7.6 Sketch ideas

When the user tests or personal experience reveal deeper problems with the design, sketching the suggestions is best to visualize them to other people on the projects. Even very quick and dirty mockups can help a lot. This sketch started off the Nextcloud file manager redesign. I openly communicated it to the mailing list together with a writeup of changes and reasons. While your design is not yet tested in implementation, be wary of people evaluating it from the mockup. With a fundamental design change many people will criticize it for being different than the current state (Nichols & Twidale, 2003). At the same time, consider that you didn’t see your designs in production yet either. You can only provide the reasoning which lead you to make the decisions and changing the design as you did. Also see 6.9 Test mockups.