I know I’ve been going on and on about the importance of the handmade in design, but I realized today that I haven’t articulated when and where handmade is appropriate. I believe I have implied that it is always appropriate, but is it? I believe that it is always important. To answer this question, however, I need to digress just a little bit. Before I went back to school, I was a user experience designer at Microsoft working on Visual Studio, a suite of programming tools for software developers. It’s an incredibly complex piece of software, with interesting interaction design problems but little visual design. I think I designed one poster while I was there to promote a scenario I had worked on in the planning phase, and that was about it. Oh, and the logo for IronPython, but even that was mostly my coworker Moneta. My team and I worked on some of the most complicated interactions I’ve every seen, and when we did do new user interface work, it was within the system that we had already designed to keep the software consistent.
Where would handmade elements fit into this project? Should they fit into this project? I’m pretty sure the answer is yes, even though I didn’t think about it at the time. There is a tendency at Microsoft to be feature-centric in design, rather than think about the user’s goals and how they are going to be accomplished. What my team did was amass huge amounts of user research and us designers would create scenarios that would be used to deliver a coherent set of features that actually worked together (I know, novel!). What I liked to do even when we weren’t in the planning phase and I was designing interactions, was to sketch out how the entire experience would look, coming at the functionality from different goals and different spaces in the software. I know, you’re probably thinking, “you told me this long, boring story just to bring up the importance of sketching?” And I proudly say yes. Before I started sketching those experiences out, I would create beautiful, pixel perfect walk-throughs of how the experience would look. The problem was, I was doing it backwards. Instead of sketching first and then creating the correct user flow, I was creating high-fidelity walk-throughs for research. I didn’t realize it at the time, because I thought I had already done my research, but there is something that happens when you are doing visual research by sketching or prototyping, rather than purely informational research, if that makes sense. Long story short, I gave myself tendonitis creating these walk-throughs and was forced, physically to go back to sketching. I found, as any designer does when they start sketching, that I would discover things in the act of sketching. To folks that do sketch, this is the most obvious thing in the world. But I’ve got to tell you, most people in the “real world”—and obviously this is based on the experiences I have had—only sketch when they need to get a visual idea across and not for research purposes.
There are two morals to this story. First, the handmade can be part of the process and still show through in the final product even when it’s a piece of software or a service. Second, it brings to mind one of the most important things I learned last quarter from August de los Reyes, that the fidelity of the prototype should match the fidelity of your thinking.
