Buxton on Sketching User Experience

Bill Buxton is so cool. He’s Canadian, a massively talented designer, and arguably the world authority on interaction and usability design. What’s not to like? Oh, Buxton does work at Microsoft as their Principal Researcher, but I forgive him for wanting a big paycheck and working for the world’s most powerful software company. I’ve even had the pleasure of shaking his hand after he gave a stirring lecture at a conference some time ago and since then have been a big fan.

His book, Sketching User Experiences: Getting The Design Right and the Right Design, argues that sketching, prototyping, and iteration are essential parts of the design process itself. And I must say I agree—especially these days where the complex marriage of increased media with information appliances and reactive environments makes the convoluted behaviors of the devices we use as important as human behaviour itself.

In 2007 Buxton presented an excellent lecture about his thinking in this area at the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Program where he discussed the design process itself, from the perspective of methods, organization, and composition. See Bill Buxton’s Stanford lecture about sketching interactions on YouTube.