Reading Bill Buxton’s “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design” feels like leafing through a designer’s sketchbook, a sketchbook of a lifetime of contributing to designing high tech products. Ideas come at you from all angles and then drill down into incredible detail before spinning off in another direction.

Bill Buxton has worked at both EuroPARC and Xerox PARC, Silicon Graphics, Alias Wavefront and most recently Microsoft Research. He has been lecturing and writing on the human computer interaction for 30 years.

Buxton is passionate about technology products and equally passionate about the role of design in creating successful products which are a pleasure to use. He describes a role for design from the very earliest stages “sketching” new products and what interacting with them might be like. He describes how these sketches can be on paper, on glass, cut out of cardboard, in short videos, photomontages, post-its, games, pantomime, almost anything. He gives detailed examples of how these have been used to develop the user experience in numerous projects, many of which have developed into products.

A core message of the book is that the design process requires experimentation, with the expectation that experiments will fail and that the design team will learn a great deal from that failure. These experiments are often in the form of role playing, where members of the design team try to take on particular roles, trying to achieve particular aims within the limits of the current design experiment.

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