Input Maps

Week in a Life of Sana.

Input Maps are a great way to organize thoughts, ideas, or actions. Input maps can be sketches, designed in Invision, or tools such as Coogle.

I started this project by listing out all the inputs within my life that occured and I went through in a week. This made me stop and think about how my time is spent. Once the list was created, I categorized the list into three main buckets: professional, relationships, and leisure.

I had the option to use any tool and I actually choose to try three different methods so I can best decide what tool or process is best to create an input map. The three methods I chose were: Sketching, Invision, and Coogle. Below are my input maps for each one.

Choice #1: Sketching

Choice #2: Invision

Choice #3: Coogle

Some challenges I faced were figuring out the correct aesthetic for each input map. For each one of these, I decided to go with a different look and feel to see what would best suit the topic, which for this instance was a week in my life. What I would do differently next time is that I would write out a list of words that would describe the topic, to figure out the tone for the input map, prior to starting.

Learning to incorporate journaling in your day to day life, in order to keep track of these inputs and ideas was productive in order to create this input map. Reflection has also been helpful for personal and career growth and i’ll be adamant to keep it up to continue to grow as a designer.

After trying all these different methods, I’d say I enjoyed using coogle the most, because of the flexibility the tool had and how easy it was to create a beautiful input map. The tools features to create parent and children were simple to catch on to and the UI sped up the process.

Next time, you need to create an input map, I would go directly to coogle. Just make sure you organize your ideas into buckets prior to starting the input map :)