reading notes: Buxton – Sketching User Experiences

04 December 2008 By Kim 0 In Game design, critical analysis, reading notes, videogame major

Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences, 2007

heard about it at Future Play in Toronto

going to be useful in the game design classes – starting int he sophomore class for sure – is there anyway to use it in the freshman classes – maybe in the critical analysis – make sketches while you’re coming up with ideas for their board games, how do we do the social part tho – where can we hang the sketches to get ideas? Could we put bulletin boards in the lobby for a couple of days? Could we commandeer a bulletin board? Could we table in the student center? question i have – is the sketching part of brainstorming ideas in a group – before or after or instead of?

key ideas in the first half of the book

sketches are part of the idea generation phase
keep them disposable and low-fi
have to be put into the environment for people to comment on, to annotate, to make suggestions about and to criticize
sketches are not prototypes

Notes from the first half of the book

designers create hundreds of sketches playing with different parts of the product, different themes – to invite changes, suggestions, criticisms disposable, tell me what you really think because i’m not really sure myself
sketch not a refined proposal but a simple suggestion, “a tentative concept” – abandon, energy, looseness of the lines, no rulers, no worrying about clean edges, if too well-drawn people assume it’s a finished idea
sketches are – quick, timely, inexpensive (cheap), disposable (see cheap), plentiful, clear vocabulary, fluid drawing style, minimal detail (good enough, don’t need lots of detail, low-fidelity is good), suggest and explore – not confirm, intentional ambiguity
sketch is not a prototype sketches happen much earlier in the design phase – while ideas being generated – to help with the idea of fail early and fail often and learn from the failures – high uncertainty (since ideas still very much in flux should be coupled with ideas of low stakes and that’s what sketches are), prototypes are for when you’re considering usability/product viability
sketch supposed to be evocative, suggest explore, questions, propose, provoke, tentative, noncommittal
prototypes supposed to be didactic, describe, refine, answer, test, resolve, specific, depiction
sketches are social, they need to be shared with others who can comment on them, suggest improvements and changes, hang them up and let htem become part of hte environment – he calls it letting them “bake in” – “you live with it for awhile and with familiarity grows either insight or perhaps contempt. DIsplaying the work in juxtaposition with other material helps in the discovery and exploration of new relationships…it provides the opportunity for your fellow designers to get to know, and comment on, this “partner” with whom you all might be spending a considerable amount of time” (p. 154)
so sketches in his definition are not just hte pictures but the picture in the environment, the collaboration, the critique
he says most studios have cork boards, white boards, places to tack up sketches, sticky notes to add annotations, and there has to be a studio culture that encourages people to collaborate and annotate and to share all their ideas, not just what they think are their best ideas (corkboard not enough, need the culture too)
talks about other ways to get works in progress up for people to see – especially as more work is digitial – there aren’t scraps of paper and works in progress laying around – talks about the portfoliowall – a big monitor where digitial work is displayed and everyone can look at it and manipulate it in some ways
says some places have stuff out – idea has cabinets and a curator in every branch – all the same stuff in each branch so if you add something, you have to have enough copies to put in every office and curator puts info into the computer for everyone to see – they call them tech boxes – hundreds of gadgets, it’s kind of a mini museum
sketches don’t have to be drawings – they might be bits of film, or little things you put together with pipe cleaners and cigar boxes – still has to be cheap and disposable, he talks about being able to sketch on top of film – make suggestions about characters or setting – good for game footage too – director’s commentary on a DVD is annotation (not at the design phase but still example of annotation), Winky Dinks was annotation of a tv show (again not at the design phase)