Abruerton

Designing Microsoft

I just finished watching the Bill Buxton presentation from the global Expression around the Clock seminars. It is part of the webcasts from the Microsoft launch of its Expression suite.

If you are going to watch any I would recommend this and also the one by August de los Reyes, as I touched on in an earlier post. It will be interesting to see how these talented individuals impact on future user experience led Microsoft products.

The title is “Design for the Wild: Sketching experiences”. Bill Buxton is a senior researcher in Microsoft Research. Here’s an article talking about his job further.

It’s well worth the watch as he delves into his experiences into the growing importance of Human-centric design over a flawed Techno-centric methodology. He discusses that whilst technically communication and learning tools have changed dramatically since the slate and blackboard, the core social and human interactive aspects have fundamentally stayed the same.

Looking into modern communication techniques and tools he explains how recent products have started to re-engage familiar habits people use to interact, and how technology is becoming more and more invisible.

Bill goes onto provide some recommended reading:

“Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communications system” by Ivan Sutherland

“Pygmalion: a creative programming environment” by David Confield Smith

“Designing for people” & “The measure of man” both by Henry Dreyfuss

He also has in own book available called “Sketching User Experiences“. Which even has a quote on the front-cover by Bill Gates for what it’s worth (which must be even harder “than getting Arrington to link your site” ha!)