Book Review: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton
Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies)
The first half of the book (the 'foundation') is a treatise on why experience-based design is an essential exploration of the best facility for helping product users achieve their goals. To Buxton, the right, good design is such a paramount virtue that he advocates companies have a CDO (chief design officer). Buxton works overtime to show that design should encompass the user's entire experience with the product, accounting for every possible social, environmental, and situational aspect. As a long-time software professional, it was a refreshing perspective on design that transcends your typical mock-up or wire-frame.
Given my past reading of Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
Buxton is also true to his title, carefully describing the first level outcome of design as a 'sketch' (which, btw, may or may not be an actual drawing). Sketches are exploratory, tangible, and, I get the feeling, mostly intended for research. Not a lot is covered on the post-sketch 'experience,' whereas Cooper's description of design outcomes are meant to feed into a software product development process. In short, Buxton's and Cooper's design perspectives are mostly a nice complement to each other. They diverge only slightly on the scope and, possibly, organizational context of design activities.
The second half discusses methods for approaching and executing design activity. After reading what seemed like a protracted first half, this was what I was really after; the good stuff. Each case study is interesting, sometimes amusing, and illustrative of how to tackle seemingly insurmountable evaluation of new or unproven ideas. He shows how these lightweight exploratory techniques inform us on how our concepts might actually be realized in real life (or as real as you can approximate), thereby enabling better decision making by business and technology stakeholders.
Again, taking, a broad view, Buxton describes sketching methods not necessarily as a drawings. They are any lightweight technique for approximating a true user experience. Buxton's sketches are so descriptive and he is obviously so enthralled with each subject, that at one point, I began to wonder if the chief end in his mind was the sketch, itself (as opposed to some shippable end product). But it is, after all, a book about sketching so, you have to cut him some slack here.
Overall, I feel like this would be a great book to include in any course on product design. For the pragmatic sketcher, the first half is longer than needed and could be skimmed. However, if you have the time, it's still worth a thorough read for getting a strong perspective design history and importance. The second half has the meat and it's a great source for concrete ideas on how to approach exploratory design, no matter what kind of product.
As a software professional, this book is relevant to my effort to ensure that we are building the right product, taking our users' entire experience in mind for each feature built. I'm not sure how many of the techniques presented, if any, directly apply to our current situation. However, they seem like a good collection to be able to reference for future needs.
My appreciation for and confidence in Cooper's work in the area of interaction design was reinforced as a result of reading this. I've even taken up re-reading About Face (now, 3.0), which I highly recommend.
The only disappointment was minor - I wanted more focus about how to build good wire-frame interactions, my initial goal for reading this. This is not your book if that's all you want to get out of it. In fairness, Buxton never set out to be this narrow. And, his broad perspective on the subject is probably as good or better than any out there. For this, Sketching User Experiences is a must read.
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