I am speaking (twice!) at the PANPA Conference (Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association) this Wednesday (10th). I'll be demoing Deepzoom and Photosynth and talking about adding depth to web content. Here's the blurb:
Taking away the toilet roll - new dimensions for newspapers on the Net
Portable, customisable, familiar, navigable, sharable. Newspapers in the real world have a lot going for them!
Now take newspapers online. It’s like reading your paper though a toilet roll tube.
In this session we’ll demonstrate new technologies that allow you to move beyond left/right back/forwards and add new dimensions to the online newspaper experience. Learn how to leverage your existing assets and deliver results through more compelling, more sticky experiences for online readers.
Shane Morris, User Experience Evangelist with Microsoft Australia, will demonstrate emerging online technologies like Silverlight, Deepzoom and Photosynth, and how they can be used to allow readers to reach out and touch your content through the Internet.
Related Posts:
- Silverlight for the Quiksilver Pro on the Gold Coast
- Aussie Web and UX highlights for Remix - have we missed any?
- Halo 3 on MSN
- August de los Reyes speaking in Melbourne 23 Sept on Microsoft Surface
- Shanemo and DelicateGenius do ‘Artists in Residence’
August de los Reyes, User Experience Director for Microsoft Surface, will be in Melbourne on Tuesday, September 23, before keynoting Web Directions in Sydney. August is a great speaker, and a really nice guy too and has kindly agreed to speak at CHISIG that evening.
August will be speaking about designing for emotion and how it applies to his work with Surface. I'm a little bit excited about this talk!
Details are:
University of Melbourne
ICT building - Lecture Theatre 1
111 Barry St Carlton
Tues September 23 2008
6pm for 6:30pm start
Related Posts:
- My Brush with Awesomeness
- Tatham Oddie and the Miracle of the Surface App
- Playing with Surface Demos
- Speaking on ‘Agile or Fragile? Practicing UCD on Agile development projects’ May 27
- Microsoft Surface as a Line of Business Platform
I love this Live Messenger Campaign highlighted by fellow User Experience Evangelist from the Netherlands, Martin Tirion. Built in Silverlight, it's a great example of one of the oldest user engagement tricks in the book: for a small action from the user, provide a big and dramatic response. I guess it's the most literal interpretation of 'empowering your users'.
http://www.overaljevriendenbijje.nl/
It looks great and is quite compelling, even though I can't read Dutch, and I'm pulling it down all the way from Holland!
Great execution by RedUrban and Lightmaker.
Related Posts:
- MIX: Microsoft Partner opportunities for Web and Design agencies
- Silverlight Apple "Staff Pick"
- About Chris Bernard
- Silverlight for the Quiksilver Pro on the Gold Coast
- Microsofties in Residence Silverlight Training - Day 5
Scenario1: when you browse the web for some foreign food, you come across words you don't know. You want to find out what do they mean quickly in your own language.
Scenario 2: you'd like to keep up with your friends status on Facebook. Instead of going to Facebook homepage and logging in, is there a easier way to subscribe to any update changes and be notified when your friends' change their status automatically?
Scenario3: tabbed browsing is a great innovation but it also generates its own usability problems when you have many tabs open at the same time and some of them are from the same domain. Something like the picture below. Don't you wish there's a way they can be grouped!
Scenario4: when you search in a web or browser search box, wouldn't it be great if the search starts to work immediately as you typing in the search term. This way before you finish typing what you want to search and hit "enter," it can already preview visually the suggested results for you. You can choose the result you want and finish your search much faster.
...
Have you encountered these scenarios or figuring out your own shortcuts to do these day-to-day web browsing activities? What about a single solution for all these scenarios? Let's look at the UX improvements in IE8 Beta 2 then.
You probably heard by now that we released IE8 Beta 2 for public download on Wednesday. I started to use IE8 Beta 1 earlier this year after the MIX announcement and found it was a great platform for developers and designers to build standard compliant websites and learning about integrating Web Slices and Accelerators (use to be called "Activities") into their web projects. However, I didn't see Beta 1 generating excitement in everyday users. IE8 Beta 2 is all about improving people's everyday browsing experience. The IE team blog has a great series of posts talking about IE8 Beta2's "Better Everyday Browsing" features. (post1, post2, post3) I've borrowed some of their screenshots and definitions to talk about the features according to the scenarios above. My teammate Jean-Luc David also interviewed a Senior Product Manager on the Internet Explorer team focusing on how IE 8 is important to Web developers.You can see the video here.
UX improvements
- Accelerators (Scenario1): "Copy-navigate-paste is old. Accelerators are services that you access directly from the webpage in the context of what you’re doing, letting you bookmark, define, email, map and more with a simple selection.Some Accelerators provide previews so that you can view the result without having to leave the current webpage. Clicking on an Accelerator opens a new tab with the full result." This is a great example of how web services can connect together seamlessly and help users to accomplish their activities faster and easier. In the picture below, the user wants to know what does "Kimchi" mean. He/she just need to highlight the word. An "accelerator icon" will appear, he/she can click on the icon to get a list of web services. Hovering on the "Define with Encarta" will preview the definition of "Kimchi."
- Web Slices (Scenario2): "A Web Slice is a subscription to part of a web page; when an update is available, IE8 bolds the title of the Web Slice so you know there’s something new to see." I've included a description from one of my colleagues talking about using Facebook Web Slice in more detail.
Web Slices – you can keep up with frequently updated sites directly from your Favorites Bar. If a Web Slice is available on a page, a green Web Slices icon 
will appear in the upper-right hand corner of the browser. You can then easily subscribe and add the Web Slice to your Favourites Bar in IE8. When new information becomes available, the Web Slice will “glow” for a second or two and then remain bolded. When you click on the Web Slice in the Favourites Bar, it previews relevant information (a slice of information) from the web page. Clicking on the preview takes you directly to the site for more information. The web slice I use the most is a facebook Web Slice. It allows me to easily tell when my friends make updates because the Web Slice is of the “Status Updates” area on my facebook site. Give it a try.
- Tab Grouping (Scenario3): "IE8 opens keeps these pages grouped together and color codes them. As you close tabs in a group, IE takes you to the next one in the group; similarly, if you open more tabs from the first site, IE appends them to the group rather than adding them to the end of all the tabs. With this, it’s easy to read and use all the related pages together."
- Visual Search Suggestions (Scenario 4): "New to IE8 beta 2 are Search (text) Suggestions and Visual Search Suggestions which are wired into the Search box. As you type in the Search box, the selected search provider can offer query suggestions and display search results right in place! Not only can the search provider provide text suggestions, they can include images as well. This way you can dynamically narrow down your search results quickly and get single-click access to the web page without having to leave the Search box." In addition to live preview search suggestions from your search providers, the search box also gives the lists of previous searches and the matching sites you've visited in your History. All these great search suggestions are in one place for you to quickly find what you are looking for.
I've just mentioned a few UX improvements for IE8 Beta 2 here, there are many more improvements which enhanced people's performance greatly such as the Smart Address Bar and Find on Page as well as provide users a more safe and private environment to browse the web. These are all UX designs coming from tons of user research. I'll post more detailed posts on IE8 UX in future posts. Like Office 2007, I see IE8 growing to be another great UI innovation for our flag product. It's in Beta now and is working in progress, we love to hear your feedback!
Qixing
Related Posts:
- Silverlight Gets Serious
- Mark your Calendars! Remix 08 (Melbourne and Sydney) is on
- Expression Media 2 Beta available for download - Oops, false start!
- Expression Blend and Silverlight 2: Preview with Scott Guthrie
- New Silverlight and Expression Blend Beta
I'll be teaching a half-day workshop, plus delivering an Advanced Session at Oz-IA in September. If you haven't been to Oz-IA before, it's definitely the friendliest conference of the year. Held in Sydney every year by Eric Scheid, it's a great (and inexpensive) way to learn about information architecture, user experience, and interaction design from practicing experts.
Advanced Session
Web applications are much easier to design than traditional web sites, right? I mean, there’s only one page in the site map! How hard could it be? Right?
Half Day Workshop
Friday 19th September, 8.30am-12.30pm
Half your skills as an interaction designer come from books, the other half from practice. In established design disciplines, the ‘studio’ is where designers hone their skills, rationale and intuition. Most people working in Interaction Design haven’t had the benefit of being able to explore design outside of ‘real’ work projects – hence this mini ”Interaction Design Studio”.
This workshop has been taught at CHI2007 and UPA 2008 in the US, but has never been taught before in Australia. (Well, apart from that ill-fated dry-run). So, come along for the Australian premiere!
Oh and Microsoft is sponsoring too
Related Posts:
- My slides from Tech.Ed Oz - WEB311Designing Compelling Silverlight User Experiences With Expression Studio
- Teaching “Interaction Design Studio” and “Back to the Future: The Next Wave of UI Design” at UPA
- Wireframing in Silverlight 1.0
- Resources
- Expression Studio 2 Shipped Today!
Here are the details for my sessions at Tech.Ed Australia:
My Breakout Sessions
The art and science behind creating a great user experience
ARC301
03/09/2008 12:00-13:15
A great user experience means more than drop shadows and rounded corners. It might end with placing elements on a screen, but user experience starts much further upstream, maybe even before requirements! In this presentation we’ll discuss the elements of user experience and how to apply them. We will talk about the role user experience design plays - not just in delivering successful end products and services - but also in facilitating communication and direction within project teams. We’ll cover a mix of tactical and strategic steps to improve user experience. If you could only do one thing to improve your application’s UX, what would it be? (You might be surprised.) What about designers? What do they do? How can you work effectively with them? This talk focuses on practical, realistic ways to ensure your next project delivers a great user experience.
Designing Compelling Silverlight User Experiences with Expression Studio
WEB311
03/09/2008 14:15-15:30
Expression Studio 2 delivers powerful tools to create natural and engaging user experiences. In this session you’ll learn how the full suite of Expression tools works together to streamline user experience design. With a focus on designing for Silverlight 2, we’ll walk through each of Expression Media, Expression Encoder, Expression Blend, Expression Design and Expression Web – highlighting new features and discussing where they fit in the user-centred design process.
In this session I'll be walking through building the RFID visualisation in Expression Studio. Hmm, it says I'll be using Expression Web. Need to think of an angle to work that in...
But That's Not All!
Also keep an eye out for the suability talk from my old colleague, Susan Wolfe from Optimal Experience:
Self Service Usability
WEB312
03/09/2008 17:30-18:45
Recently there has been a push by many organisations to shift more customers to self-service channels like in-store kiosks, telephone systems and the web. It makes sense - self-service can save organisations a lot of money when customers use more cost effective channels to accomplish routine interactions such as checking balances. The trick is ensuring that self-service is simple, speedy and satisfying. Otherwise there is the very real chance that you will end up with disgruntled customers and more calls to the contact centre. This session will show you ways to ensure that customers have a consistently good experience across all your channels. Trent Mankelow from Optimal Usability will talk about the keys to designing easy-to-use, customer focused self-service applications, using examples from New Zealand and overseas. The session will help anyone who is responsible for the self-service design or management, or anyone wanting a better understanding of self-service usability practices.
(Trent is doing the New Zealand version of this talk.)
And Also...
There are also a heap of sessions and hand-on labs covering Silverlight. So if you've been trying to work out how to get your head around Silverlight (including Silverlight fro Mobile), come along to Tech.Ed and say g'day...
Related Posts:
- My slides from Tech.Ed Oz - WEB311Designing Compelling Silverlight User Experiences With Expression Studio
- More about the Tech.Ed Australia RFID visualisations
- I’m a Motion Design Newbie - TechEd attendee RFID visualiser thingy
- MIX08: A Conference Summary
- Silverlight and Expression Resources on the web
