He’s back. Clothespin Man wouldn’t be complete without some gadgets, some energy and some movement!
Get your sketch on and practice making Clothespin man (& woman) do your bidding.
Once you have these simple skills in your toolkit, you can communicate your customer using your product in a scenario. And that means you’re ready to rock & roll building a product people want, need and will love to buy.
So grab a Sharpie and we’ll see you in Clothespin land.
If there’s one core skill you gotta have as an entrepreneur, a designer or a developer, it’s the ability to communicate your ideas quickly and clearly. That’s why having some ninja sketching skills up your sleeve is a good, good thing.
When working with startup teams, we’ve learned that most people need to learn how to draw a person, in a place, doing a thing. If you can’t draw that, then it’s hard to communicate ideas about how your product makes a difference to a real person in a real place, doing real stuff.
Enter Clothespin Man (and Clothespin Woman.)
Clothespin Man uses simple lines and shapes to communicate a person. He’s so easy to draw, you’ll find yourself doodling him everywhere.
In this episode of Clothespin Man, we explore how to draw him in context. Check out how a few lines and shapes create a world of possibility for communicating your product ideas in context:
One of the first things we do in a LUXr event, workshop or residency, is introduce Clothespin man.
He’s a quick and dirty sketch of a person, so you can quickly get your ideas out of your head and onto a page where others can see them.
With Clothespin man (or Clothespin woman…both are correct, of course) you can sketch pictures of how your product will be used by real people in the real world.
With a few simple lines and shapes, you can make Clothespin folks do just about anything! (Yes. Anything.)
What? You’ve not yet met this clever character? That’s a-okay. We’ve put together a short intro video to get you introduced.
Pssst! Wanna spend some, ahem, quality time with Clothespin Man and Clothespin Woman? You can totally do that. Come to one of the workshops and we’ll hook you up.
It’s a busy Fall here at LUXr. The 10-week Residency has kicked off, we’re in full swing working on the Lean UX Bundle MVP, and exchanging inspiration with Shuqiao and Tobi, the fearless Fall interns.
Because we’re a startup, opportunities pop up like whack-a-mole. So how do we take advantage of great ideas? How do we prioritize our work so we are focusing on the right things?
We’re trying two things out, and so far results are good.
We have a large cardboard sheet (6′ x 3′) that we call the Don’t Forget board. Anytime we hear, say or encounter something that looks like a good idea, we grab a sticky note and post it up on the board. We can also post articles, names, urls, etc. This keeps the ideas visible until we can address them (or punt them.) In short, it’s an information radiator that shows us what we think is hot. Super-important: put a date on every thing that gets posted!
The best thing about a big sheet of cardboard is that it has limited space. That means it’s gonna fill up. When it fills up, it’s time for us to prioritize and purge. We don’t have a set time to review the stuff on the board…we do it as the board fills up.
So, how do you frame ideas as a chunk of work that someone can own and move forward? When tossing things up on the Don’t Forget board, I noticed that some of the ideas were projects-in-waiting…pieces of work that we needed done, but that didn’t have enough there-there to move forward.
This need dovetailed with a key part of the Intern program at LUXr: every intern works on 2 things: a LUXr-oriented project and a personal project. The personal project can be anything. The only guidelines are:
Based on these needs, I needed a way to accomplish both tasks and clear the way for focused work.
The Project Snapshot is a super-simple template that captures just enough info to inform the work on a project. It acts as a guide to help frame “stuff to be done” in a way that someone can take it and run with it.
I reviewed the Don’t Forget board and pulled out ideas to frame as projects. I also captured the butterfly ideas that caught our fancy at some point in the past month. (You know the butterflies: the ideas where everyone says “Yes! We should totally do that!” but then there’s not follow-up.) I wrote up a Project Snapshot for each chunk of work. The result? 12 interesting potential projects.
Once we had a set of Project Snapshots completed, we sat down as a group and reviewed them. We divvied them up, delaying or tossing the ones that didn’t have energy or urgency. The result? We each ended up with 1-2 projects. Each project had a measurable outcome, a date, and the roles of support. With the five of us, it took us about an hour, which seemed too long. As we get more used to doing this, I expect we’ll be able to shorten this time to 30 min. max.
The real proof in the pudding is, of course, how many of these projects get done and deliver the results in the timeline expected. But for now, knowing what we’re focusing on NOW, and having a simple way to look at potential work with the snapshot templates has cleared our minds and helped us commit our time to the right things.
Want to try the snapshots for yourself? You can download the entire bundle as a .zip file.
What’s included in the Zip:
Each fileset includes:
The filesets are available in these formats:
We’ll continue to work with these and see how they help us focus. I’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts on how they work for you!
Viva Los Proyectos!
This weekend, we flew out the killer NY team, Lane Halley and Josh Seiden to help us lead a weekend workshop on Lean UX. We asked lane to put together a one-page guide to “getting out of the building”. (I call it “generative user research”, adaptive path calls it “pre-design user research”, and steve blank calls it “getting out of the building.” It’s all pretty much the same thing.) I’m going to love having this in my toolkit. Thanks Lane & Josh!