Five Sketches™

This week, I’m attending a few days of training in agile software development, in an Innovel course titled Lean, Agile and Scrum for Project Managers and IT Leadership.
My first exposure to agile was in Desiree Sy’s 2005 presentation, Strategy and Tactics for Agile Design: A design case study, to the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) annual conference […]

The more choices people have, the more likely they’ll choose something utilitarian over something hedonistic.

In an experiment by Aner Sela, Jonah Berger, and Wendy Liu, 20% of 121 participants chose low-fat ice cream when given a simple choice of two, but 37% chose low-fat ice cream when given a choice of ten. In this case, low-fat […]

Here are three techniques for eliciting more feedback on your designs:

show users some alternatives, so more than one design.
show users a low-fidelity rather than high-fidelity rendering.
ask users to sketch their feedback.

To iterate and improve the design, you need honest feedback.  Let’s look at how and why each of these techniques might work.
Showing alternative designs signals that the design process […]

I first heard Bill Buxton talking about sketching in Texas, at the UPA 2007 annual conference. I was running around with a video camera asking people what they thought of Bill Buxton’s presentation. Everyone loved it, including his ideas on sketching and design. But almost everyone I spoke to also said Buxton’s requirement for five sketches […]

I’m presenting the Five Sketches™ ideation-design method at the 2007 annual Usability Professionals Association conference, in Baltimore, USA. The presentation is titled: Teach your software developers this Ideation-Design process to reduce your usability work downstream.
It’s a short presentation—only six slides—so I’ve included three supporting documents on the conference proceedings disk. See you there!
Update
The slides are on […]