• We’re here – 9am Las Vegas time, and live blogging the MIX day 1 keynotes!

0902 Bill Buxton is on stage.

0904 Despite the economic downturn, it’s a great time for design!

Industrial design in 1929 was in exactly the same place as experience design is now. Think about it – what a stupid time to launch a business: the middle of the Great Depression! This was the moment when Henry Dreyfuss designed the classic phone. Raymond Lowey designed the Studebaker Avanti and the Coca Cola logo in 1929. Walter Dorwin Teague started in 1926; his principal customer was Kodak. They wanted to grow the market; he helped them expand their brand by producing a version in multiple colors in silk-lined boxes, these sold at double the price. What idiot would start up a design company in the middle of the depression? Yet every one of these companies is still going right now – and the lessons learned are still valuable today.

Industrial designers talk about objects; but it’s the experience of interacting with the product that is the true result of the design, not the object itself. I spent some time working with Trek – the guys who designed Lance Armstrong’s bike. But there are multiple ways to render it – as a basic image of product, or in a different stance that shows the essence of mountain biking. It’s not about the bike – you can’t tell what model it is, it’s the excitement, the energy. This is what we design – what our tools do.

0912 The question is, how do we do it by design, not by accident?

Here’s an example – an HTC Dash mobile phone. It’s easy to draw the phone itself; what about the phone interface? Now clearly, the interface is as important as the hardware, but it’s much harder to draw. That should worry you, because design is about rapid iterations so you get to the right version. What about the experience of using the phone? Here’s the challenge – if you can’t sketch it in a few seconds, how can you capture its essence? We need the same speed and versatility of designing experience, otherwise we’d better start rethinking the structure of the design process. And it’s not just about the phone – the same is true whether you’re designing websites, applications, or anything else that requires interaction.

0915 So how do we do it? When I think about design, I think you need to come up with multiples. You’re not allowed to have made a decision as a designer, your role is to ask the right questions that get us to the right answer. Designers don’t come up with solutions, they come up with provocative choices. The challenge is how to combine the goal with the budget, personnel and resource issues required to get to this point. If we have the right tools or techniques, we can be just as efficient as our industrial and graphical design colleagues.

Again, how? Well, certainly don’t write code, as a start, sketch. I don’t care how good you are at Blend or Photoshop, you can do the first iteration faster with a post-it note than on a computer.

How do you sketch time? Experience is a temporal phenomenon. To show the flow, we use a state transition diagram.

0919 You need to have as much detail in the transitions as in the states, otherwise you’re going to get it wrong. A guy called Ron Bird from the UK (http://www.2birds.org) has done some interesting work in this space, showing how each screenshot is connected in the state transition diagram. This is where the reality comes in – the state transition diagram is a good indicator of the complexity. My dream is that some day we’ll have a tool that will provide a way to combine the sketches with the state and enable rapid iteration between those.

0922 People think that design is a creative process. In fact, design is the most negative discipline you could come up with. You start with a million ideas and come up with just one! The biggest part of creativity is throwing away stuff without upsetting folk (and most of what you throw away is yours!) These things are far too important to take seriously; we need to change from sketching to prototyping; from ideation to valuation. We need a really important variation in the suite of tools we use.

0923 What about Microsoft? When I joined three years ago, thee was only one person in the technical leadership with a design background. Now there are about ten. There is significant growth in senior ranks joining from other companies, but others promoted from within. Growth isn’t just at a senior level. In less than two years, we’ve grown UX headcount almost 1.5 times. This is almost twice the rate that we are hiring technologists. We now have about 800 designers and user researchers. Two of the young UX designers who joined Microsoft recently created the Arc Mouse, for instance – a great example of design-led innovation.

Another example is the Zune – to go from a standing start to the Zune 2 in just nine months was a remarkable feat. It’s not about the device, it’s about the software and the whole ecosystem.

0927 We’re looking for a unified way to develop these interaction experiences, regardless of the target platform: that’s how we get the return. The Roman Senator Seneca once said, “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity”. What Scott Guthrie is going to do is to show you how we can help you in the preparation so that you can get the optimal experience.

• And we’re done! Next up – Scott Guthrie. We’ve got quite a keynote for you!