Bill Buxton at UPA2007
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
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.
June 21st, 2007 at 9:36 am
Thanks for the notes on the talk. It is nice to get feedback that the intended points got across. Regarding the home climate control studies that I spoke about, I thought that it might be useful to let you know where they can be found on-line:
http://www.billbuxton.com/rightDesign.pdf
http://www.billbuxton.com/UserSketches.pdf
As for the joke, here is the follow-up: on the plane home I read the stack of talk evaluations. On about 5 of them there were comments like, ‘.. but he made two jokes about Canada” or “I know Bill lived in Toronto for a while, but that does not give him the right to make jokes about Canada.”
Now I’m curious if knowing that I am Canadian, and continue to live in Canada despite working for Microsoft Research, might result in different reactions, i.e., that would make it Okay. Interesting perspective on political correctness that I clearly did not anticipate. I take it as a nice reminder (sketch?) of why it is important to keep cultural considerations in mind in design. Perhaps also another supporting (?) my other motto: These things are far too important to take seriously. As Einstein says, “Play is the most important part of research.”
All the best and thanks again.
June 21st, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Bill Buxton commented on my blog! Bill Buxton commented on my blog!
Errrr.. ahem.
Thanks for the links, Bill.
As a Canadian, I thought the joke was hilarious. I would have found it funny no matter where you came from, but I know that there are some jokes that can only be told by “insiders”. The other question is whether those 5 respondents were Canadian or not…
If you’re still reading… I did hear some negative feedback about the talk. I think there are some companies or environments that are integrating usability and design at those early stages and they took offense to your generalization. However, the situation you describe is very true in my world, but I’d like a glimpse into these enlightened areas.
July 15th, 2007 at 8:06 am
I like the idea of “getting the right design” before “getting the design right”. Nice simply catchy slogan that expresses an important idea.
I also loved the joke. The only sad part is that only a limited audience will get it. In fact, even with the right audience you probably have to set the stage first so that they’ll understand which states/transitions are being talked about.
Seems like a hard problem to indicate transitions with sketches. You did a fabulous job of indicating transitions for the Preps ganging UI but my memory says you used some kind of movie to do it.