If you can’t draw big diagrams on the wall that everyone can see, you can’t design complex systems. Period. And you aren’t communicating to your team, well, either. 12

In recent years, giant whiteboards have become a totem in tech companies. There are whiteboard rooms and whiteboard tables in the cafeteria. But, sad to say, I don’t see people actually use them the way we did. Constantly, expressively, as tools for discovering our thinking. 13

I always had a rule: Whiteboards are volatile! There is no such thing as “SAVE.” If what’s on the board is valuable, copy it down. Since the advent of digital cameras, that’s become trivial. 14

Whiteboards at Cooper were NEVER allowed to be places for notices or permanent messages. That would utterly defeat their purpose as instantly-available visual thinking tools. 15

One of the latter innovations in the design field is the use of PostIt notes as conceptual tools. They are useful for discovery, for crowd-sourcing, for participatory design, and for organization. I’m a fan. 16

But PostIt notes are generally stuck to whiteboards. PostIts on whiteboards kill the primary purpose of whiteboards: sketching. PostIts should not be stuck to whiteboards. 17

I walk into offices and see the whiteboards covered with PostIts and this is what it tells me: They listen, but they don’t hear. They gather, but they don’t analyze. They are attentive, but not creative. They have graduate degrees, but not practical skills. 18

I’m writing this thread because @davegray expressed concern that my complaints about “visually prettifying” screens instead of doing interaction design threw shade on visual thinking. NEVER! Visual thinking is a critically valuable skill for interaction designers. 19

My colleague, @miniver, says, “No whiteboards, no design. Know whiteboards, know design.” 20

At Cooper, we would test job applicants with a simple test: I’d draw a dialog box on the whiteboard, then hand the marker to the candidate and instruct them to “Make it better.” 21

After two or three iterations of this game, we could pretty much tell if they were charlatans, theorists, or actual designers. 22

Eventually, my colleague, @MC_UX, named this “The Five-Step Design Test.” He said, “It’s five steps to the whiteboard and you’d better have an answer by the time you get there.” 23