the drawing of lines and the drawing of interfaces or whatever the working of, working through problems using pen to paper, but I hadn’t, hadn’t really thought about some of the aspects that Eva-Lotta brought up during the interview.

From practical things, like you mentioned with adding, giving sketches, a longer life through adding labels and making more robust to actually the fact that the sketch isn’t always something that you are using to communicate. The sketch in itself is exploring the problem space, which I know when I sit here I’ve got I’ve got sketches to my right at the moment I’ve been working on for a client, and that’s me exploring the problem space. But I hadn’t really, maybe it’s kind of naive me or silly of me, but I haven’t really connected it all together in the same way as Eva-Lotta managed to do during this interview.

Per Axbom
Yeah, you and I, we know it’s powerful. But we haven’t been able to perhaps explain why it’s so powerful. And it’s so funny. I love that she brought up that, well, hey, sometimes a sketch is 80% words. Sometimes it’s arrows. I mean, I sometimes I draw four arrows on a whiteboard. And people say, Oh, you’re so visual, but it’s four arrows connecting a lot of text labels. So, basically, it’s 80% text and you don’t even think about that because you’re, you’re placing it not linearly on a paper but you’re placing it instead across a broader space, which makes it feel you understand it and that’s why it was so important that she was talking about how the spacing between objects and the sizing between objects and how they compare that helps people think we draw those connections instantly? By how even words are placed on a piece of paper? Yeah.

But, visual hierarchy is not something new to us we know about it. We use it when we’re doing interface design. And we’re almost certainly using it subconsciously, for some of us, maybe subconsciously, when we’re doing work in front of whiteboards or sketching in groups or communicating with lines on diagrams that were making for us. Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
I also think about I mean, I’m clutching now one of my one of my pens I use for sketching. And it’s a pen. It’s not a pencil. I rarely use pencils. And looking back when you showed me a picture this morning of your one of your son’s sketchbooks, yeah, (and he’s been using pen.) Thinking back to my days when I was probably around the same age as your son as I used to write and sketch sorry with biro, so ink pens. And I’m used to like that because it forced me to be to be sketchy. It forced me to, to do lots of lines and to and to be rough with sketching, which meant I could, I could let go of being correct and being detailed. And you know, I wasn’t going to do a Mona Lisa, I wasn’t intending to I wasn’t what I was trying to achieve that using the using a pen, rather than a pencil. It forced me to just let go.

Per Axbom
You’re having fun, essentially. Yeah. And having fun as you’re creating something, it’s something we often forget to do as well.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the tool, the tool in my hand, allowed me to let go of something that I probably would have kept on to, if it was a pencil and had an eraser or rubber to correct it. Personally, I’m going to take I’m definitely going to think more about the adding of labels to things that the, like I mentioned during the interview about so many times where at the end of meetings and we’ve created something or there’s been a few points during a session where you’ve created something visually and take five minutes, maybe the last five minutes of the meeting to deliberately set aside some time to annotate. Yeah, together, maybe even. So you’ve got a better artefact at the end to take with you.

Per Axbom
I’m gonna take away slowing down because it’s strange. That’s something I tell other people I mean, it’s something I even have in my handbook. But even in the in drawing, I mean, I mistakenly think that you sort of draw fast, but if you draw slowly, but with intent, you don’t have to redo that line, which means that that will go faster because it’s just a simple way of, of annotating. Yeah, the whole thing where you’re being economical with strokes. Yeah,

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, you’re producing something quickly, but that doesn’t mean to say that the component parts of the thing you’re creating have to be done fast. So slow down your marks to create something quicker. Yep, you’re right. That was like a TED talk from Eva-Lotta.

Per Axbom
So what should people listen to next?

James Royal-Lawson
I reckon a sensible choice will be Episode 209; paper prototypes. That was one way we look into whether paper prototypes are fantastic tools are a waste of time, based on a little video clip of paper prototypes that a group of students went on.

Per Axbom
Exactly. Thanks for listening, everyone and always a pleasure. A quick reminder, you can contribute to funding UX podcast by visiting, uxpodcast.com/support. Remember to keep moving, see you on the other side.

[Music]

Per Axbom
What did the green grape say to the purple grape?

James Royal-Lawson
I don’t know Per, what did the green grape say to the purple grape?

Per Axbom
Breathe? Idiot breathe.

James Royal-Lawson
I don’t get it.

Per Axbom
His face was purple. He wasn’t breathing so…..

James Royal-Lawson
Oh no, that was that was the worst one ever

This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom, and Eva-Lotta Lamm recorded in March 2020 and published as Episode 234 of UX Podcast. 

Cover-photo by John Davey (CC BY-NC 2.0)