Picture My World

It seems everyone at the conference has a Blackberry.  I don’t recall so many of these thumb-damaging machines at the conference last year.  What’s going on?

Bill Buxton gave an insightful and inspiring opening keynote at UPA2007 today.

He talked about design and specifically about the role sketching plays in the process (the subject of his new book, Sketching User Experiences).  He also nicely tied the topic into usability.  He prefaced his talk by saying he was introducing some ideas not mentioned in the book, so the reference to usability might be one of them.

I won’t give a blow-by-blow of his entire talk, but I want to capture some of the more interesting points (and one joke).

• Sketching is not design, but he’s never seen a design process without sketching.
• Buxton’s personal mantra (as highlighted on his site) is “Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.“  That really resonates with me. I think it’s easy to dismiss my development goup’s  commercially oriented products as “things”, but they have a huge impact on the people that use them. We sometimes get a glimpse of this from enthusiastic customers, but we need to internalize this idea.
• Many design sketches focus on the states but not the transitions.  Designers need to communicate the detail about these transitions.  As we all know, it’s the journey, not the destination and that applies to our interactive interfaces as much as anything else.  This leads to the joke:
• Q: What do Canada and transitions have in common? A: They are both dominated by the States.
• A key attribute of sketches is that they are ambiguous. Buxton says, “you need holes in order to let the imagination run around.”  This way, you get more out of a sketch than you put in it.
• Another key attribute is that sketches of an idea come in multiples.
• The software design industry needs to do more up front ideation.  We need more sketches. He spoke of one studio manager that demanded his designers came to the table with a minimum of 5 well thought out, valid design sketches or they were shown the door. Ideas are cheap. We are all creative. Practice.
• Usability today focuses too much on the phase following ideation and exploration. It focuses on “getting the design right”, not on “getting the right design”.
• Buxton advocates earlier usability involvement, evaluating multiple sketches of alternative designs.  We should expose users to these different designs so they can compare and contrast. He presented some research showing that this technique results in better, more critical feedback from participants.

I’m very excited to take these ideas back to work. From now on, any design work I’m involved with will follow Buxton’s advice and I want to develop techniques to quickly and easily usability test sketches. I think we have most of the tools already - as Buxton mentioned, this is similar to paper prototype testing but at an earlier phase.

I’m in Austin, Texas at the UPA conference.

Last year, there were a few people blogging about the conference, but this year I can find only one, Pat Kennedy. I hope this is not a sign of things to come, but there looks to be many good sessions regardless of the lack of online buzz.

Off to the opening reception…