Relevant links:

• John's blog and on Twitter (@john_papa)

• Bill's blog 

• Bill's book, Sketching User Experiences

• Surface v2

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But beyond the name, what is this new thing? As far as I can see, the answer depends on who you ask. Ask enough people, and you will see that it can mean anything - which means, by the way, that it might mean nothing. I don’t view it that way. Yes, there are a lot of diverse views. But that also means that there is a lot of diverse conversations accompanying them, and I see that as healthy. Complacency is rarely a worthy aspiration for design. But out of the collective conversations one would hope that there is some convergence - which might be another term for insight or growth.

The purpose of this talk is to throw my own thoughts into the fray - for better or for worse. Taking my cue from the term itself, I’ll start like a good naturalist, and strip the term bare, and build from there. Starting with diving into the essence of the term natural.

Biography: Bill Buxton is the author of "Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design", published jointly by Morgan Kaufmann and Focal Press as well as a columnist on design and innovation for BusinessWeek.com. He is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and has a 30 year involvement in research, design and commentary around human aspects of technology, and digital tools for creative endeavour, including music, film and industrial design. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc. - where 2003 he was co-recipient of an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement. In 2007, he was named Doctor of Design, honoris causa, by the Ontario College of Art and Design, in 2008 became the 10th reci-pient of the ACM/SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award for fundamental contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. In January 2009 was elected a Fellow of the ACM, in June was awarded a Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, by his alma mater, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and in November was awarded an honourary doctorate in Industrial Design from the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Finally, in 2010, BusinessWeek named Bill among the World's Most Influential Designers.

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I haven't yet received my copy of his book, but my background for this conversation was a talk given last November at BostonCHI, the Boston chapter of the ACM's special interest group on computer-human interaction. In that talk (which summarizes key themes from the book), and also in this conversation, Bill lays down core principles for designing effective user experiences.

He proceeds from the assumption that sketching is fundamental to all design activity, and explores what it means to sketch a variety of possible user experiences. His approach is aggressively low-tech and eclectic. He argues that although you can use software tools to create fully-realized interactive mockups, you generally shouldn't. Those things aren't sketches, they're prototypes, and as such they eat up more time, effort, and money than is warranted in the early stages of design. What you want to do instead is produce sketches that are quick, cheap, and disposable.

How would you apply that strategy to the design of, say, the Office ribbon? When Bill talks about sketching, he means it literally:

You'd start with paper prototyping -- quickly hand-rendered versions, and for the pulldown menus and other objects you'd have Post-It notes. So when somebody comes with a pencil and pretends it's their stylus and they click on something, you've anticipated the things they'll do, and you stick down a Post-It note.

What matters here isn't the interaction between the test subject and the prototype, because it isn't really a prototype, it's a sketch. Rather, what matters is the interaction between the test subject and the designer. The sketch need do no more than facilitate that interaction.

Continuing with the same example, here's how an eclectic strategy keeps things simple and cheap:

Now that will give you the flow and the sequence of actions, but it will not give you the dynamics in terms of response time. To show that I'd use exactly the same things, photograph them, and then make a rough pencil-test video so I could play back what I think the timing has to be to show it in realtime. It's a combination of techniques, where none is sufficient on its own.

Later in the conversation, he challenges some of my favorite themes. Bill's skeptical about the notion (popularized by Eric von Hippel) that lead users can be co-designers of products. And he doesn't think that logging interaction data is as useful as I think it is. But he agrees with me that a key weakness of paper prototypes is their inability to incorporate the actual data that animates our experiences of products and services. One of his examples: MP3 players think in terms of songs, not movements, so if you load one with classical music you'll find a bunch of duplicate songs called Adagio. In such a case, Bill admits, you'd like to have used a more fully-realized prototype that could have absorbed real data and flushed out these kinds of problems. His point isn't that you should never deploy heavier design artillery, but rather that you should reserve it for when it's absolutely necessary. Much of the time, he believes, sketching is faster, cheaper, and more productive.