Sketching!

With a little downtime at work, I’ve been catching up on some nice UX articles online. Here’s one I found about storyboarding iPad transitions using sketching called “Storyboarding iPad Transitions” by Greg Nudelman. The article calls out 7 principles that can be applied to storyboarding iPad transitions.

  1. Component Relationship (background-foreground)
  2. Illusion (motion perception and perceptual constancy)
  3. Exaggeration (highlighting states, actions, and changes in state)
  4. Staging (camera view, lighting, focus)
  5. Acceleration and Deceleration (slow in and out)
  6. Metaphors (using real-world analogies to convey complex digital events)
  7. Simplicity (avoiding noise)

Actually, I wish I’d seen this article about 3 months ago as it’s directly related to the mobile project I’m currently working on. I did create a lot of sketches, on Post-Its(!), but I didn’t think so much about documenting the transitions as much as focusing on the user flow, which is what I’ve posted examples of below.

Here are some examples of what I did:

There’s more available here.

The article really makes it sound like this is a fairly complicated process; a lot of work. But, I think it would be very helpful, depending on your project. Particularly for off-shore development. Unfortunately, my project has simply too many screens to efficiently even sketch the interactions out, let alone wireframe them all. I hope I get to try this out on another, smaller project.