INTERACT 2005: Buxton challenges HCI to understand Design Skills

'We have a terrible track record in creating successful new products,' began Bill Buxton of Buxton Design in a keynote designed to shake up the audience at the IFIP TC13 conference, INTERACT 2005. Buxton is near completing a book that will look at the move from designing products to designing for experience and what it means for practice so he had a number of considered points to make. Sitting in Rome was an international mix of HCI, design and computing researchers. Over the following hour, he took this assembly through some of the thinking that informs the book, emphasising the value good designers bring in a market where the cost of innovating grows exponentially as the code gets bigger.

Designing for experience comes with a whole new level of complexity, he argued. This is especially true in the emerging world of information appliances, reactive environments and ubiquitous computing. His concern is that our current training and work practices are not adequate to meet the demands of this level of design. He gave his opinion that those coming from a computer science background do not have sufficient grounding in design, at least in the sense that would be recognised by an architect or industrial designer.

'Where do you spend time?' he asked the audience rhetorically. 'Getting the design right or getting the right design?' Usability engineering is 'the business of getting the design right,' he said, 'making a silk purse from a sow's ear'.

Looking at the value that design skills bring, he concluded that the archetypal (and poorly understood) activity associated with it is sketching. Sketches are ideas caught in an unfinished form and demonstrably unready and disposable. They are 'hand-drawn and messy' so that 'first stages look like first stages' and are not captured as beautiful things that look complete before time. And he talked about the need for considerable branching of ideas before the closing down of choice, rather than the practice of working from the beginning for a converging path, as many less disciplined developers do. 'Openmindedness, humility, discovery and learning' are key, with perhaps five out of hundreds of ideas deemed worth taking forward to discuss. 'It has no relationship to how HCI works,' he said.

He drew attention to designers' heightened ability to read sketches, regardless of their ability to draw them. 'It takes almost as much creativity to understand a great idea as to have it,' he said a little bitterly of the challenge of getting others to commit to a good design - especially senior management. He pointed to how Apple's iPod designers had been employed in the studios under the previous three presidents before Steve Jobs took back over, but that it took Jobs' return to support creativity in the company and recognise their ideas. 'As designers, we spend more time designing the organisation and the attitudes of the people around the process,' he said, estimating that only 20% of effort is spent designing the thing itself.

Dwelling on sketching and its uses, he contrasted it with prototyping: a sketch 'suggests', where a prototype 'describes', he said. And he showed that low-fi prototypes and sketches might actually look the same, but be used with different intentions. He gave suggestions of 'sketching' interactive systems by making rough and ready examples of how things would work – not a representational version, he stressed, but something that indicates potential and that can be read as such. He talked through Wizard of Oz methods in this context too.

'But I hate the "paper prototyping" term as absorbed by usability,' he said. 'It is not cheap, fast or disposable to run five users past it'.

Criticism, where it came, was a little defensive, pointing out that in describing how designers generate many options and then whittle them down, Buxton had not acknowledged the role of user research.

But clarifying his understanding of what value university research might bring, Buxton concluded questions by suggesting that in using universities for R&D, companies are destroying them. 'Research feeds design: it's not part of it,' he said. 'It is the equivalent of the pre-production stage in films.'

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