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.
Today’s awesome find: Sketchnotes from FLOW by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. Posted on Flickr by Eva-Lotta Lamm.
This sketch shows a customer development story, wherein Bob the entrepreneur has an idea. He gets to work…
When Bob is pretty sure his hypotheses are good, he starts to build.
In reality, Bob started building a little at a time, long ago, as each answer was validated. Every time he takes a new version of the emerging product to Mary for validation, he’s presenting a “Minimum Viable” product candidate. There isn’t only one MVP, there are several, and at each stage, Mary needs to prove her interest by exchanging some token of value — her attention, her email address, log-in credentials….and eventually money.
You know that you have product market fit when Mary is willing to pull out her wallet, and she would be very disappointed if Bob’s product went away.
* Each question is shown with a few suggested “lean user experience” methods…I’ll be writing about those in the future.
** Design Target: This isn’t necessarily the biggest user type, but the user who is the harbinger for all possible users of your product. The classic example is in-flight entertainment systems — if you design it for grandma and grandpa, and they can use it, then you’re sure that your road warriors will be able to use it, too. The same isn’t true of the reverse — the system created for road warriors wouldn’t work for the occasional, non-expert user.