One of the most valuable things freelancing has taught me is to quickly get my head around a new problem space, in a threefold way:
- What characterises the company I’m going to be working with?
- How does the team that I’ll be working with operate?
- What’s the problem space we’ll be working with/on?
Quite early on, I learnt to read the subtle and not-so-subtle signals. I became comfortable with and made a thing of asking questions and saying “I don’t know… x” because as the new one in I didn’t know.
But I also developed a method for getting the people I’d be working with on the same page, and myself. A method for making sure they understood what I actually do and could bring to the project. A method for us to work out what was valuable to spend time on, and what wasn’t. And more than anything, create clarity in what we, as a team would need to do together.
How you may wonder.
By sketching out what we needed to do as a storyboard.
This method is by far what has helped me the most.
Not only has it won me work, it has helped me do better work. It’s a method I use in my work and in my coaching today, in various ways.
- I use it for planning presentations
- I use it for working out what “deliverables” I should spend time on and why
- I use it to create alignment, a clear direction, and to drive work forward
I don’t always do actual sketched storyboards. Sometimes it’s with sticky notes in Miro. However I do it, it’s without a doubt the thing I get the most “this-was-really-useful” feedback on. Both from other UX and product designers that I coach, but even more so from the people I do, or am about to do the work for.
I cannot recommend it enough.
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If you want to learn how to do it, we have a bite-sized course over on UX Fika that launches on 17 November that will teach you how. Until then, it’s 50% off and an absolute steal for something that will help create clarity, gain trust, and make your work much more focused.
