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Jul 26 3 min read

Sketch thinking, narrative UX & chatbot

design Q&A with Jose Berengueres

Jose Berengueres, author of Sketch

Thinking, talks sketching your emotions,
visual thinking and designing conversation
loops for chatbots
With chatbots rising popularity and the opening of new opportunities
to interact with customers, chatbots can now help you overturn parking
tickets, become your personal stylist and act as financial consultants.

The growing chatbot trend is showing no signs of slowing down as big

players such as Google, Amazon and Apple capitalize on the UX trend
with their very own versions. In the future will all our online interac-
tions be with chatbots?

This trend has pushed narrative UX to the fore, pulling language out of
the shadows and giving it a much needed revival in the world of UX
design.

In our Q&A, author of Sketch Thinking Jose Berengueres shares his

thoughts on the importance of sketching, chatbots, narrative UX, and
design thinking. Sketch thinking is brainstorming enhanced. Its using
images to convey ideas. Berengueres book gives readers a sketching vo-
cabulary and aims to help people in design thinking workshops.
Hi Jose! Before we start, could you briefly tell us about yourself
and your area of expertise?

I am a Kaggle competitions master and professor in the Computer Sci-

ence Department at the federal University of United Arab Emirates
where I teach Design Thinking, entrepreneurship crash courses and
Computer Science. Our lab research is about robots and human com-
puter interaction. We actively collaborate with industry and startups
worldwide regarding applied data science.

You have an insightful book, Sketch Thinking, which guides people

to pick up the pencil and sketch their ideas. In your view, how im-
portant is sketching in the design process?

We started the sketch thinking workshops as a tool to enable engi-

neers to communicate emotion. The idea came after a workshop at
Apple in 2015.

We realized that STEM grads are usually taught technical drawing skills
but are never taught how to sketch emotions. This hinders communica-
tion and what we call the group IQ.

What are the benefits of prototyping with sketches as your

foundation?

As a kid I grew up with an MSX computer and later I moved to Tokyo.

While in Japan, I realized that the Japanese are very at ease sketching
to communicate ideas in business settings. Whereas in the West, the
only businessman famous for his penchant for whiteboarding was per-
haps Steve Jobs.

By training or by nature, every one of us has a preferred mode of

thinking: some people like myself are visual, others prefer to listen
(audio oriented), a third group prefers to talk aloud to process
thoughts (verbal), a fourth group prefers write thoughts into words to
function (writing) and a fifth group understand ideas best when they
read them as words.

These are known as the five modes of thinking and each of us excels at
one of the modes. Steve Jobs was audio oriented and that is why iTunes
was so good. Amazons Je Bezos is a famous reader oriented person
(Kindle).
However, as a visual person I feel that the business world has been hi-
jacked by word-oriented thinking. And that is what I loved about
Japan, that it is okay to use sketches even at a board meeting. Fortu-
nately, recent works by visual thinking advocates such as Dan Roam
(Napkin), Alex Osterwalder (The Business Canvas), and Mike Rohdes
(Sketchnoting) have very explicitly shown the benefits of visual think-
ing.

Similarly, since Apple became the most valuable company in the world,
we have that other companies (such as SAP, IBM) have started paying
more attention to the UX of their products.

The UX department is probably the only safe haven for visual thinkers
in todays corporate mayhem. There are many visual thinkers out there
locked in word-only oces who could be happier by getting permission
to sketch. And every time the communication of an employee improves,
the IQ of the company increases.

Continue reading more of Joses answers on our blog here.