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.

Scott Berkun conducted a survey surrounding the topic of

“why designers and people who work with designers believe designers don’t achieve the results they desire”

His top findings:

The 389 survey respondents self identified as:

The top 15 issues, ranked by average scores were:

More summary and breakdown of the results here

I’ve been really into content aggregators lately. These sites gather information around specific topics and troll the internet to find out what is top of mind and any moment in time. There are many ways to do the feed but here are a couple that do it well:

Lou Rosenfeld’s UX Zeitgeist

Rating the top UX topics, books, people across the blogosphere, amazon, etc

and

perspctv

Following discussion trends for the major party leaders through news, blog mentions, and tweets.

What I would like to see is the evolution of this through dialogue. The artifacts on Flickr have a one to many relationship without discussion. But with conversation around, how a photo was taken, or how to reproduce the results of the photo, it produces that many to many dialogue that creates a rich set of tangents and a more human way way to stitch information together through conversation.

I guess in a way this is an extension to the post I wrote about APML feeds. Except the ambient feeds are around topics of interests instead of people. Still with these types of feeds becoming more prevalent and the future casting of the Aurora concept, feeds associated to people and topics will only become more popularized and embedded within the technology we use.

I created this model the other day to evolve an old model that was based on a waterfall methodology. I’m hoping we will practice this soon. Feel free to poke holes.

Two students from IIT went ahead and defined what ethnographic research is and how to conduct it. It was a great refresher for me. Thanks to Todd Warfel for originally posting this on his site.

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy

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

The Interaction Design Association held their inaugural design conference early February 2008. Unfortunately I was traveling in China and didn’t get an opportunity to go but I’ve been told it was quite the gathering of minds. For those who also missed it you can access the majority of the speaker sessions at Brightcove. Unfortunately only a handful include slide and speaker documentation. Stick to the larger talks (i.e. Alan Cooper or Bill Buxton) they have been edited and are easier to follow.

The New York Times recently reviewed Toyota’s Scion brand’s online marketing efforts: Scion Speak. What I can’t believe is the surface level evaluation by NYT.

“With an eye to the social networking ethos that made Facebook and MySpace wildly popular”.
What eye is that? The lack of social connection and a sense of place?!?!

“Harnessing, imitating and creating social networks to promote a brand.”
This is a social network?!?

What they fail to see is that the logo application is not integrated in anyway. Yes you can download it and if you wanted to put it as an IM icon you could but what are we talking about here? Well this is a car company, why can’t this logo be integrated with parts or decals for my vehicle? Why aren’t groups formed around these logos to create a sense of purpose or collectiveness? Of course these groups would need goals but even at the very base leveraging existing social networks to proliferate whatever message they’re trying to proliferate. You can’t even see how well your creation is doing amongst the vast valley of other logos: a high priority item of an ego surfer.

To me it seems like a lot of bloat that people may come to dwell on, even create a logo but there is no reason for someone to stay or return. The tool itself only allows for a limited range of creativity.

In the end, if this is the bar of a satisfied client, marketing agencies will be happy to know that they will be gainfully employed for the foreseeable future.

Stephen P. Anderson recently put together a primer on this topic. What business leaders are slowly becoming aware of is that it’s not good enough to be more efficient or feature rich. They need a new tool for a post-industrial world. One that leads to innovation. Design thinking is traditionally a part of the process that delivers great products and artifacts. Take that to a higher level and you can be designing ecosystems where many products and services live. This is knowledge that is vital for companies in a new frontier of competition.

This is why we’re seeing traditional B.Schools like Rotman promote their integrative thinking toolkit as a main differentiator.

Anyway have a breeze through these slides you should come out of it with a better understanding of “design” as a verb not a noun

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A new prototyping tool on the horizon from adobe:

” ‘Thermo‘ is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

Features:

• Use drawing tools to create original graphics, wireframe an application design, or manipulate artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools.
• Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”.
• Define and wire up interactive behavior, such as what to do when a user clicks on something, without having to write code.
• Easily design UIs that work with dynamic data, such as a list of contacts or product information, without having access to the actual data source. Design-time sample data can be used as a realistic placeholder when laying out an application, testing interactivity, and choreographing motion.

Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.”

See a demo from Adobe MAX Chicago. I haven’t looked through it yet but thought I’d share