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.

No, I have to say what really does disappoint me is that whenever we’re confronted with an issue that is too large for a single day solution by a single person we’re very likely to turn our backs. It happened during the Holocaust – good men looked away. Out of fear. Out of apathy. What can I do against the machine? And if I were asking people to throw away their stereo or mobile phone then I’d see that defence might have some force… but I’m not. People are only being asked to consider before they shop for luxury items, or to think twice before upgrading the office hardware.

What I’m asking people, particularly in the tech community, is to pass the word around – its not cool to just run out and buy up that latest gizmo using tantulum capacitors – UNLESS you know for sure that the supply chain does not include Congo minerals or the stolen minerals from surrounding countries in that part of Africa. These companies can source coltan elsewhere, but then your phone will be a little more expensive. That’s it.

However, the supply chain issue with tech products is a misty one. There are many hands and non-linear trails between the miner and the mobile phone in your hand. But we need to let our governments AND the tech companies know that we don’t agree. We need to only upgrade when we need to upgrade – not for the cool factor of having the latest greatest iPhone. Don’t for a minute think distance absolves you from your complicity in those 45,000 deaths per month in Congo. Its what we do from this point forward that will define us for future generations.

By the way, studies have shown that people in groups make worse decisions than individuals and a part of why that happens is because we feel that not only responsibility but also blame are shared between us. Therefore we share the blame in those 45,000 deaths – one mega-micro-fraction doesn’t equate to much. Right? Yeh, just keep telling yourself that. And ask yourself if you can at all see how so many good Germans turned their back on the Jews and Auschwitz in the 1940′s.

Do you really need that new piece of shiny tech you’re so intent to get your hands on? Really?

Before I go on with this post, watch Rape of a Nation by Marcus Bleasdale on MediaStorm (11 minutes that will make you a better technologist).

Here are some quick facts. Approximately six million people have died in the Congo war and the death toll is rising – half of these are children below 5 years of age. That equates to about 45,000 people dead every month in a country of 60 million.

Why Congo? This is not a war about politics, it’s a war about minerals. Diamonds, gold, coltan, cobalt, magnesium, tin and other minerals. This is a war with numerous parties selling their wares to the rest of the world and using that money to finance their continued murder, torture, rape and slavery. Yes, six million dead. The war in Congo has killed the most people of any war since World War 2. And the driver of that war is us… the global consumer… because we want cheaper, better technology products.

Let me tell you about the mineral commonly called coltan. You mine coltan and sell it to someone who refines that into tantulum. Amazing stuff, tantulum is highly corrosion resistant and has a melting point of 3017 Celcius (boiling point of 5458 Celcius). This tantulum’s main use, among other things, is to create tantulum capacitors for use in electronic equipment such as mobile phones, stereos, automotive electronics and computers. But its also used for creating alloys with high melting points like you need for jet engine components and missile parts – as well as for body implants. To our technologically driven society tantulum is highly desired and expensive.

There is enough interesting content for you to find more about this subject yourselves. Suffice it to say the mobile phone in our pocket drips blood every time we send an SMS. If you want to ask yourself about the losers in globalisation look at Congo – they have abundant resources and should be very rich and secure. Instead, our demand for cheaper and better technology fuels the war of greed over minerals in Congo.

All I’m saying is that you need to ask yourself at which point your desire to upgrade your iPhone unnecessarily (or at all) makes you complicit in those deaths. Its a big question. Because now you know these facts you’re linked to those people and those murders and rapes. Go investigate… the rest is up to you.

[The image below is from Marcus Bleasdale's Rape of a Nation - linked to in the content of this article.]

1) When creating a project in Eclipse don’t use J2ME Midlet Suite but instead use MIDP Project (Nokia SDK Plugin) like the tutorial says – the Nokia SDK plugin wasn’t showing in the list only because it wasn’t correctly installed and configured

2) When running midlets don’t use the Wireless Toolkit Emulator (if you have it installed) but use the Nokia SDK Plugin

3) And if, when you get all that done and click run, it gives a big red error saying it can’t run the emulator then go into properties and change the version of Java support to 1.4

Big Tip: If the Nokia SDK Plugin isn’t correctly installed then only the J2ME Midlet shows in the New Project window and its easy to incorrectly assume that the tutorial screenshots are outdated. You really need to work within the Nokia environment for this assignment to work.

Robert has posted a short comment which caught my eye about Opera Mini 4 Beta. In it he points to an awesome article over on Opera Developer Community about designing for Opera Mini 4 which is definately a must read and has some resources at the end which should help you further.

Its important when you’re working in web design / development to realise that mobile is becoming a more important medium and to begin your projects with some appreciation of what impact (or lack of impact) you are aiming to achieve in that space. My view is ignoring the mobile platform due to some fixated idea the desktop paradigm is transfixed for all eternity is an osterich approach to business – even if you hear it from government advisors to small business!

How many times have people stood in front of me angrily shouting that people won’t EVER use their mobile phones or personal digital assistants for web browsing? I’ve lost count. It somehow reminds me of the “blind people don’t use the Internet” statement which still comes to the fore at surprisingly common intervals. Accept it everyone – technology changes and so do the way we use it! The mobile browser is now a player and it is building momentum every year.