Ryan Singer and the Basecamp team just released their new ebook on product development, called Shape Up, made available for free online. Me and some of our team here have already dug into it and are finding some interesting ideas to experiment with in our own product development cycles.

On shaping and wireframing:

When design leaders go straight to wireframes or high-fidelity mockups, they define too much detail too early. This leaves designers no room for creativity.

Appetites:

Whether we’re champing at the bit or reluctant to dive in, it helps to explicitly define how much of our time and attention the subject deserves. Is this something worth a quick fix if we can manage? Is it a big idea worth an entire cycle? Would we redesign what we already have to accommodate it? Will we only consider it if we can implement it as a minor tweak?

Breadboarding:

Deciding to include an indicator light and a rotary knob is very different from debating the chassis material, whether the knob should go to the left of the light or the right, how sharp the corners should be, and so on.

Similarly, we can sketch and discuss the key components and connections of an interface idea without specifying a particular visual design. To do that, we can use a simple shorthand. There are three basic things we’ll draw:

1. Places: These are things you can navigate to, like screens, dialogs, or menus that pop up.
2. Affordances: These are things the user can act on, like buttons and fields. We consider interface copy to be an affordance, too. Reading it is an act that gives the user information for subsequent actions.
3. Connection lines: These show how the affordances take the user from place to place.

I’m planning to go through it completely this weekend. There are a couple of ideas here to try out right out of the gate.