Matching design sketches to the desired level of design feedback

Whenyou ask people for feedback on a design that has not yet beenimplemented, take care how much polish you put on the design‘srepresentation. A counter-intuitive principle of soliciting earlydesign feedback is that people reviewing a highly polished design may concentrate on superficial details and overlook fundamental issues.In the early stages of the process, you may be able to elicit deeperfeedback by striving for an unfinished look in your designrepresentations.
Even novice designers can employ production tools like AdobePhotoshop or Flash to quickly work up beautiful conceptual screen shotsor prototypes. They can lavish attention on the presentation of earlydesign concepts, even those that might be thrown away. However, whensuch a design is shown for review, reviewers may fixate on such detailsas the color on a button—and fail to question why the button, or indeedthe entire screen, needs to exist at all.
One obvious force at work here is the visually engaging nature ofbeautiful imagery. I believe another, subtler issue is that peopleunintentionally calibrate their criticism according to their impressionof where you are in the development process. A highly polished imagemay look like a screen shot of an implemented UI, or at least theresult of many weeks‘ work, leading someone to assume that only smalldetails can be changed at this point. Even if you repeatedly remindthem that the design is just an early sketch, they may still demur fromsuggesting anything so bold as starting over. People may also havedifficulty criticizing a design if the representation seems far beyondwhat they could have created themselves.
As an antidote to this phenomenon, in my own design process Iusually keep early designs looking rough, and try to refrain fromjumping straight to a polished result. I often draw early sketches byhand with paper and ink. Why ink and not pencil? I don‘t want to givemyself too much opportunity to polish up even a hand-drawn sketch. Toavoid the tedium of recreating design elements like navigation bars, Isometimes draw a sketch of just the global design elements, thenphotocopy that to create a template for sketches of individual screens.I take care to leave even the template sketch looking pretty rough.
Here‘s a scan of an early sketch for Cozi Central‘s Shopping Lists area:

No one has any trouble giving feedback at this stage, any may indeedcall for something completely different. Reviewers figure, "How hardcould it have been to crank that out? I could have done that!"
After I‘ve had a chance to iterate at this hand-drawn level, I maycreate a prototype in Microsoft PowerPoint to explore some interactiveelements. Again, I resist the temptation to apply visual polish. It‘sstill too early.
I‘ll eventually create a skeleton UI directly in a development environment‘s visual designer, leading to a design like this:

At this stage, things are being to feel more solid and less mutable.Design feedback may begin to focus on smaller details, but people stillrecognize substantial room for change. Following further iteration, thedesign stabilizes enough to warrant a full treatment from visual designspecialist:

The design is now polished to the point that many people may find itdifficult to look past the surface. Luckily, by now significantportions of the design are often functional enough that people caninteract directly with the user interface. This opportunity cancounteract the tendency to notice only superficial issues. People whohave a chance to actually use a design will generally notice when itsuddenly does something they didn‘t want. A thoughtful user will stepback and realize the problem lies with the software (and not withthem), and deliver this feedback to you.
In this particular interface, feedback that came late in the game onthe surface appearance turned out to be quite important too. People wholooked at the above design said that it was "cool", in both senses ofthe word: interesting, but also cold. Since we were aiming the productat families for use at home, we iterated on the design to produce awarmer feeling. The feature finally shipped like so:

If you‘re intrigued by the idea of presenting rough sketches earlyin the development cycle, but appalled by the idea of manually draftingpaper sketches, you might consider modifications to your own designprocess. This past week I conducted design reviews of a PowerPointprototype that used a free handwriting font (at a suitably legiblepoint size) for the UI text. The feedback collected during the reviewswas at the right level for this stage of the process, and it was easyto refine the design between reviews, so I‘m likely to use thisapproach again in the future.