Tag: Bill Buxton

Design without touching the surface

I am preparing two classes at the moment. One is an introduction to user experience design, the other to user interface design. I did not come up with this division, it was part of the assignment. I thought it was odd at first. I wasn’t sure where one discipline ends and the other begins. I still am not sure. But I made a pragmatic decision to have the UX class focus on the high level process of designing (software) products, and the UI class focus on the visual aspects of a product’s interface. The UI class deals with a product’s surface, form, and to some extent also its behaviour, but on a micro level. Whereas the UX class focuses on behaviour on the macro level. Simply speaking—the UX class is about behaviour across screens, the UI class is about behaviour within screens.

The solution is workable. But I am still not entirely comfortable with it. I am not comfortable with the idea of being able to practice UX without ‘touching the surface’, so to speak. And it seems my two classes are advocating this. Also, I am pretty sure this is everyday reality for many UX practitioners. Notice I say “practitioner”, because I am not sure ‘designer’ is the right term in these cases. To be honest I do not think you can practice design without doing sketching and prototyping of some sort. (See Bill Buxton’s ‘Sketching User Experiences’ for an expanded argument on why this is.) And when it comes to designing software products this means touching the surface, the form.

Again, the reality is, ‘UX designer’ and ‘UI designer’ are common terms now. Certainly here in Singapore people know they need both to make good products. Some practitioners say they do both, others one or the other. The latter appears to be the most common and expected case. (By the way, in Singapore no-one I’ve met talks about interaction design.)

My concern is that by encouraging the practice of doing UX design without touching the surface of a product, we get shitty designs. In a process where UX and UI are seen as separate things the risk is one comes before the other. The UX designer draws the wireframes, the UI designer gets to turn them into pretty pictures, with no back-and-forth between the two. An iterative process can mitigate some of the damage such an artificial division of labour produces, but I think we still start out on the wrong foot. I think a better practice might entail including visual considerations from the very beginning of the design process (as we are sketching).

Two things I came across as I was preparing these classes are somehow in support of this idea. Both resulted from a call I did for resources on user interface design. I asked for books about visual aspects, but I got a lot more.

  1. In ‘Magic Ink’ Bret Victor writes about how the design of information software is hugely indebted to graphic design and more specifically information design in the tradition of Tufte. (He also mentions industrial design as an equally big progenitor of interaction design, but for software that is mainly about manipulation, not information.) The article is big, but the start of it is actually a pretty good if unorthodox general introduction to interaction design. For software that is about learning through looking at information Victor says interaction should be a last resort. So that leaves us with a task that is 80% if not more visual design. Touching the surface. Which makes me think you might as well get to it as quickly as possible and start sketching and prototyping aimed not just at structure and behaviour but also form. (Hat tip to Pieter Diepenmaat for this one.)

  2. In ‘Jumping to the End’ Matt Jones rambles entertainingly about design fiction. He argues for paying attention to details and that a lot of the design he practices is about ‘signature moments’ aka micro-interactions. So yeah, again, I can’t imagine designing these effectively without doing sketching and prototyping of the sort that includes the visual. And in fact Matt mentions this more or less at one point, when he talks about the fact that his team’s deliverables at Google are almost all visual. They are high fidelity mockups, animations, videos, and so on. These then become the starting points for further development. (Hat tip to Alexander Zeh for this one.)

In summary, I think distinguishing UX design from UI design is nonsense. Because you cannot practice design without sketching and prototyping. And you cannot sketch and prototype a software product without touching its surface. In stead of taking visual design for granted, or talking about it like it is some innate talent, some kind of magical skill some people are born with and others aren’t, user experience practitioners should consider being less enamoured with acquiring more skills from business, marketing and engineering and in stead practice at the skills that define the fields user experience design is indebted to the most: graphic design and industrial design. In other words, you can’t do user experience design without touching the surface.

Week 173

At the studio, coffee brewing in the french press, El Guincho on the stereo. Last week I felt overwhelmed, this week I just feel allergic. Literally. I have a head full of antihistamines, hope they kick in soon.

One thing I decided to do about the overwhelming bit is block out more time in my calendar for work. Not saying how much, but I already had some time blocked for a while now, and I have doubled that. It just won’t do to have hardly any time to do actual design. I guess I’ll just need to to talk to fewer people. If you do not push back, it is easy to lose all your time to meet-ups. People are reckless in the ease with which they impose on other’s time. Myself included.1

We played a card game last night at the studio. An insight I’ve had after reviewing the past period with my interns. To become better designers, we need to make a lot of games, this is true.2 But it also helps to play games, many games, of any kind. So we’ll set apart an hour or so each week and we’ll play a game that someone brings in. I kicked it off with Dominion, which is interesting for the way it has built upon trading-card-game deck-building mechanics, like Magic the Gathering. In stead of it being something that happens before a game it takes place in parallel to the game.

What else is of note? Ah yes. I attended Design by Fire 2010 on Wednesday. It is still the best conference on interaction design in the Netherlands. And I really appreciate the fact that the organizers continue to take risks with who they put on stage. Too often do I feel like being part or at least spectator of some clique at events, with all speakers knowing each other and coming from more or less the same “school of thought”. Not so with Design by Fire. Highlights included David McCandless, Andrei Herasimchuk, m’colleague Ianus and of course Bill Buxton.

The latter also reminded me of some useful frames of thought for next Tuesday, when I will need to spend around half an hour talking about the future of games, from a design perspective, at an invitation-only think-tank like session organized by STT.3 The organizers asked me to set an ambition time frame, but as you may know I have a very hard time imagining any future beyond say, the next year or two. (And sometimes I also have trouble being hopeful about it.) But as Mr. Buxton points out, ideas need a gestation period of around 20 years before they are ready for primetime, so I am planning to look back some ten years, see what occupied the games world back then, and use that as a jumping off point for whatever I’ll be talking about. Let’s get started on that now.

  1. Mule Design had an interesting post on this. Part of the problem is people, but part also software, according to them. Imagine a calendar you subtract time from in stead of add to. [↩]
  2. Tom wrote a wonderful post on games literacy. [↩]
  3. The Netherlands Study Centre for Technology Trends. [↩]

Sketching the experience of toys

A frame from the Sketch-A-Move video

“Play is the highest form of research.”

—Albert Einstein1

That’s what I always say when I’m playing games, too.

I really liked Bill Buxton‘s book Sketching User Experiences. I like it because Buxton defends design as a legitimate profession separate from other disciplines—such as engineering—while at the same time showing that designers (no matter how brilliant) can only succeed in the right ecosystem. I also like the fact that he identifies sketching (in its many forms) as a defining activity of the design profession. The many examples he shows are very inspiring.

One in particular stood out for me, which is the project Sketch-A-Move by Anab Jain and Louise Klinker done in 2004 at the RCA in London. The image above is taken from the video they created to illustrate their concept. It’s about cars auto-magically driving along trajectories that you draw on their roof. You can watch the video over at the book’s companion website. It’s a very good example of visualizing an interactive product in a very compelling way without actually building it. This was all faked, if you want to find out how, buy the book.2

The great thing about the video is not only does it illustrate how the concept works, it also gives you a sense of what the experience of using it would be like. As Buxton writes:3

“You see, toys are not about toys. Toys are about play and the experience of fun that they help foster. And that is what this video really shows. That, and the power of video to go beyond simply documenting a concept to communicating something about experience in a very visceral way.”

Not only does it communicate the fun you would have playing with it, I think this way of sketching actually helped the designers get a sense themselves of wether what they had come up with was fun. You can tell they are actually playing, being surprised by unexpected outcomes, etc.

The role of play in design is discussed by Buxton as well, although he admits he needed to be prompted by a friend of his: Alex Manu, a teacher at OCAD in Toronto writes in an email to Buxton:4

“Without play imagination dies.”

“Challenges to imagination are the keys to creativity. The skill of retrieving imagination resides in the mastery of play. The ecology of play is the ecology of the possible. Possibility incubates creativity.”

Which Buxton rephrases in one of his own personal mantras:5

“These things are far too important to take seriously.”

All of which has made me realize that if I’m not having some sort of fun while designing, I’m doing something wrong. It might be worth considering switching from one sketching technique to another. It might help me get a different perspective on the problem, and yield new possible solutions. Buxton’s book is a treasure trove of sketching techniques. There is no excuse for being bored while designing anymore.

  1. Sketching User Experiences p.349 [↩]
  2. No, I’m not getting a commission to say that. [↩]
  3. Ibid. 1, at 325 [↩]
  4. Ibid., at 263 [↩]
  5. Ibid. [↩]