Someone recently brought to my attention the fantastic keynote presentation by Bill Buxton (the author of Sketching User Experiences) from this year’s Mix 09 event.
The concepts and ideas mentioned by Bill — particularly the notion of ROE or Return On Experience — resonated so much with me, that I think his vision should help anyone in the Design profession feel awesome about what they do (even though most people still don’t really understand what is it we do) and feel energized about the potential and future of any User Experience profession.
One of the points I completely agree with is the notion of learning from the past (both successes and failures) and figuring out how to exploit that past, not in the sense of simply copying what has been done before, but to figure out how relevant the core concepts might be, and figure out how to bring them over to our time, age and circumstance. As he points out, that’s the real definition of Creativity, Design, and of course, ROE.
The second point I loved, had to do with Experiences. He makes the point of how in the past everyone focused on the products and the services, but now we need to refocus and be aware that the real differentiation now comes from what a product, image, or sound might trigger in us! And figuring out the origin of the feeling we’re trying to provoke in our users is the real art of what we do.
“How can we tailor what we’re making to generate those feelings?”
The third point I want to mention is his assessment of how nowadays the Interface is just as important as the Object, yet it is really hard to sketch/prototype interfaces as fast as we do products in rapid iterations. He also added that it is not about a device/product/service, it is about the whole ecosystem (think iPod + iTunes). And along this idea of prototyping, he points out that going through multiple iterations is the essence of Design, in fact, that is the only way to explore a more broad design space compared to the typical process of choosing a single direction and spending time and effort refining it.
I think he summarized his concepts in a beautiful way:
“Our job is not to answer questions. It’s to ask the right questions to get us to the right question that would get us to the right answer.”
What do you think? How many different variants have you done lately for each of your designs?
You can watch the full presentation here, or download it from here (Windows Media Audio/Video file, 748 MB).
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