–Engage

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

When thinking about sketching, there are several pieces that make a sketch a sketch, but to really make it a useful tool the quality of appropriate fidelity is one of the most important. In Bill Buxton’s “Sketching User Experience” (2007) he talks about the various qualities of an artifact that allow it to be a sketch. He talks about it being quick and he also talks about the importance of it being in multiples. Another quality he addresses is fidelity. He said in his Interaction08 | Savannah keynote that there is no such thing as high-fidelity or low-fidelity prototyping, but rather appropriate fidelity prototyping.

Another part of the puzzle when speaking about sketching that we all need to consider is what is a sketch vs. what is a prototype. Buxton goes to great lengths to work through this. He expresses it as a continuum moving from idea generation to idea validation. The closer to idea generation as its purpose the more it needs to be a sketch. The more it is for validation (i.e. usability testing) the more it needs to be a prototype and its “appropriate” level of fidelity needs to follow suit in order to get the desired results from the created artifacts. So when presenting a collection of sketches, or even going through the action of sketching itself, it is primarily if not entirely for the purpose of idea generation.

So why is roughness important. I mean with today’s tools like Flash, Fireworks, OmniGraffle, etc. I can create some really compelling high fidelity prototypical solutions really quickly, right? but here is the issue–completeness. For a sketch to be a tool of creation as opposed to validation, it must be able to illicit ideas with criticism and correction (and approval). Artefacts that give the appearance of completion tell a story. For sketching to be used as a design tool, it must have artifacts that ask questions.

So why not make stencils or create tools that make things look rough? Well one company thought of just that. Balsamiq created a tool in Flash called Mockups. It is basically Omnigraffle or Visio, but with a stencil of rough objects. But to me tools like this ignore some important issues of sketching because “Roughness” is only a piece of the equation.

But let’s get back to what roughness gives a sketch. It suggests incompleteness. It begs for moving forward, for completion, for change, for association. And the act of creativity requires tools that allow for moments of free association. So the tools and processes it uses need to work within that framework.

If you are intrigued by this and want more, well there is still 24 hours to get the early bird registration for my “Sketching for Interaction Design” workshop organized by SmartExperience.org.

Use discount code, “Synapse”, to get even more discount.

You can also take my other workshop separately or with “Sketching…,” called “Interaction Design for RIAs”. Ya get a discount if you take both.

For group rate information contact me or SmartExperience.org.

I’ll be teaching two 1-day workshops for SmartExperience.org in October. One about the interaction design of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and the other about Sketching in Interaction Design.

First the logistics:
Dates: RIAs is on Oct 16 & SKetching is on Oct 17 — from 9-5 each.
To sign up for either class you can go to http://smartexperience.org/
Use my discount code to get an additional amount off your registration fee–Synapse.

RIAs
To be honest, this 1-day workshop is really just about designing software applications with a focus on web-based applications. The reason is, that RIAs is not a distinction of note any longer in web-application development. But the issues for designing RIAs are the same now as they were back in 2003 when Macromedia first coined the term.

The workshop is going to help designers think better about technology choices and hopefully clear away the cloudiness of techno-babble. Then it is going explain what direct value richness (well after we define rich) brings to user experience. We will also go through exercises where we design a project together, and we will deconstruct existing comparative web-applications to learn what succeeds and what doesn’t and why. Lastly, we will discuss both the building blocks and patterns of web-applications and what are the techniques you can use to better document and communicate richness over time to your project teams and clients.

Go here to learn more about Designing Rich Internet Applications

Sketching
This course is actually an evolution of my own personal thinking. It is largely inspired by Bill Buxton’s book, “Sketching User Experience” and inspired by my teaching that I’ve done for SmartExperience.org the last 2 years.

I have taught some 200 or so students in the last 2 years and during that time it has become apparently clear that many UX practitioners (maybe you) have not been exposed to one of the most fundamental of design tools–Sketching. There is a single foundational design discipline from interior > industrial or architecture > fashion that does not use sketching as a primary method for generating and communicating ideas.

It is primarily this concept of using sketching as a tool for generating ideas that we will explore in this workshop, but we will also look at ways to communicate the special needs of interaction design in a sketching space. Finally we will look at sketching techniques outside of drawing.

I’m very excited about this first workshop on Sketching. I think it will be one of many that I do over the next few years and it will evolve from this starting point. I hope you can join me and contribute to what I think will be one of the more important educational programs for the user experience community.

Go here for more information and to register for Sketching for Interaction Design

Register for both workshops and get even a bigger discount and add on to that discount with my discount code — Synapse.

Oh!! and if you register before Sept 25th you even get more of a discount.

Check out SmartExperience.org for all the details.

I listen to music all the time. (It stops the voices.) But I have had this recurring them in my head. The songs I truly love just feel like air. Like they are part of the landscape, like a natural emergence.

And while technologically based interaction design is relatively new compared to say music or sculpture, the idea that Michaelangelo described of him liberating the statue from the marble really rings true for almost any practice of applied creativity. It is why in the end that applied quantitative research within interaction design is also the death of it as an applied creative practice. But that’s a separate story.

I would like to posit that really great design is like great music or dance or painting or sculpture or architecture–The very best examples just feel like they’ve always been there, like they should have always existed, like they just fit.

What makes this particularly difficult for interaction design, unlike sculpture or music is that our craft is not so well defined. Our ability to pre-articulate, or even imagine what is “missing” has not been fully realized yet. But what also makes it difficult is that we as a practitioner community are ultra cynical, which moves us past constructive critique into the realm of dismissive way too quickly. This means that we have hindered our ability to discover micro-interactions of great value intermixed with macro-interactions which are poor.

Further, the conceiver and the executioner are not the same person quite often, or the conceiver does not have the appropriate level of skill to execute their ideas “perfectly” due to the level of technical complexity involved. Our reliance on others, and our lack of expert attention to making the forms necessary for our design hinders our ability to find that flow within the interaction design.

I’m not offering any answers here, but just hypothesizing ideas.