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

Chameleon: From Wizardry to Smoke-and-Mirrors

Only a god can tell successes from failures without making a mistake.

— Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

One of the people who learned from Gould and his colleagues was one of my PhD students, George Fitzmaurice. Like others, he realized that one could create the illusion of a working system using techniques other than having a human Wizard perform some of the functions of the system. In some cases, such as the example that we are going to look at, the magic, or illusion, comes by means of the clever use of technologies and techniques on the part of the designer. Rather than a human Wizard, “smoke-and-mirrors” technologies are applied to realize an interactive sketch of a concept in a form that users can ...