Tuesday 4/3/2007
Design

No video? See it at BrightCove .

Key points from the talk:

• The design process, while iterative, is largely a destructive process, where many many ideas are generated and nearly all of them are eventually thrown out. Quality at the end depends greatly on having a large quantity of options to sift through at the beginning.
• A sketch is not a prototype. Sketches are for ideation, for getting the right design, for working on the large strokes in advance of selecting a direction. Prototypes are for getting the selected design right, for usability and refinement in advance of implementation. Much of the recent writing about design processes have focused on the refinement of a chosen design.
• A designer should come to early meetings with five or more sketchy but viable designs and no favorite. This makes it possible for critique to be about the design and not the designer; if the designer has made up her mind, then a battle of wills is likely.
• “If a sketch was made in a forest and nobody saw it,” it isn’t really a sketch. A sketch is a social artifact. Cover the walls!