Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

I can’t leave the future behind

— Suze Woolf

Perhaps the most important book in terms of informing our endeavor is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz(Baum 1900). To some this might seem a strange statement. But think about our purpose: it is to experience interactive systems, before they are real, even before we have arrived at their final design, much less their implementation. Keeping that in mind, think again about Baum’s book, or the film version of it, and consider this:

Up to the point where Toto tipped over the screen and revealed the Wizard to be a fraud, all of Dorothy’s reactions were valid psychologically, anthropologically, and sociologically. To her the Wizard was real, and therefore so were all her experiences. ...