Whiteboards are an invaluable design tool – and like all tools, the more expertise you have with them, the better the outcome you’ll get during a whiteboarding session. These are 10 techniques I use frequently when running design sessions.

1. Help yourself remember the order of each whiteboard print after the design session. A good way to do this is to number each board in the top right in whiteboard marker, so that the sequence prints out along with the content.

2. Leave space for digression and annotation. Never fill a board up with one idea (eg a matrix) – because inevitably a new thought will emerge from the discussion, and you won’t have any whiteboard real-estate to write it on. Try to use no more than two-thirds of a board for any idea, and leave a hand’s-width margin around all of your squiggling so that you can annotate if you need to.

3. Make good use of colour. During a session, try and build a colour palette that becomes familiar to the audience as the design session progresses. For example, use black for a prototype screen design, blue for annotations, red asterices for marking high-priority requirements. Always have two of each colour whiteboard marker handy, for when one (inevitably) runs low and becomes hard to read.

4. Always carry a camera (or a mobile phone with a good built-in camera). I can’t count the number of times the whiteboard printer has broken, or the board content needed to be emailed out straight after a session. Rather than troubleshooting the mechanical error or rushing to find a scanner, take a high-res digital picture instead.

5. Have a few big sheets of paper or a second whiteboard available, to capture issues that aren’t relevant to the conversation happening at the time they’re raised, or to draw up comparative ideas so that people can consider them simultaneously.

6. Have a few pre-thought thinking schematics at your fingertips. If you’re going to need to capture ideas with two separate dimensions (eg importance vs effort), know how to draw a up a matrix. If you’re going to need to capture a timeline with dependencies, become adept at constructing a GANTT chart. If you need to capture a complex interaction involving multiple users and systems, know how to construct a swimlanes diagram.

7. Don’t be afraid to ask a workshop participant to get up and draw an idea, rather than just talk about it. A visual can explain their idea in 10 seconds, but if they can’t articulate what they want to say in words, you can waste time or just confuse the other participants. If they’re annotating an existing idea, get them to do it in a different colour.

8. If you’re trying to capture a rapid, free-flowing conversation, rather than capturing every word, draw a mind-map. When the conversation reaches a natural conclusion, have a two-minute debrief to capture the most important conclusions.

9. Pre-practice a couple of important icons to make it easy to articulate ideas. For example, know how to draw an icon representing a person, a business, a problem or issue, an idea, a piece of information etc.

10. If people are unable to come to any agreement about a particular point being discussed, capture controversial points as a summary question, and provide a couple of different answers elicited from the group. Then get the audience to capture the pro’s and cons of each answer. Sometimes, the analysis needs to be made visible before a group can jump to a preferred solution. And using this approach, people feel that their point of view has been considered, making it easier to achieve consensus despite controversy.