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Although times and locations aren't finalized at the moment I'll be at the Refresh Houston on June 26th to talk about User Experience in software design and discuss some of the recent Microsoft business around Silverlight, Popfly and Surface.
I hope to see you there.
So, because I've been rebuilding my feedlist I thought it might be helpful to list some of the blogs I find most useful and enjoyable (ie the first ones I couldn't live without so I had to resubscribe to.)
First up is David Armano's blog called Logic + Emotion (and duh, I link to it so it's a bit of a nobrainer). David's blog states he sits and the intersection of marketing, brand engagement and experience design. But also has a strong focus on how consumers are now active participants in the conversation. One of my favorite posts is his incomplete manifesto. If you want a succinct summary of what all great designers do (and you need to BE a designer to do this) check it out. Typically this is the first blog I look at everyday that is foucsed on design, branding and marketing.
Finally a note to the AIGA, if you ever spin up a print version of GAIN see if you can hire Dave to help. I'm not sure he knows it yet but I think he's going to be the Roger Black of infographics soon.
Second up is Creating Passionate Users. This blog also gives me a daily does of inspiration and who doesn't need that? Alas, this blog will also become a bit of a time capsule due to the still, on occasion, puerile nature of people that inhabit the internet behind a cloak of the anonymous. I'm hoping over time that the authors Kathy Sierra and Dan Russell find a new outlet in the future that makes them feel comfortable to share there wonderful insights.
Creative Passionate Users is wonderful in how it visual displays it's ideas. A few of my favorites are:
Today is an exciting day for Microsoft and aQuantive employees. It's also perhaps scary day for some folks too I suspect. I work for Microsoft but my thoughts here are my own on these recent events and aren't being derived out of anything that isn't public knowledge about the acquisition.
You can read this or simply watch this video (Which Dave Armano initially made me aware of--it's brilliant and done by an MS colleague in EMEA that we all owe a pint). I think the advertising world is fundamentally moving forward in a way that a lot of us have been predicting for quite some time and you can learn more about what motivated this video here.
Now not everyone probably buys the above premise or even that companies like Microsoft have any business here. On the one side there's a lot of folks within and outside of Microsoft that are getting tired of hearing about design, user experience and advertising--what's a technology and engineering company doing talking about that, or buying companies that, shudder, actually help people do that?
I regularly meet with designers, developers, architects and business decision makers and I'm often asked to make sense and parse out what Microsoft is up to and there is confusion and sometimes a feeling of being overwhelmed at the pace of the tools and technology that is coming of Redmond. This is a complicated discussion both within and without Microsoft, some see the trends and memes that are beginning to define our industry and some don't. The future of software is based on iterative and rapid development done in conjunction with the communities the software is designed to serve for example. You see this with commercial properties like MySpace and Facebook and new technologies like PopFly and even more professional level tools and technologies like Visual Studio and Silverlight.
If you're a designer at Avenue A | Razorfish you may be terrified that your offices are going to be overrun with a bunch of socks with sandals developer geeks that carry so many gadgets on their person that they appear to be wearing utility belts. We've got a lot of those folks. :) But we've also got a fair amount of creative folks too that do the exact same things that folks at Avenue A | Razorfish do everyday for their customers.
The reality of this acquisition is both simpler and more complex than these scenarios however. Microsoft is a technology platform company. Historically that platform was the desktop (A PC in every home). Today that platform is the network and all the digital channels that feed into to it or derive value from it (to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential). The desktop is still in there, so is the browser, but so are our phones, our televisions, our cars and a lot of other things.
Today's platform has multiple channels and multiple methods of distribution and there's historically been tension between IT and how to serve these channels where a desire to write once and run anywhere has trumped optimizing an experience for context, capabilities and even the business model that might monetize a given channel.
The coming revolution of three things is going define how this model is going to change.
One is the fact that Rich Interactive Applications are going to come to dominate our experiences. Channel optimization of experiences is going to be the norm where IT will be expected to give users the best experience possible in the channel they are using (where all the usual rules of ROI will apply). We'll have experiences optimized for the browser, the desktop and the other devices and environments that are part of our daily lives.
Two is the idea the experiences and software in general are going to start taking advantage of services that live 'in the cloud.' We see this in the Web 2.0 with APIs that let us access tools like photo and mapping services. Interoperability and agility with services will enable us to service our customers and offer capabilities that will be exponentially more powerful that what an enterprise could traditionally do on their own. This is well evident in the consumer space and will happen in the enterprise too.
Three is the fact that advertising will supplement and support this world of software and services. I've stated before that the advertising business represents a market of over 500 billion versus the software industry market size of about 120 billion. Like it or not these two markets are on a collision course. In fact it's going to be difficult to be a company in IT or Advertising with large footprint that doesn't play in both spaces. aQuantive gives us some powerful technology that rounds out our end to end capabilities that we want to offer consumers and partners of Microsoft. It also gives Microsoft a quick kick in pants as it continues its cultural transformation and journey into becoming a company that uses design intelligently and makes design a first class citizen in the world of technology with the body of knowledge and expertise that is housed in Avenue A | Razorfish.
As a platform company Microsoft's intent is to grow our platform capabilities by augmenting it with services and support those models with advertising.
This world will be fuzzy. Our platform tools and technology will need to enable partners and customers to pick and choose which components of our platform and services that they want to take advantage of. They'll need to work well with other platforms. Finally, they won't be absolute, people will still make and sell digital products, or augment the service component in a way that may NOT be advertising supported too.
AT MIX Michael Arrington interviewed (This link will take you to a Silverlight enabled video of the keynote) Scott Guthrie and Ray Ozzie on stage about our focus in this space and what was missing in that conversation was someone that could talk about how creativity and design is such an important part of Microsoft's strategy. Or at least we didn't have someone that could represent that discipline at an executive level for our company. This acquisition gets on a path of being able to fill that gap. We've just added a lot of talented new folks that understand design fundamentally and they've got a wonderful opportunity to advance the design profession in Microsoft in powerful new ways.
People matter a lot here (really) and I expect there are many in Microsoft that can and will learn a great deal from some of the folks in aQuantive. In addition, I think aQuantive will derive enormous benefit from having an end to end platform of technology and services that focus on the creation and distribution of content and software. In the end Microsoft is still one of only a handful of companies one can work at where you can truly chance the world.
There is going to be a great challenge for both companies to merge our cultures. If we smother what aQuantive is culturally we won't succeed, if we don't adopt some of the aQuantive culture we won't succeed. After being at Microsoft for my brief time I'm not too worried about that and I hope that if you're a designer at aQuantive that you'll embrace the wonderful opportunities that are going to appear out of this. I've seen Microsoft move enormously in how it values design and in sensing the market with our development of Expression Studio and technology platforms like Silverlight in a just a few short months.
Microsoft is a company that is successful because of how strongly it values its partners and this is something that I think aQuantive also shares when you look at how they've run their three core businesses. This won't change as we continue to work closely with web agencies and advertising entities and enable them to grow their businesses and become more successful through partnership.
The DNA of aQuantive will infuse with Microsoft and will give us additional wisdom and knowledge to be even more relevant and effective in these relationships around design, digital media and advertising. But I'm curious. If you're an application developer are you concerned about Microsoft's direction? Are you a designer? What do you think about what Microsoft is doing in this space?
Update: Forgot to run a spell check on this. I've corrected a few typos, sorry Mr Armano :).
I've been doing a number of user experience focused sessions across the midwest that are targeted at architects and developers (www.arcready.com). I've been recommending some books for this audience that I'll reference here as well.
Don't Make Me Think- A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition) is a concise tome about user testing. There are more comprehensive and exhaustive books but this is a great starter book.
The Elements of User Experience- User-Centered Design for the Web is a concise book that presents a user experience framework for building effective Web applications. When one looks at today's applications are a mashup of both procedural codes and dynamic languages I think book has new relevance.
Designing Interfaces- Patterns for Effective Interaction Design is the most rigorous of all of these books and it's focus is on understanding what different interface components are best utilized for. It has absolutely nothing to do with WPF or other Microsoft technologies but everything to do with how empowering WPF can be when used smartly.
Designing for Interaction- Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices (VOICES) is a book that gives an overview of the processes and techniques that inform the 'what to make' process of design. Dan's book is a great introduction to the skills that talented designers can bring to a team and also serve to educate you on the types of skills you should look for in designers.
Web ReDesign 2.0- Workflow that Works is a book about tasks that one would presume we've all mastered at this point but sadly haven't. In short this book is really about project management and tactics that one can employ is a Web-based or really any project that will focus on User Experience.
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