Meet Microsoft's guru of 'design matters' | Hacker News Reader

Meet Microsoft's guru of 'design matters'

seattletimes.nwsource.com

15 pointsGarbage12 comments

Obviously I am not commenting from experience with Microsoft's design process, just from the article. But what little the article says is deeply disturbing.

It says that Buxton told Ballmer they needed to fix the design process. There's your problem right there. If they want to turn their design around, the conversation should involve Ballmer telling the troops to get cracking. It needs to be Ballmer's passion, not the passion of some gadfly wandering around trying to evangelize the company while being bereft of authority or responsibility for any single product line.

Design involves making painful decisions. It's not just pretty skins, it's an exercise in leaving things out. That's intensely political, and the only people with the authority to play that game are the people who have responsibility for shipping the products.

Joel Spolsky (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html):

  At Microsoft, if you're the Program Manager working on the Excel
  macro strategy, even if you've been at the company for less than six
  months, it doesn't matter - you are the GOD of the Excel macro
  strategy, and nobody, not even employee number 6, is allowed to get
  in your way. Period.

Does this sound like the kind of place where Buxton can wander around getting product managers to make trade-offs between their precious list of check-box features and good design?

The goal is noble, but this is not the way to change Microsoft's behaviour.

> Bill Buxton is multiplatform the way Leonardo da Vinci was multiplatform.

I'm not a native speaker, but isn't polymath a better word to explain interest and expertise in multiple fields?

It doesn't say he's good at different kinds of math, though.

Kidding, but the average newspaper reader wouldn't know what a polymath is. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of smart people who couldn't tell you what a polymath is. It's a word that is not a common/standard word in the English language, but one that hackers tend to use and love. Kind of like "autodidact."

>He has the unique ability to speak about technology without actually talking about technology.

This sounds like a euphemism for talking out your ass.

If the article is a reflection all the substance about design the guy could muster, I think I figured out Microsoft's problem. What exactly has he contributed?

I know nothing about this guy, so maybe he's a genius, but I've never heard of him before this article.

Buxton is a prominent name in the field of UX, and the book referenced in the article (Sketching User Experiences) is a seminal text in the field.

I think the failings you point out are more about the inability of the press to shoehorn both introduction and meaning into a thousand words, and less about Buxton himself.

On a related note: I think every software developer would be well-served by reading Sketching User Experiences. There is a false dichotomy between developers and designers, to my mind; many of the lessons about understanding your audience and the process of "ideation" and refinement apply equally to both disciplines.

I've been following the likes of Buxton, Laurel, Tognazzini, Norman etc. since I was into HCI (oops, now it's called UX). Even attended a few SIGCHIs where they held court.

Sorry for being cynical but all I saw was a group of researchers that got into a groove with CEOs and could constantly glide from company to company preaching the UX gospel without actually making a dent in any company they touched. Don't get me wrong, it's a hell of a lucrative career path and I envy their ability to slide effortlessly from Atari Research to Xerox PARC to Sun Labs to Apple Advanced Technologies to Microsoft Research to probably Facebook Labs next.

(Actually it makes me kind of admire Google for not falling into the same trap. Yes they have "Google Labs", but they didn't create a palace on a hill somewhere full of beanbag chairs stuffed with $100 bills. They just go out and buy the tech that interests them.)

I thought seminal texts were by Norman, Raskin and Cooper. Buxton? Never heard of him.

I honestly hope you are a backend dev and not s designer. You'd have to go out of your way as a designer to have not heard of him.

I am sure wast majority of the designers never heard neither Buxton nor those names I mentioned.

Is he showcasing the extent of his expertise via the design of his personal Web site? http://www.billbuxton.com/

It looks to me to be a mock-off of Jakob Nielsen's http://www.useit.com/

The guy's office is messy and far from stylish. This is the design guru at Microsoft?!

I think the photo says it all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com