On page 186 of Bill Buxton's book Sketching User Experiences, he has a great section entitled "On Hunters, Gatherers, and Doodlers." Bill talks about how designers are "doodlers" who produce great volumes of design sketches. He also observes that designers are the modern-day embodiment of hunters and gatherers, because they collect a great deal of reference material to inspire and inform their designs. I've posted elsewhere about how I use InkSeine to meet my needs as an inveterate doodler, as well as to actually sketch designs, but it may be the best tool ever for the hunting and gathering part.

When we deployed InkSeine at Microsoft I received a large number of bug reports, requests for features, ideas, and general comments about the application. When the dust settled a bit, I did some searches to pull those emails out of my inbox, and I took snapshots of individual features or ideas from each and arranged them in my notes. The little round envelope icons in the note shown below are links back to the original email so that I could reference it again later. InkSeine made a great tool to hunt down and gather together all of these gold nuggets contributed by kind folks who sent me detailed feedback.

The sad part is that if you look closely, some very good ideas and improvements that people suggested have not been added to the application yet. We are just a small team, but we keep plugging away at the biggest holes, and InkSeine gets a little better with every release.

But for now I'm back off to the information jungle to hone my skill at hunting, gathering, and doodling!

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