UX Eye

Hi,

 

So the event of the year finally took place :-) It feels as though I have been preparing for this event forever.

 

The Expression around the Clock event kicked off in New Zealand, followed by Korea, India and Russia, then we hit Egypt where I was presenting. The event took place during Ramadan and everyone was a little worried how this would affect the attendee numbers, however we had a full house, and more importantly a full house of designers :-) This trend continued to the other locations, Italy, Switzerland, Brazil, Mexico and finally Canada. For me this was by far the best news. Since starting this role as a UXE, I have been pushing for us to run an exclusive designer event, rather than a developer event with a designer workstream which is what we had been doing - wrong audience, wrong event in my book.

 

I was hugely excited to finally get the go ahead to run a designer event, however to be honest I was a little concerned launching our first designer event on such a large scale - would we get the attendees? Turns out the answer is YES :-) This event was all about showing what Microsoft can bring to this industry, we had a fantastic line-up of keynote speakers - all working within UX/design at Microsoft. Followed by live demonstrations of Blend, including demoing the designer - developer workflow, plus third party presentations from Erain, UPA and local design agencies. In addition we also demonstrated some of Microsoft's new products, such as Surface and Photosynth - very cool.

 

The feedback so far has been fantastic, I'm sure some of the attendees came with a view to mock us, however even they have to agree that the Microsoft produce stack is impressive. Now you may think I am just saying this because I work for Microsoft, on the contrary, trust me when I don't like something I make it known. As above we are still running developer events with a designer workstream - WHY - I will continue this rant on a different blog entry. But please believe me when I say I am genuinely impressed with Expression Blend.

 

If you are interested in finding out more about this event, including watching webcasts of the presentations, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/expression/events-training/globalevent/default.html 

Hi,

 

Microsoft has organised its first Global Design Event. The event will take place on the 4th October 2007 in ten locations across the globe simultaneously over 24 hours.

 

Keynote speakers include Bill Buxton, Don Lindsay and Richard Banks, amongst many more great names. The entire event is aimed at UX and Design, Registration is open now.

 

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/events-training/globalevent/default.html 

 

I will be presenting in Cairo, hope to see you there :-)

Hi,

 

Working with both Microsoft and London Underground developers, I designed the London Underground demo, which seems to recieve great feedback whenever I demo it. So here is a link to the video:

 

Unfortunately I have had to remove the video link as someone hacked it, linking it to some random video.

Hi,

 

So last week I finally completed my Europe/Middle East tour as part of the Microsoft ReMIX event. If any of you attended please send me your feedback, good and bad, as I'm always trying to improve my presentation style.

 

I'll be honest by the end of the tour I was a little fed-up of presenting, I have pretty much been presenting none stop since February, and most of the presentations were similar content. I'd really wanted to produce some new stuff but I really didn't have the time and the old stuff was what was being requested. I'm planning on producing some new WPF and Silverlight demos by November when I'm sure I will be out presenting again.

 

It's really difficult to create an interesting presentation, it might sound simple, pick a topic and talk about it. However there are so many other pieces to the puzzle, for example the location. As the presenter I have no control over the location, however this makes such a big difference, I recently attended a presentation delivered in a room without floor to ceiling walls. The presenters did a great job but it was very difficult to hear them as all the outside noise came flooding into the room.

The time of your presentation is another, I think the best slot is probably just after the keynote when the coffee has kicked in and people are waking up. I always seem to get the post lunch slot which has to be one of the worst, everyone is so sleepy it's really difficult to get some energy back in the room.

The next issue is how do you present your topic? For example I tried both live demos, building simple interactions in Blend on the fly, and Customer demos, showing more complex work I had previously produced for a variety of clients. I definitely receive more feedback from the later, however did this really give the audience what they want?

 

My plan for my next presentation is to demo one of my customer projects and produce a document to accompany the demo i.e. a step-by-step guide on how to build what you have just seen. I will ask the developer on the project to produce a similar doc so I have content for both the devs and designers. This will be a lot of extra work but I think/hope answer a lot of questions for the audience.

 

Any ideas please let me know.