Sketching user experiences : getting the design right and the right design

445 Pages·2007·41.57 MB·English

by  William Buxton

Sketching User Experiences
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Sketching User Experiences
getting the design right and the right design
Bill Buxton

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buxton, William.
Sketching user experience : getting the design right and the right design / Bill Buxton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-12-374037-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-12-374037-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Design, Industrial. I. Title.
TS171.B89 2007
658.5’752--dc22
2006036416
ISBN 13: 978-0-12-374037-3
ISBN10: 0-12-374037-1
For information on all Morgan Kaufmann publications, visit our Web site at www.mkp.com or www.books.elsevier.com
Printed in Canada
07 08 09 10 11 5 4 3 2 1
To the love of my life, Lizzie Russ.
Contents
9 Preface
19 Acknowledgements
21 Author’s Note
25 PART I: Design as Dreamcatcher
27 Design for the Wild
41 Case Study: Apple, Design, and Business
63 The Bossy Rule
69 A Snapshot of Today
73 The Role of Design
77 A Sketch of the Process
85 The Cycle of Innovation
95 The Question of “Design”
105 The Anatomy of Sketching
115 Clarity is Not Always the Path to Enlightenment
121 The Larger Family of Renderings
127 Experience Design vs Interface Design
135 Sketching Interaction
139 Sketches Are Not Prototypes
143 Where Is th e User in All of This?
145 You Make That Sound Like a Negative Thing
153 If Someone Made a Sketch in the Forest and Nobody Saw it…
167 The Object of Sharing
175 Annotation: Sketching on Sketches
201 Design Thinking and Ecology
207 The Second Worst Thing That Can Happen
221 A River Runs through It
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227 PART II: Stories of Methods and Madness
229 From Thinking on to Acting On
239 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
245 Chameleon: From Wizardry to Smoke-and-Mirrors
253 Le Bricolage: Cobbling Things Together
261 It Was a Dark and Stormy Night…
277 Visual Story Telling
299 Simple Animation
309 Shoot the Mime
315 Sketch-a-Move
331 Extending Interaction: Real and Illusion
337 The Bifocal Display
349 Video Envisionment
371 Interacting with Paper
393 Are You Talking to Me?

401 Recapitulation and Coda
407 Some Final Thoughts
421 References and Biblography
436 Index
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Preface
If Ernest Hemingway, James Mitchener, Neil Simon, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Pablo Picasso
could not get it right the first time, what makes you think that you will?
—Paul Heckel
This is a book about design. Mainly, it is about the design of appliances, structures,
buildings, signs, and yes, computers, that exist in both the physical and behavioral
sense. That is, there may be something concrete that you can touch, see, and hear. But
there is also something that you can actively experience: something that involves dy-
namics or time; something with behavior that is usually the result of software running
on an embedded microprocessor; and something whose design needs to be grounded
in the nature of that experience.
The underlying premise of the book is that there are techniques and processes
whereby we can put experience front and centre in design. My belief is that the basis
for doing so lies in extending the traditional practice of sketching.
So why should we care about any of this?
Hardly a day goes by that we don’t see an announcement for some new product or
technology that is going to make our lives easier, solve some or all of our problems, or
simply make the world a better place.
However, the reality is that few of these products survive, much less deliver on their
typically over-hyped promise. But are we learning from these expensive mistakes? Very
little, in my opinion. Rather than rethink the underlying process that brings these prod-
ucts to market, the more common strategy seems to be the old shotgun method; that is,

keep blasting away in the hope that one of the pellets will eventually hit the bull’s eye.
Now if this is a problem, and I believe that it is, it shows every indication of getting
worse before it gets better. The pundits, such as Weiser (1991) and Dourish (2001), as
well as those contributing to Denning & Metcalfe (1997) and Denning (2001), tell us
that we are in the midst of a significant transition in the very nature of the products
that are going to emerge in the future. Others, such as Forty (1986) and Borgmann
(1987) would say that this transition began a long time ago. Both are accurate. The
important point to recognize is that whenever it started, the change has reached a tip-
ping point (Gladwell 2000), where we ignore it at our peril if we are in the business of
creating new products.
By virtue of their embedded microprocessors, wireless capabilities, identity tag-
ging, and networking, these products are going to be even more difficult to get right
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