Why Products Fail

(page 2 of 2)

Bill Buxton

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The difference between before and after is a chief executive officer who made design an integral part of the product-development process.

For Buxton, the need to rethink the development process by inserting design into the front-end is all the more urgent because new technology, such as embedded processors and wireless networking, introduce new levels of complexity to the challenge of product design. He argues that designers are uniquely trained to focus on the human side of product development, to consider the behaviors and experiences associated with or enabled by these new technologies. "To design a tool, we must understand the larger physical, social, and psychological context in which it will be used. And that's something designers are trained to do," he says.

This focus on "what designers do" rather than on the murkier question of "what design is," is one of the things that makes Sketching User Experience worthwhile for non-designers. Buxton offers his straightforward analysis of the design process, in concrete language and with plenty of real-world examples.

From Sketch to Prototype

This approach leads him to focus on the archetypal activity of design: sketching. Sketches, he argues, are quick, inexpensive, disposable, plentiful, offer minimal detail, and suggest and explore rather than confirm. (It should be noted that he doesn't limit "sketches" to pen on paper—a sketch might be digital or three-dimensional.) The value of sketching is less in the artifacts themselves than in the cognitive process of working through dozens of ideas, of considering as many options as possible, and allowing each option to raise new questions.

Buxton takes pains to distinguish sketches from prototypes, which are more detailed, more expensive, and more focused on testing or proving a single idea. If sketching is about asking questions, prototyping is about suggesting answers. Sketching takes place at the beginning of the development process, prototyping only later.

For an executive more comfortable with hard data, the value of these scraps of drawings, these glorified doodles, might not be obvious. But Buxton makes a case that could easily be expressed in a spreadsheet. Sketching is less expensive than prototyping, and far less expensive than trying to fix problems late in the development cycle.

Into the Lion's Den

Does that mean that companies shouldn't invest in prototypes? Of course not. But it does suggest that investing more money and resources up front to allow a small team of designers adequate time for product ideas will save significantly higher costs of trying to correct problems later in the game, when the production team has swelled to include as many as 50 engineers and marketers, and delays can cost millions. In fact, it was the delay of a software project by two years that broke Buxton's spirit at Alias.

With the book finished, he has rejoined the industry at a company that's hardly known for good design. "As I was working on the book, I figured the ultimate test of my ideas would be to give them as talks at Microsoft," he says. "So I walked into the lion's den and ranted."

The good news for the company, as well as its millions of customers, is that the lion didn't rip him to shreds. Instead, it gave him a home. Based in Toronto, he spends one week a month in Redmond—where he says he spends more time with the product teams than doing research—or visiting one of Microsoft's labs in Silicon Valley; Beijing; Cambridge, Britain; or Bangalore, India, where he weighs in on various projects.

"A lot of my friends certainly raised an eyebrow when I took the job," he admits. "But part of part of my job is to put design on equal footing with technology. If I'm successful, the impact will be phenomenal."

Jessie Scanlon is the senior writer for Innovation & Design on BusinessWeek.com.