Sketching User Experiences (Book Review)
What brought me to read Sketching User Experiences: getting the design right and the right design by Bill Buxton was an IXDA Keynote Bill Buxton did several years ago. The audio is still available but unfortunately the video has long since failed to work. Nevertheless it was solely on that conversation with interaction designers that drew me to this book.
If any of you have heard Bill speak you will quickly notice that the presentations complement his writing and vice-versa. The passion Bill has for fostering innovation in the business context drums through from start to finish with some invaluable ideas along the way. It challenges the reader to rethink a few essential components of your own methodologies and you will no doubt recognise many of the frustrations and issues incumbent in the teams you’ve already worked alongside. Because its through fostering innovation and daring to fail that great products are made. Too often we fall into the box of comfortability, we start to code on the first day alongside design… not a great outcome.
Also fundamental to the concepts in this book is the term sketching – not meaning pencil sketching so much as ideation sketching. Cheap, fast, to the point design experimentation. You’ll need to get your head around the difference between sketching in this context and fast prototyping along with the literacy to distinguish when each is useful or redundant. And ultimately you have to shift your perception of what we do – for example as software developers and web designers – from product creators to experience designers. Because the whole ballgame starts to change when we rethink our definition…
Another key takeaway from this book is that Design (with a big D) is about exploring multiple paths throughout ideation – not to be confused with prototyping and developing around a core single branch. We most often get caught up in the latter. Design is about finding solutions to problems rather than trying to fit something to a pre-determined path… simply get pen and paper, get fast and cheap materials to test ideas and do so way before you ever write a single line of code. Things are cheaper to fix and will wind up as better products if you think through the questions and obstacles before committing to the implementation. But that should be obvious…
The next time you’re challenged with a web solution and are tempted to start coding templates I dare you to ask yourself this question – what experience do you want a user of that website to take away? I don’t mean how should it look aesthetically, nor what type of shopping cart should be utilised or the flavour of JavaScript interaction. Simply, if you don’t understand the experience you’re designing then you probably aren’t designing. In fact, I have to say there has been very little actual experience design in my presence in any of the teams that I’ve worked beside.
So I like Bill Buxton’s worldview of design and it runs alongside many of the thoughts I’ve taken away from projects. I think that’s the appeal of his work in Sketching User Experiences – I think we all know there are flaws in how we’ve been operating. The bigger the business it seems the bigger the stagnation and fear of risking failure.
Were I to be running a business at present, whether or not it was a software enterprise, this book would be available for all staff to read. Because its about a way of doing business as much as a way of making software. For those in the business of designing anything – its about the experience… you don’t design mountain bikes do you? No, you design that feeling that a biker gets hitting the bottom of a big hill and rushing through the shallow stream with water spraying everywhere. This is how we should be looking at everything… from the experience outward.
Two small criticism that I would put forward are (a) the small font size: at times and in some circumstances this was a little difficult to read; and, (b) four or five images were missing so that a caption appeared on an empty page. However, the book itself is a catalyst for new ways of thinking about what we’re out to achieve. Or are they the old ways?
I hope you all read Sketching User Experiences: getting the design right and the right design before the year’s out and we see some awesome creativity as a result.
Update: 9 January, 2009
You might find Bill Buxton’s 25 minute day one keynote Sketching User Experiences for MIX09 worth watching.
