Quick recap from part 1 of this post: In October, I started working 1:1 with an amazing designer named Xander Pollock. Xander is a badass. He worked on Inbox by Gmail, and before that, he co-founded a company (Punchd) and sold it to Google.

Xander's been teaching me about Google Venture's process of UX design. The first phase in the process is unpacking. I wrote about that yesterday. But my favorite part was phase 2, sketching:

   
• I did an activity called Crazy 8's, where you divide paper into an 8-part grid.

   
• You get 1 minute to sketch a version of an idea for each grid (8 mins total).

   
• Doing this with Xander was super fun (we did this part in-person) because he rolled up his sleeves and did it with me. We would show each other our ideas & Xander's a genius so he really inspired me and got my creativity flowing.

   
• Plus, once you get to the 5th sketch, you really want to stop, but Xander pushed me to finish & sketched 6, 7, & 8 were usually some of the coolest.

   
• I learned that words are design too.

   
• I took the best Crazy 8 ideas (some of them sucked but others were surprisingly nice ideas) and fleshed them out in Solution Sketches.

   
• Again, Xander did these with me & seeing how an ex-Google designer sketches really helped me get my own ideas out of my head & onto paper.

And then I took those sketches and started Part 3, the Decide phase.

‍