In praise of the analog

Lately I've found two tools that have become completely indispensable when I'm writing user stories.

• pencil
• paper

Maybe because I'm such a horrible typist, but I've always found it easier to think when I'm writing out longhand. It was the same in university: whenever I had to work on an essay, I'd get a Hilroy scribbler and write the essay longhand in the front and do my footnotes in the back. I had everything in one place and an easy way of tracking my edits for when I had to type my paper. (We didn't all have laptops to carry to class and the stacks back then. Kids today...) To this day, it's almost impossible for me to really brainstorm unless I'm holding a pencil in my hand, even when I'm typing.

The most recent move to analog was born out of necessity. One part of analysis where I'm not so fast is screen design. Part of this is learning, and part is just pure speed when it comes to mocking up in Paint.net. For the longest time I would take screencaps of elements from the screens I wanted to use and cobble them together (I can hear many of you shuddering now). One time we were up against a deadline and I just brought the wireframes I had scribbled on graph paper to the meeting. They looked good, so I scanned them in, added them to the story, and it worked fine.

I was recently at some seminars on usability and design and we discussed lo-fi prototyping, and it appears I'm not alone. One example given were the designers at Apple who do most of their work on whiteboard and paper and rarely turn on their computers. The advantages are pretty easy to see: it's easier to pass a piece of paper around and quicker to change a mock up on paper or a board. What you lose in fidelity you make up for in speed and...yes..being more agile!

Having said that, there is one advantage to the lo-fi method that I discovered today. I've been working on a story for the past couple of days on my scratchpad (hunched over the paper, pencil furiously scribbling, Elbow playing at top volume, tongue sticking out). This story has a lot of moving parts, even at a high level, so I had a lot of text, wireframes, and flowcharts. I had everything where I wanted it and started writing the actual story on our wiki. Now, something happened at some point and instead of getting the nice fallback of "The version you were working on has not been saved. Do you wish to resume?" my story got eated. About an hour of layout and typing, gone.

For the first time in months, I actually openly swore while at my desk. There was enough blame to go around between me and the system, but it upset me enough that I didn't want to get rolling on it again. Plus, I had other things to write.

One reason I didn't sweat it, though, was because I took the time to write things out, scribble questions in the margins and then answer them, and prototype some ideas, all I really lost was transcription time. All my work is still there, and when I go in tomorrow morning I'll just open the red file folder on my desk and get back at it again.

And hit save after every damn sentence.