the UX girl's thoughts (42)

A “Flasher’s” take on Silverlight: Part II

kathroderick — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:49:23 +0000

I recently put up a post regarding how the team at BigSpaceship had developed one of the Victoria’s Secret sites in Silverlight. The blogged a pretty spectacular post on Flash vs Silverlight in that session, but wait, there’s more! Here follows part II…

Invite to Connect

kathroderick — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:23:14 +0000

I know quite a few of you are upset that we didn’t get to run MIX Essentials this year – huge apologies. We are however, running Microsoft CONNECT in Joburg on 12th November at the Venue at Melrose Arch. We’ll be covering the “What’s new” in web and UX in MS tech stack – and then breaking out into 2 tracks; one for designers and one for web devs. We’ll be doing great sessions on the latest in Expression Studio, UX Solutioning, and Silverlight. View our detailed agenda and register now!

SharePoint for Web BootCamp

kathroderick — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:14:15 +0000

I presented a session at the recent SharePoint for Web BootCamp at the Joburg Microsoft offices, with Michael O’Donovan. The 1.5hr session looks at UX and web101 to give some content as to why sexy UI is important and how this thing known as ‘web’ is evolving. Slides are available here from Slideshare

A “Flasher’s” take on Silverlight

kathroderick — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:49:00 +0000

Besides the question: “When is Windows 7 arriving?”, which is luckily for us – later this month – the next most asked question thrown out is “But why Silverlight? I’m already happy with Flash”. Apart from some of the partners I’ve come across that are head-over-heels for Silverlight, incl New Media Labs, Blacklight, DVT etc, it’s nice to see a hard core Flash developer/designer working in Silverlight and giving it the thumbs up (and more). See what Jamie Kosoy says about it in his blog post at Big Spaceship on his experience building the Victoria’s Secret All Access site. What’s quite nice is he mentions Terence Tsang’s site shinedraw.com as a useful resource for Flash des/devs wanting to see “how it’s done in Silverlight”.

Web 3.0 for dummies

kathroderick — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:37:36 +0000

Finding a clear definition for what Web 3.0 actually is, can be pretty hard work. Whilst trawling for data I came across this presentation by Freek Bijl. He presents the story with beautiful simplicity and easy to understand concepts.

Web 3.0 explained with a stamp (pt I: the basics)

View more presentations from Freek Bijl.

Web 3.0 explained with a stamp (pt II: techniques)

View more presentations from Freek Bijl.

Windows 7 RTM available!

kathroderick — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:58:38 +0000

Windows 7 RTM is available for download to MSDN subscribers as of tomorrow, 6th August. Considering the rest of the world will have to wait until sometime in October, this is awesome news for those on MSDN subscription.

User Experience Design & Design Thinking in Business (SA UX Forum)

kathroderick — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:24:58 +0000

Venue: University of Johannesburg, FADA Building Auditorium
18th August 2009
Starts: 6.00pm (drinks will be provided)

Please RSVP as soon as possible by emailing phillip [at] jh-01.com

Keynote address:
Sylvain Cottong (Integrated Place, Luxemburg) will be speaking on the use of design methods to solve business problems. He will explore how these approaches, traditionally applied to digital, interface driven experiences, can be applied in service design, physical spaces and business management problems.

UX Tools:
Kat Roderick (Microsoft, SA) will demonstrate SketchFlow, a new tool for creating schematics (wireframes) for design and prototyping. She’ll also be giving away a few free copies of the software.

Forum feedback:
Jason Hobbs (jh-01, SA) will provide a welcome and introduction to the User Experience Forum. He will feedback on a workshop held earlier this year where various representatives of corporate, educational, media, marketing and agency industries gathered to understand their needs from the practice of user experience design in SA.

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Venue and directions:
FADA Building Auditorium, ground floor in the FADA Building (the Design School opposite the UJ Hotel School) on the Bunting Road Campus of the University of Johannesburg.

The campus entrance is opposite the Gas Works in Auckland Park.
Enter in Bunting Road. Pass through the boom, take your first right into the first parking lot.
Park and walk all the way down (heading North with the Hotel School on your right).
At the bottom walk left over the pedestrian bridge into the Design School and FADA building.

About Sylvain Cottong:
After his studies in economics, Sylvain started to work for the first multimedia production studio in Luxembourg back in 1995. Along with interactive CD Rom productions the agency "352 Production" he also started to produce websites at the very early stages of the World Wide Web. Always interested in the usability, usefulness, desirability and business value of things, Sylvain then got interested in web usability and software usability on a more general level. In 1997 he became an independent consultant in user experience design and networked business strategies. During that time, he also was acting as an adviser to the Luxembourg government on eGovernment & knowledge management strategies as well on Internet communication.

In 2006, he founded integratedPlace, together with his partner Georges
Zigrand, who then came back to Luxembourg after 8 years of professional experience as an industrial designer in London.

IntegratedPlace is a design consultancy and a design management agency that
specialises in (user) experience design, social media communication, environmental design, service design and business innovation.

Sylvain has attended numerous international conferences in different areas of interest during his career and would call himself a "problem solver using design thinking".

About the SA UX Forum:
The Forum was started by Jason Hobbs several years ago to develop a local community of practice for user experience design in South Africa. The Forum exists through a Google Group and has meet-ups in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. Please feel free to join the group:
http://groups.google.com/group/sa-ux-forum

Please feel free to invite your friends.

This event is being kindly sponsored by jh-01, Microsoft SA and The University of Johannesburg.

Gestalt is here

kathroderick — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:47:43 +0000

The MIX team have been quite busy little bees this past while. Today they’ve launched a new feature – Gestalt

Gestalt.js is a library that allows you to write Ruby, Python & XAML code in your (X)HTML pages in a cross-browser, cross-platform way. It enables you to build richer and more powerful web applications by marrying the benefits of expressive languages, modern compilers, AJAX & RIAs with the write » save » refresh development model of the web.

Gestalt is a way of building more powerful web applications without changing the way you work. And thus, quite nifty.

Announcing: Blend 3 with Sketchflow

kathroderick — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:34:59 +0000

One of the main issues of prototyping or even trying to do wireframes for an app or site is the lack of tools around. I’ve come across some really nice online tools, but in my experience, most people are using Visio or even PowerPoint to illustrate wireframes to customers. Along with Silverlight 3, Microsoft has brought out Expression Blend 3 with Sketchflow – a supremely awesome tool that allows to you to do rapid protyping (or even just plain old wireframing) with real ease. This is not just for MS developers – anyone who needs to do wireframing and allow others to comment and collaborate on it – check this out.

More info on Sketchflow
Watch video of the demo at MIX09
Download the 60-day trial
Visual Kitchen for all things fabulous on Silverlight and new designer/developer workflow tools.

Ultra Lightweight & portable computing

kathroderick — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:32:54 +0000

I am now onto my 3rd laptop in as many months. When the mac wheezed itsself into the cupboard (waiting for spares) I moved onto the Dell XT2 – v v glam machine with touch and multi-touch enabled and running Windows 7 like a dream. However, my new found security was destroyed yesterday when a colleague asked if he could use the XT2 to demo and would I mind moving onto X. X being a Lenovo ideapad S10E. This little machine is smaller than A4, so very convenient for carrying meeting to meeting and whipping out of the handbag. And it comes in my favourite colour; red Built-in camera, 2GB memory, 160GB harddrive and Windows 7 - it’s smooth, impressively so. The biggest shock to my system is the size. For browsing I have to maximise browser (F11) and had to put my bottom taskbar to ‘autohide’ because some prompt screens barely fit into the res. For a more indepth review, look at TrustedReviews