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Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies)
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Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies) |
Author: Bill Buxton
Published: 2007-04-11 |
List price: $49.95
Our price: $32.97
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: December 02nd, 2008 09:48:07 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 The value of design
The word 'design' in English covers such a wide range of activities that it has become unusfully vague, applying as well to designing a business model as to designing a frock. Bill Buxton describes the activities of designers who have usually been to design school rather than engineering or business school. Not many people know what they do, beyond a vague impression that they make things look good. Bill Buxton's book describes, with excellent examples, the range of designers' activities--both functional and aesthetic--and the value to a company of their particular skill: imagining and visualizing ideas for products or services so they can be developed and assessed before time and money is committed to building them. This book is a great demonstration of the value of design to the bottom line and how it can be incorporated in the product development process in the digital realm.
 Useless book
I bought this thinking it would be about interactive design (e.g. web, flash, etc.) It's a meandering book that hardly addresses those concerns at all. I kept waiting for it to get to some real meat, but it just walks through examples of industrial design and abstract concepts. A waste of money for me.
But one can sketch in code too
This is a compelling book. It manages to blend business, organizational and design thinking on the user experience. In doing this, Bill Buxton makes the case for (i) the centrality of design in driving business value and (ii) the importance of investing in the design process. The importance of exploration and play in design is called out, and the role of making multiple light, inexpensive sketches of alternatives as an important part of the design process. Buxton also brings together the separate histories of the industrial design (the people who make things) and the software design worlds, sprinkling in some lessons from film making for good measure. And he reinforces the importance of knowing the traditions and their high points if you want to innovate. All of these lessons are vital to our collective future.
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br /I liked this book enough to buy copies for people on my design and business teams, and I will probably give my copy to my boss. I may get a copy for my son as well, who is involved in furniture design in Vancouver.
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br /The book does have a couple of weaknesses. The most serious is that Bill seems to think that people don't sketch in code. I am pretty sure that this is not what he thinks - he has seen plenty of people sketch in code and most of the code created by university researchers is a form of sketch - branching code that explores, plays and demonstrates possibilities. The book can also be read as advocating a waterfall process rather than something more agile. One reason may be that he is focused on the design of interactive objects and environments where there are high production costs. But this kind of waterfall approach is not all that useful for people (such as myself) who are building businesses around the delivery of software as a service. And taking Bill's own advice, and looking out a few years, it seems likely that most of us will have 3D printers in our homes and that eventually these 3D printers will be able to print 3D programmable objects. With shape memory plastics and other such smart materials, one of the things with behaviours (interactions) may even be the shape itself.
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br /Still an important book, and one that points to more thinking and more learning. The gallery of important user experience sketches is worth deep study.
 If you're involved in design, read this book
I was fortunate enough to see Bill Buxton lecture last year. After the lecture, I picked up this book since it extended on the themes he was discussing. I found his thoughts on the fidelity of the designs for different levels of development extremely helpful.
Outstanding Book
Bill Buxton does an outstanding job exploring the role design should play in an organization which really sticks in your head. He also explains how a sketch can go a long way as a communication tool during the product life cycle. Just brilliant.
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