As always Jess and Gene have put together a great lineup for CanUX from Nov 16-18th. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend but if you’re into breathtaking scenery as well as a great intimate workshop/conference experience this is definitely one to consider

Dave Gray, Founder and Chairman of XPLANE.

Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. Founded in 1993, XPLANE has grown to be the world’s leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. Dave’s time is spent researching and writing on visual business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to educators, corporate clients and the public.

He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.

Brandon Schauer, Director of Experience Design at Adaptive Path

Brandon Schauer is an experience design director for Adaptive Path. He speaks, writes, trains, and practices experience design as a differentiator for business strategy.

Brandon’s passion for finding and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments, from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World. This insight with customers — plus a solid grounding in business analysis and a mastery of design methods — allows Brandon to help organizations define and design more meaningful experiences for their customers.

Brandon has over a decade of experience developing new products, services, and user experiences for the web, desktop, and devices. He’s keynoted, presented, and conducted workshops at such conferences at Business to Buttons, IA Summit, Designertopia, and UIE Web App Summit. Brandon is a co-author of Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.

Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal, Yahoo! and LukeW Interface Designs.

Luke Wroblewski is currently Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. and Principal of LukeW Interface Designs, a product strategy and design consultancy he founded in 1996. In 2008, Luke published Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Luke has also authored a book on Web interface design principles titled Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability and numerous articles on design methodologies, strategies and applications including those featured in his own online publication: Functioning Form. He is also frequent presenter on topics related to Web startegy and design and a former member of the board of directors of the Interaction Design Association.

Lisa Anderson, Microsoft Surface.

Lisa C. Anderson is currently the Microsoft Surface User Experience Director. Previous to this role, she held similar positions at Intuit and Autodesk in the Bay Area. In years past, Lisa acted as User Experience Director for several other teams at Microsoft: Windows XP, MSN, Real Time Collaboration. She was also Executive Producer at Corbis for several years, where she produced award-winning, high-end documentaries on CD-ROM (Leonardo da Vinci;  Critical Mass: America’s Race to Create the Atomic Bomb; FDR; The Barnes Collection). Her background and education are in Design, Art History, English Literature, Writing, Editing, Publishing.

Dennis Wixon, Microsoft Surface.

Dennis Wixon directs research at Microsoft Surface. Previously he managed the user research team an Microsoft Games Studios which is recognized throughout the industry as a leader in user research methodology. Prior to Microsoft Dennis was usability manager in the Software Usability Engineering group at Digital Equipment Corporation, where methods such as usability engineering and contextual inquiry were developed. He co-edited a book Field Methods Case Book for Software Design with Prof. Judy Ramey of the University of Washington. Dennis holds a PhD. in social psychology from Clark University.

If you haven’t already caught wind of the news. Interation 09 will be held at my old stomping grounds: the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU. Definitely looking forward to seeing the new grads, professionals and students at the school. I think all of you who do attend will be very impressed with the facilities. See you there!

Another small announcement is that I’ve moved to the Blast New York office. It’s a slight change of role but really a very fresh and exciting opportunity. Will be seeing a lot of you shortly at the many great local groups

As always, Jess/Gene and the gang are hosting CanUX, a Canadian User Experience workshop, Nov 25-27 in Banff. The lineup looks terrific:

• Lou Rosenfeld, founding figure in modern information architecture, author of the best selling Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and publisher at Rosenfeld Media.
• Dave Armano, VP, Experience Design for Critical Mass. An active thought leader in the industry, David authors the popular Logic + Emotion blog currently ranked in the top 20 media + marketing blogs according to Advertising Age.
• Derek Featherstone, leading authority on accessibility and its implications for user experience.
• Gene Smith, author of the definitive book on tagging, coming early 2008 from New Riders, and principal at nForm User Experience.
• The Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble, world-renowned facilitators who work to help executives develop leadership capacity through the combination of the arts, creativity, and leadership principles.
• Kes and Sue Sampanthar, founders of Metamemes, producer of generative thinking tools and experts in moving beyond brainstorming for innovation.
• Jess McMullin, business and design evangelist, advocate for increasing practitioners’ influence in the organizations they serve, CanUX program chair and nForm User Experience founder.
• Brad Nemer, Product Portfolio Manager for Motorola’s Asian 3G business, and pioneer in combining business and design thinking.

If you’re want to find a very inclusive, intensive workshop with the beautiful Canadian Rockies as your inspiration, this should definitely be an event you consider.

Anthony Hempell, my manager at BlastRadius, decided that we should try and submit something for the IA Summit 07 in Las Vegas. So we submitted a presentation that talks about the changes in documentation style while communicating rich interaction. This is where the page does not refresh but many interaction states can exist. Depending on the problem a variety of solutions are available from storyboarding, frame by frame interaction, sequential walkthroughs, prototypes, and much more.

Well, we got word last week our submission had been accepted so now comes the hard part of sifting through all the examples and creating a compelling presentation. We hope to touch on a range of documentation that people are currently using and hopefully show some concrete examples of successes and failures through case studies.

The current abstract for our presentation (scroll down to the “IA for Rich Interaction: Tools and Techniques from the Trenches”)

Hope to see you there!

Just came back from a trip to NYC. Just a sensational buzz in that city. I’ll be posting some real content shortly, just wanted to update you on the feed situation. You can select either feed now, my wizard like skills have them both pointing to the right place.

Let me know if you’re experiencing problems.

Hey guys, anybody who is subscribed to the old feed @ http://feeds.feedburner.com/serendipitydoo needs to switch over to http://feeds.feedburner.com/serendipitydoo2 if they want updated content. The sidebar should be linking to the new feed now.
If anybody knows how I can automatically have the old feed point to the new feed I’m open to suggestions. (I’m sure it’s easy but I have no clue how to do it )

Until I figure out how to get some of my old posts back in their original form I’m going put up some old content. (Minus the pictures and youtube links but it’s something to read for now )

I’ve been hit by blog spam! It’s ok not that many people were commenting so I will be removing comments at some point (unless there is a better solution?). On another note the annual Canadian User Experience Workshop: Canux 2006 - Sept 14 to 16 is going once again in Banff.

If you have the chance to go to the event I’d highly recommend it. It’s an intimate venue set in an amazing facility (Banff Centre) with beautiful cascading mountains as your backdrop. It feels a lot less like a networking event and much more about getting together with your peers and growing your knowledge.

As for myself I’ve made as many attempts as I could to try to get to this workshop but it looks like I won’t be able to make it for this year. (BTW any pictures you see of me on the site most likely represent Adrian in an inebriated state.)

I’ve started posting at iaslash. It’s a news website put on by the IA Institute for all things related to information architecture.

As my most recent post on iaslash suggests, you should check out a great series of articles by Christopher Fahey on User Research as well as a couple of great blog posts by Peter Merholz – Emergent IA and Gene Smith – How do people co-create information environments? around emergent IA.

So a lot of things have happened since my last post. I got a job in Vancouver and will be back in town June 9th on ward. It also means I miss Jeff Tweedy for the 7th? time… but who’s counting To the Edmonton folk who have kept me company I thank you wholeheartedly. Moving to a new city is tough stuff and you made my time enjoyable. In a perfect world I could pluck all of you from Edmonton and merge you in Vancouver but it’s not possible. Once I get my Vancouver number I’ll be updating everyone with new contacts. Please say hello if you ever make a stop in Vancouver and I’ll be sure to do the same when I return to Edmonton. New and exciting web related postings will begin once I settle in