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Book Review: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

Sketching User Experiences:  Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies), by Bill Buxton, is an excellent read on the scope, purpose, and implementation techniques for designing good user experiences.  Buxton's narrative style is easy, warm, and conveys his rich experience and passion for the subject.  He includes a rich set of stories and case studies that demonstrate the importance of design and techniques for doing it.

Enterprise Bearware

The price customers pay for software and the level of usability they get with that software is inversely proportional.  As long as it solves a big business problem or two, it doesn't matter how easy it is to actually use the stuff.

Romantic Keyboards

Advanced users need toolbars like Lance Armstrong needs training wheels.  As application designers and programmers we must pay attention to how user needs change as they progress towards advanced user status.  And, in doing so, we must help them to learn and maximize the right tool for the job.

Opting for Opt-in

"News and updates" pollute our mailboxes every day.  They're not always the infamous kind of spam we all know and hate; now they're 'newsvertisements,' sent to you because of that little, afterthought-checkbox at the bottom of on-line account sign-up forms.  They're usually checked by default.  At the rate new web apps are created, this is an increasingly common occurrence.

The M/VC Antipattern

Introduction
M/VC may be more familiar as "MVC," or Model-View-Controller the design pattern used in the Smalltalk environment [KP88] and cemented as the "Observer" pattern in Design Patterns [GHJV95] by the Gang Of Four.  In real life, subconsciously plowing along with M, then V, then C often leads to MV with little or no decoupled C.  Call this M/VC.  With controller code woven deeply into your view, it becomes nearly impossible to later switch the view out.

Eclipse Con 2005: Seamless UI Integration

This was a good topic by Julian Jones, the usability 'gatekeeper' for IBM's Eclipse tools.  The PDF has details but here's a quick summary:

• Don't harden UIs early.  Consider them loose and changeable until close to the final release.  Note: This implies clean model-view-controller separation and keeping a light view.
• Try out divergent ideas by shipping them in milestones (or the equivalent).  This encourages "natural selection" of good UI patterns.
• Use 'centralized planning' only where it is truly necessary.  Example: Eclipse's unified Help TOC.

On enforcing tight UI integration between disparate plugin development groups, Julian suggested that the dictatorial approach will never work and to use a 'gatekeeper' for publicizing good UI examples.  I agree.  IBM publicizes new UI features using formal walkthroughs.  He sights the PDE Overview page as an example of a good, internal UI-pattern that grew organically this way. 

The gatekeeper also manages decisions regarding ugly UI overlaps.  Currently, there is an ongoing discussion about how to resolve GEF sliding-pallettes, icon-bars, and side-bars in 3.1M5, which all effectively do the same thing but target vastly different users.

Simply Complex

Bruce Tate, Graham Glass, Kent Beck and Steve Jobs all seem to agree that the simplest approach is often the best one.  Graham argues that it is a key factor in improving the entire user-experience.  They're dead on.  It would behoove all engineers and designers to get on board.  But even the pursuit of simplicity can go too far, making some unintended thing more complicated.