Sketching User Experiences by Buxton Bill

Author:Buxton, Bill [Buxton, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-080-55290-3
Publisher: Elsevier
Published: 2007-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

In the Introduction to this book I said something that read like a paradox:

The only way to engineer the future tomorrow is to have lived in it yesterday.

What Baum’s book teaches us is that if we do an effective job of following the example of the Wizard, we too can conjure up systems that will let users have real and valid experiences, before the system exists in any normal sense of the word. In all of this, the four most important things to glean and carry forward are:

• It is fidelity of the experience, not the fidelity of the prototype, sketch, or technology that is important from he perspective of ideation and early design.

• We can use anything that we want to conjure up such experiences.

• The earlier that we do so the more valuable it generally is.

• It is much easier, cheaper, faster, and more reliable to find a little old man, a microphone, and some loud speakers than it is to find a real wizard. So it is with most systems. Fake it before you build it.

I’m not sure who first used the term “Wizard of Oz” in the context of interaction design. I first heard it from one of my early influences, John Gould, of IBM. But regardless of who coined the term, the meaning is pretty well understood internationally (unlike the story): the Wizard of Oz Technique involves making a working system, where the person using it is unaware that some or all of the system’s functions are actually being performed by a human operator, hidden somewhere “behind the screen.”

The objective is not to make the actual system, but to mock up something that users can actually experience, thereby enabling us to explore design concepts in action and as experienced far earlier in the process than would otherwise be possible. Such a system should be cheap, quick to realize, disposable, not the real thing, and only have sufficient fidelity to serve its intended purpose. That is, it should have all the attributes that characterize a sketch.

Inherent in all this is the following rule:

Generally the last thing that you should do when beginning to design an interactive system is write code.

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