Tag: Business Week

Microsoft’s Bill Buxton recently wrote an article for Business Week, titled On Engineering and Design: An open letter. In it, Buxton explains that developers can improve the user experience of the product that they’re building by learning three of the four layers that engage designers:

• Design awareness.
• Design literacy.
• Design thinking.

Buxton also mentions a fourth layer, design practice. He explains that design practice represents a fulltime job for highly trained professionals, and that it’s rare to find a developer who straddles both. (In my experience, small- and mid-sized companies may get by without a design practitioner, if their designs are constrained by the rules and standards of the operating system and hardware, and if their competitors do no better.)

Buxton thinks non-designers can easily learn about and appreciate the first three layers of design. On the third layer, design thinking, Buxton writes:

Cognitive science makes it clear that the strategies designers use in approaching problems or questions are different (not “better”) than those employed by those trained in engineering disciplines. Both strategies are complementary. Given the complexity of the problems that confront us, it seems to me that expanding our collective arsenal of techniques is something we could all benefit from.

This difference in problem-solving strategies is the ideation-judgement axis that I wrote about in Please exit your comfort zone. Learning to use these different strategies—at the right time in the design and development process—is what Five Sketches™ teaches to developers and other non-designers.