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A cartoon. Two people are sketching on a whiteboard animatedly. One says 'a-ha!' while pointing to what they've drawn and the other, still sketching, says 'Yes! And then...'

Now that we have the constraints of an appetite and the problem we’re solving, it’s time to get from an idea in words to the elements of a software solution. There could be dozens of different ways to approach the solution for a problem. So it’s important that we can move fast and cover a lot of different ideas without getting dragged down.

Move at the right speed

Two things enable us to move at the right speed at this stage.

First, we need to have the right people—or nobody—in the room. Either we’re working alone or with a trusted partner who can keep pace with us. Someone we can speak with in shorthand, who has the same background knowledge, and who we can be frank with as we jump between ideas.

Second, we need to avoid the wrong level of detail in the drawings and sketches. If we start with wireframes or specific visual layouts, we’ll get stuck on unnecessary details and we won’t be able to explore as broadly as we need to.

The challenge here is to be concrete enough to make progress on a specific solution without getting dragged down into fine details. The questions we’re trying to answer are:

To stay on the right level of detail and capture our thoughts as they come, we work by hand using a couple of prototyping techniques: breadboarding and fat marker sketches. These allow us to quickly draw different versions of entire flows so we can debate the pros and cons of each approach and stay aligned with what we’re talking about as we go.

Breadboarding

We borrow a concept from electrical engineering to help us design at the right level of abstraction. A breadboard is an electrical engineering prototype that has all the components and wiring of a real device but no industrial design.

A drawing of an electronics breadboard and a finished electronics product. The breadboard looks like a circuit board with a light bulb, dimmer and battery connected by long wires. It has no industrial design. The product has the same components but looks finished, with the bulb and dial artfully placed in an enclosure.

Deciding to include an indicator light and a rotary knob is very different from debating the chassis material, whether the knob should go to the left of the light or the right, how sharp the corners should be, and so on.

Similarly, we can sketch and discuss the key components and connections of an interface idea without specifying a particular visual design. To do that, we can use a simple shorthand. There are three basic things we’ll draw:

  1. Places: These are things you can navigate to, like screens, dialogs, or menus that pop up.
  2. Affordances: These are things the user can act on, like buttons and fields. We consider interface copy to be an affordance, too. Reading it is an act that gives the user information for subsequent actions.
  3. Connection lines: These show how the affordances take the user from place to place.

We’ll use words for everything instead of pictures. The important things are the components we’re identifying and their connections. They allow us to play out an idea and judge if the sequence of actions serves the use case we’re trying to solve.

Example

Suppose our product is an invoicing tool. We’re considering adding a new “Autopay” feature to enable our customers’ customers to pay future invoices automatically.

How do you turn Autopay on? What’s involved? We can pick a starting point and say that the customer landed on an invoice. That’s our first place. We draw it by writing the name of the place and underlining it.

The word 'Invoice' is written with a horizontal line underneath.

On the invoice, we’re thinking we could add a new button to “Turn on Autopay.” That’s an affordance. Affordances go below the line to indicate they can be found at that place.

'Turn on Autopay' is written below the line.

Where does that button go? Some place for setting up the Autopay. We don’t have to specify whether it’s a separate screen or a pop up modal or what. From a what’s-connected-to-what standpoint (the topology) it’s all the same. Let’s draw a connection line from the button to the Setup Autopay screen.

An arrow points from 'Turn on Autopay' below 'Invoice' to a new place named 'Setup Autopay' with a line below it.

Now we can talk about what belongs on that screen. Do we ask for a credit card here? Is there a card on file already? What about ACH or other payment methods?

Just figuring out what to write under the bar starts to provoke debates and discussions about what to build.

As we think it through, we decide we should ask for credit card details here and show the logo of the financial institution (an aspect of the domain in this specific product).

The breadboard is further populated with affordances below Setup Autopay: CC fields, FI logo, and Submit. Submit has a connection arrow to a new place named Confirm. Below Confirm one affordance is named Thank You Message.

Straightforward enough. But wait — did we actually pay the original invoice or not? Hm. Now we have both functional and interface questions. What does enabling Autopay actually do? Does it apply only for the future or does paying with Autopay the first time also pay the current invoice? And where do we explain this behavior? We’re starting to have deeper questions and discussions prompted by just a few words and arrows in the breadboard.

Since we’re using such a lightweight notation, and we aren’t bogged down with wireframes, we can quickly jump around and entertain different possibilities.

We could add an option to the Setup screen…

The same breadboard is modified. Now below the Setup Autopay place there is a new affordance called Pay Balance Now with a question mark.

But now we’re complicating the responsibilities of the confirmation screen. We’re going to need to show a receipt if you pay your balance now. Should the confirmation have a condition to sometimes show a receipt of the amount just paid?

How about an entirely different approach. Instead of starting on an Invoice, we make Autopay an option when making a payment. This way there’s no ambiguity about whether the current amount is being paid. We could add an extra “Autopay was enabled” callout to the existing payment confirmation page.

A different breadboard. This time a Pay button on the Invoice leads to a Pay Invoice place. Under that, there is an option to Autopay in the Future. Submitting goes to a third place called Confirm, with affordances named: Print Receipt, Thank You Message, and Confirm Autopay if Chosen.

Sketching this out reminded us that the current payment form supports ACH in addition to credit card. We discuss and confirm that we can use ACH too.

What about after Autopay is enabled? How does the customer turn it off? Up to this point, many customers in the system didn’t have usernames or passwords. They followed tokenized links to pay the invoices one by one. One might naturally assume that now that the customer has something like Autopay, they need a username and password and some landing place to go manage it.

The team in this case decided that adding the username/password flows was too much scope for their appetite at the time. Reflecting strategically on what they knew about their customers, they thought it would be quite alright if the invoicer’s customers had to reach out to the invoicer and ask them to turn off the Autopay. In that case we could add a single option to disable Autopay in the customer detail page that we already offered to invoicers. We drew out the flow like this:

The Invoicer's Customer List has one affordance: Customer Detail. Customer Detail points to Customer Page. Below that is an affordance to Disable Autopay.

This example illustrates the level of thinking and the speed of movement to aim for during the breadboarding phase. Writing out the flows confronts us with questions we didn’t originally think of and stimulates design ideas without distracting us with unimportant visual choices.

Once we get to a place where we play through the use case and the flow seems like a fit, we’ve got the elements we need to move on to start defining the project more clearly. We’re getting more concrete while still leaving out a huge amount of detail.

Fat marker sketches

Sometimes the idea we have in mind is a visual one. Breadboarding would just miss the point because the 2D arrangement of elements is the fundamental problem. In that case, we still don’t want to waste time on wireframes or unnecessary fidelity. Instead we use fat marker sketches.

A fat marker sketch is a sketch made with such broad strokes that adding detail is difficult or impossible. We originally did this with larger tipped Sharpie markers on paper. Today we also do it on iPads with the pen size set to a large diameter.

Here’s an example. We found ourselves often creating fake to-dos in our Basecamp to-do lists that acted as dividers. We’d create an item like “––– Needs testing –––“ and put items below it. We had the idea to make some kind of official divider feature in our to-do tool to turn the workaround into a first class function of to-do lists.

We had to work out what the implications of adding a divider were. We came up with a rough idea that adding a divider separates the list into “loose” to-dos above the divider and “grouped” to-dos below. Adding subsequent dividers adds more groups below the “loose” items at the top.

A sketch drawn roughly with a fat-tipped marker. Squiggly lines suggest a to-do list with items. The first two items appear directly under the to-do list name. The rest of the items are separated by dividers. The top items with no divider above are labeled Loose and the divided ones below are labeled Grouped.

We could add items via some affordance within each group, including the “loose” group on top.

A sketch showing an Add button below each set of items: the loose items and the items in each group.

We were a little concerned the add buttons might break up the gestalt of the list, and the groups might all separate too much from the lists on the page. We talked about possibilities to place the “add” affordance inside of a menu that we already had to the left of each to-do item.

A sketch with no add buttons. Instead little handles appear to the left of each to-do item. A popover menu appears to the left of one of the item and points to it. Inside the menu is a button to Add an Item and some squiggly lines suggesting other actions.

This notation is much less constraining than breadboards, which has downsides. We might sketch a sidebar and get attached to a layout element like that even though it’s not a core element. But as long as we keep an eye on that we’re still far better off than if we get sucked into the weeds by creating wireframes too early.

It may seem a little silly to call fat marker sketches a technique or a tool. The reason for calling them out is we too easily skip ahead to the wrong level of fidelity. Giving this rough early stage a name and using a specific tool for it helps us to segment our own creative process and make sure we aren’t jumping ahead to detail a specific idea when we haven’t surveyed the field enough.

Elements are the output

In the case of the Autopay example, we ended up with some clear elements:

For the To-Do Groups project, the elements were:

Similarly, when we sketched the simplified solution for rendering events on a calendar grid, we used the fat marker approach.

Fat marker sketch of the Dot Grid as described in the previous chapter

This enabled us to work out the main elements of the solution:

This list of elements is extremely narrow and specific compared to “monthly calendar.” Exactly the kind of narrowing we hope to accomplish through the shaping process.

Room for designers

Later, when it’s time to involve a designer, you don’t want to have to say “I know I drew it like this but ignore that…”. Regardless of what you say, any specific mockups are going to bias what other people do after you—especially if you’re in a higher position than them. They’ll take every detail in the initial mockups as direction even though you didn’t intend it.

Working at the right “level of abstraction” not only ensures we move at the right speed, it also leaves this important room for creativity in the later stages.

By leaving details out, the breadboard and fat marker methods give room to designers in subsequent phases of the project.

This is a theme of the shaping process. We’re making the project more specific and concrete, but still leaving lots of space for decisions and choices to be made later. This isn’t a spec. It’s more like the boundaries and rules of a game. It could go in countless different ways once it’s time to play.

Not deliverable yet

This step of shaping is still very much in your private sphere. It’s normal for the artifacts at this point — on the wall or in your notebook — to be more or less indecipherable to anybody who wasn’t there with you.

We’ve gone from a cloudy idea, like “autopay” or “to-do groups,” to a specific approach and a handful of concrete elements. But the form we have is still very rough and mostly in outline.

What we’ve done is landed on an approach for how to solve the problem. But there may be some significant unknowns or things we need to address before we’d consider this safe to hand off to a team to build successfully.

The next step is to do some stress-testing and de-risking. We want to check for holes and challenges that could hinder the project from shipping within the fixed time appetite that we have in mind for it.

After that we’ll see how to wrap up the shaped concept into a write-up for pitching.

No conveyor belt

Also keep in mind that, at this stage, we could walk away from the project. We haven’t bet on it. We haven’t made any commitments or promises about it. What we’ve done is added value to the raw idea by making it more actionable. We’ve gotten closer to a good option that we can later lobby for when it’s time to allocate resources.

We built Basecamp to execute the techniques in this book. It puts all our project communication, task management, and documentation in one place where designers and programmers work seamlessly together. See How to Implement the Shape Up Method in Basecamp.