Sketch your core screens

A rough visual model of the key moments in your product — before any design decisions get made.

Instructions

Sketching core screens before you build them is not about design fidelity. It's about forcing decisions. When you draw even a rough sketch of what a screen needs to contain, questions surface that weren't visible when you were thinking abstractly: what information needs to be present, how does a user navigate to this from elsewhere, what happens when the data isn't there yet.

The sketches at this stage should be functional, not beautiful. The goal is to capture the key structural decisions — what's on each screen, what actions users can take, what feedback the system gives them — not to produce something that looks like a finished design. Paper or a whiteboard is fine. The value is in the thinking, not the artefact.

Focus on the screens that carry the most weight: the first sc...