Bill Buxton in Princeton – A Review

I, like most in the (software) design industry, was pumped that Bill Buxton was coming to my neck of the woods for a talk.  I wager it’s the most popular talk ever put on by the two groups that sponsored it (PhillyCHI and Usability NJ); there was a waiting list and the “large auditorium” at Princeton’s CompSci building was packed.

I’ve only begun to dig into his book, Sketching Experiences, so I don’t know for sure how much of the talk reflected that, but in talking with colleagues, it sounds like there was some overlap (as should be expected!).  In any case, enough with the intro..

Overall, of course, Buxton makes for an interesting presenter.  He has a lot of personality, and it comes out.  And regardless of the particular topic, when you have someone of his caliber—his amount and quality of experience in the field—it is bound to be interesting and have little gems here and there.

I took away four main themes:

• Learn From the Past
• Think About the Transitions
• Keep It Simple/Lo Tech
• Make Way for Design

Learn From the Past

He demonstrated a 1984 Casio touch screen calculator watch—you trace the numbers and signs on it, and it tries to recognize them.  The explicit point was that we should be more diligent in finding and using the research that folks have done in HCI and Design and apply that to what we do.

I also wonder, though, if the state of technology also have exerted an influence on the up-surge of awareness of the value and importance of design in software and devices.  I think the two (tech advancement and design presence, along with business acumen to buy into and fund the potential) have worked together to make the iconic good UX products happen when they did.

Think About the Transitions

This was something he mentioned at MIX.  He reiterated that we need to spend more time thinking about and representing the how we get from state to state in our designs. 

It’s a good point, but it left me wanting more.  It’s one thing to criticize the state of the art; it’s another to show how it could be better.  I want to see how he thinks it could be better—in the context of building software interfaces, which was the context his criticism was made within.

Keep It Simple/Lo Tech

He showed a few examples, mostly videos, of how folks have utilized simple, lo-tech stuff to prototype and communicate ideas design ideas.  He reinforced the idea that you need to keep your design work lo-fi at first, while you’re discovering the design, to both enable you to do many alternatives but also to leave holes for others to creatively critique your designs. 

In having done sketching now, both literal and metaphorical, I am a fan of the idea.  I have found limitations though, so I think there is a happy medium and one needs to use judgment as to when to move from sketchy media to more domain-specific media.

Make Way for Design

He is an advocate (among others recently—Don Norman comes to mind) for raising the visibility and impact that those with a design background have on organizations.  He talks about the three pillars of business, technology, and design, and how he feels they should be relatively on equal footing for truly successful products to happen in our space.

This one makes a lot of sense to me.  Even being the relative n00b in the design world that I am, I see that there are distinct ways of thinking and approaching things.  I also implicitly value the non-quantifiable/aesthetic/emotional as an integral part of being human, so it just resonates for me to have this sort of enshrined in the way we organize ourselves, our businesses, and our products. 

I’ve seen, however, (not with Buxton personally but with “Design” folks in general) a sort of arrogant tendency that is not welcome; this sort of “if you don’t get it, you don’t get it, and it’s not my job to help you get it.”  I think that although we may not be able to quantify something, we can still intelligently craft and use language to communicate about it. 

One of the things that I think Designers need to work on is better working out that language amongst themselves, and, if they want to be equally valued with peers from other backgrounds, they also need to learn to establish and use that language outside.  There will always be competing concerns, and folks need to be able to dialogue about them to come to the best solution.  This is core, IMO, for Design to come into its own as a “pillar” in its own right.

In any case, as I said, all in all it was a good talk.  Good tidbits; good themes, and certainly a stimulant for further, good discussion.  Thanks for coming out, Bill. 

[FYI - they videoed it, if you’d like to watch it.]