Book: Sketching User Experiences

Sketching User Experiences
Getting the Design Right and the Right Design
Bill Buxton, Microsoft Research
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
May 2007
Paperback – 400 pages

Excerpt from a book review by Jessie Scanlon in Business Week:

“While Buxton’s insights are geared towards companies making software or products that depend on software, the book is jargon-free, and most anyone in the business of creating products will learn from it.

“My belief is that one of the most significant reasons for the failure of organizations to develop new software products in-house is the absence of anything that a design professional would recognize as an explicit design process,” writes Buxton.

He argues for a holistic approach to experience-based design, showing how the weakness of software product development can be complemented by the strengths of traditional product design and vice versa. But mostly, he argues strongly for an explicit and distinct design process that’s integrated into the larger organization and supported by executive leadership. […]

He argues that designers are uniquely trained to focus on the human side of product development, to consider the behaviors and experiences associated with or enabled by these new technologies. “To design a tool, we must understand the larger physical, social, and psychological context in which it will be used. And that’s something designers are trained to do,” he says.”

– Read full review
– Download book flyer (pdf, 539 kb, 2 pages)