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meshU schedule

February 10, 2009 by davidcrow

meshu I’m a big fan of meshU. I was lucky enough to speak last year. Mike McDerment has announce the initial meshU schedule today. Perhaps a little Rails focused on the development side (AideRSS, Unspace and Engine Yard – even 37signals on the design side), this might be a result of FreshBooks using Rails for part of their infrastructure. I hope that Michael and the team will consider expanding the technologies to include things like PHP and Drupal, jQuery, other MVC frameworks, other mobile & rich client development environments, configuring your development environment.

The initial schedule looks great for designers and developers. It’s hands-on practical exposure to leading Web 2.0 technologies, techniques and patterns. meshU is a bargain, it’s $289 to attend ($25 for a limited number of student tickets). It fits right into a similar spot that TechDays filled for developers on the Microsoft stack. Way less expensive than Mix, PDC or Web2Expo particularly when you remove the travel costs. I love seeing world-class talent and conversation happening in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver (yes, I know that meshU is only in Toronto – for now).

Design

  • Ryan Singer, 37signals – Value Judgements in Interface Design
  • Bruce Philp, GWP Brand Engineering – Ten Keys to a Branded User Experience

Development

  • Chris Wanstrath, GitHub – Building a Business with Open Source
  • Ilya Grigorik, AideRSS – Event-Driven Architectures
  • Pete Forde, Unspace – Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
  • Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Engine Yard – Building Scalable/Decoupled Web Architecture

Management

  • Dominic Bortolussi, The Working Group – Experiments on selling agile development projects. Are Estimates the new ‘Spec’?
What: meshU
Registration: $289 – Limited number of student tickets at $25
When: Monday, April 6, 2009 (all day)
Where: MaRs Discovery District Auditorium

Toronto, Ontario

Filed Under: Articles, Events, Toronto Tagged With: Design, Development, management, meshu, rails

A web without windows

January 28, 2009 by davidcrow

moz_design_challenge_logoCan’t help but love the shot at Microsoft in the latest Mozilla Labs Design Challenge post. Nice.

No windows, no unnecessary trappings.

I’m sure that this was not intentionally aimed at Microsoft’s IE8 RC1 announcement. But it made me laugh. It’s hard to imagine the world without the trappings of the personal computer. This is one of the unique challenges presented by August de los Reyes about Predicting the Past. I’ve been thinking more about personal health data, and thinking about how to build solutions aimed at informing and altering behaviour. Not on the scale of transformation that the Office Labs and MSR teams did with Future of personal health concept.  The video storyboards used in the Aurora Concept and the MSR Future of Healthcare videos are a great medium for students to express the complexity of the environment and the changes they see in predicting the future.

The question posed by the Mozilla Labs team is about extending the interpretation of the web. What does a user experience look like if the web is ubiquitous?

The Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. Our aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

It’s an interesting outreach to inspire and engage members of the Web community. It builds on the work that Mozilla did with Adaptive Path on the Aurora Concept exploring the future directions and ideas for Mozilla as a browser. The Design Challenge Spring 2009 asks 20 students to answer the following questions:

“What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.”

It’s an interesting question and it provokes a series of other questions:

  • What does the Web really mean?
  • What does the Web mean in the context of a device? Does the device have local storage? local computation?
  • What assumptions as designers are we making about bandwidth? latency? interaction? behaviour?

The question of what is the Web and how individuals and groups interact, communicate and collaborate is really interesting. I hope that design students will document their assumptions about the hardware, software, networking infrastructure, carriers and to make their visions real.

As the Web becomes even more ubiquitous, we’ll never have to leave it. Whether it’s on touch tables, giant wall-sized screens, mobile devices, or just our computers, exploring the interactions for browsing a windowless Web will become ever-more important in the next couple of years.

Great opportunity for 20 design students to design a vision for the future. Plus they’ll get to work with Beltzner, Madhava, Aza, Alex and the rest of the team at Mozilla. 

Filed Under: Articles, Community, Design, Innovation Tagged With: Design, futuring, mozilla, predictions, web+design

Trapeze – Usability Specialist

August 24, 2008 by davidcrow

Toronto, ON

Trapeze (www.trapeze.com), a leading interactive marketing agency is seeking a talented Usability Specialist to help contribute to the design and development of projects for clients such as: Bonefish Grill, CBS Television, Cineplex, Disney, Jaguar, LandRover, Mattel, MTV, Paramount, Pizza Hut and others.

Responsibilities

As a Usability Specialist with Trapeze, you’ll be accountable for:

  • Participating in project kickoff meetings, ideation sessions, design reviews
  • Conducting comprehensive usability site reviews
  • Researching, analyze and help define user needs and design approaches
  • Formulating UX concepts based on client documentation, business objectives/requirements, and best practices
  • Documenting functional aspects, behaviours and experiences with the following
    deliverables:
    • mental models
    • user contextual maps
    • information maps
    • information architecture diagrams
    • wireframes and functional prototypes

Requirements

  • Understanding of information design, metadata and user centered design principles and methods
  • Proficient in choice of IA, prototyping, and diagramming application (Visio, Axure, Omnigraffle, etc.)
  • Strong analytical skills and attention to detail
  • Effectively communicate designs and concepts visually and verbally
  • Familiar with industry trends in usability
  • Organized and ability to prioritize

Nice to Have

  • Qualitative and quantitative research skills
  • Experience with:
    • facilitating usability testing, focus groups, customer interviews, card sorting
    • survey design and implementation
    • developing research-based personas
    • data and statistical analysis

Key Benefits

Strong written and verbal communication skills

  • Able to work under tight timelines for demanding clients.
  • A good team player, with effective people management skills.
  • Ability to effectively solicit input from other skilled team members before deciding upon the best approach.
  • Understanding the big picture with a sense of empathy for the end user

Package/Benefits

  • – Competitive compensation plan
  • – Comprehensive health benefits plan (medical, dental, life insurance and disability)
  • – Excellent working conditions
  • – Career advancement opportunities

To Apply

Email your current resume to careers@trapeze.com with the words “Usability Specialist” in the subject line. No calls, drop-ins or faxes, please.

Filed Under: Jobs, Toronto Tagged With: Design, ia+jobs, Toronto, ux+jobs, wireframes

Johnny Bunko and comics

May 7, 2008 by davidcrow

JohnnyBunko-DanPink

Dan Pink has released his latest career book, Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, it’s a manga book with all of that advice you wish someone had given you. Over a bourbon last night, Eli Singer and I were reflecting on manga, well Scott Pilgrim, and career paths. I was saying that I never imagined that I would be and “Evangelist”, this honestly wasn’t on my career career path at any point. It feels like a “career choice based on fundamental reasons”, something that I thought would be inherently valuable regardless of what it may lead to.

Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen provides a beautiful summary of Johnny Bunko. The slides have only text or photographs from istockphoto.com. It’s 6 simple lessons about building a successful career that all students should take the time to read.

SlideShare | View | Upload your own

Comics are a great medium for telling stories.They allow artists and authors to create compelling characters in rich, believable worlds using nothing more than pictures. Kevin Cheng has shown that comics are a great medium for convey concepts including unbuilt sofware. Scott McLeod has published a series of books on the art form of comics as a communication tool including:

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
by Scott Mccloud

Read more about this book…

Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form
by Scott Mccloud

Read more about this book…

Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
by Scott Mccloud

Read more about this book…

Dan Roam‘s new book The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures has a great set of techniques and tools for those of you who can’t draw. The VizThink community is a group of visual thinks to share their philosophies, experiences and approaches for using visualization for learning and communication. (VizThink has hired Ryan Coleman as their Chief Community Evangelist. And we’re back to the career discussion, I wonder if Evangelist was on Ryan’s path). If “The MFA is the New MBA“, then the visualization and communication tools presented are the foundations for the next generation of leaders and CEOs. And your career path might not have included becoming a designer, but there is obviously some market exchanges that can happen when, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
by Dan Roam

Read more about this book…

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter)
by Garr Reynolds

Read more about this book…

Filed Under: Articles, Design, Entrepreneurship Tagged With: communication, Design, ryancoleman, visualization

Subject to Change

April 25, 2008 by davidcrow

adaptivepath-subject-to-changeI picked up a copy of Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World by my Adaptive Path friends Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, and David Verba. The book presents a toolset for a “flexible design process” to embrace user behaviours and motivations and an ever changing, unpredictable environment.

Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It’s a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today’s environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations.

The process reminded me of the outstanding work on Charmr – A Design Concept for Diabetes Management Devices. Charmr is Adaptive Path’s response to an Open Letter to Steve Jobs from Amy Tenderich asking for some of that Jonathan Ive magic to redesign insulin pumps. The Charmr Project was a 9 week long project completed by an Adaptive Path team including: Dan Saffer, Rachel Hinman, Alexa Andrzejewski, Rae Brune, Sebastian Heyke and Jamin Hegemin.

The process and timeline:

  • 3 weeks learning about diabetes and talking to patients and experts
  • 1 week analyzing and taking in all the data gathered
  • 2 weeks concepting – creating as many ideas around the design principles
  • Narrow the ideas to a single idea
  • 3 weeks creating the visual and interaction design to create a movie to explain the vision and finally an Experience Blueprint [PDF – 4Mb]

The most interesting part is that before the concepting and design work, is the creation of the six primary design principles:

    1. Wear it during sex. Make the product elegant, discreet, and comfortable.
    2. Make better use of data. Have the product use the data that is generated (blood glucose levels, amount of insulin dosed, trends) in smarter ways.
    3. Easy to learn and teach/No numbers. A broad cross-section of diabetics will use this product, so it cannot be overly complicated, nor difficult to teach. And while numbers are important, we didn’t want to solely rely on those for indicating status and trending.
    4. Less stuff. Diabetics have to carry around a lot of stuff. We wanted to be sure that whatever we created wasn’t just one more thing to carry around.
    5. Keep diabetics in control. The people we spoke to weren’t interested in automatic pumps for the most part. They wanted to retain control of their insulin dosing.
    6. Keep diabetics motivated. Diabetes is a difficult disease to have. Diabetics, in the words of someone we talked to, “never get a day off,” so keeping motivated is a challenge. We wanted our product to help diabetics set goals and be so easy to use it helped keep them on track.

The principles themselves aren’t interesting beyond diabetics. But that they were derived from the observations and interviews with patients and experts. How often to we discount the basic user research and analysis?

nikeplus

In moving beyond the features and functionality, and looking at behaviour and experiences companies are able to build compelling solutions like Nike+. Amazing, runners listen to music when they are out pounding the pavement. Understanding the experience has let Nike partner with Apple to build a great experience.

Nike Plus “combines the physical world with the digital world. We put a sensor in the shoe that speaks to the iPod, and you can hear how far you went, how long you went and how many calories you’ve burned, pretty simple thoughts. And then, when you dock it, you have a world of information at your fingertips. You get to see all that you’ve done, all your runs stored in a very simple, intuitive web experience where you can set goals for yourself.  – Trevor Edwards, VP Global Brand & Category Management, Nike

Nike+ is also really interesting because it is software above the level of a single device. Using the iPod, Nike shoes, iTunes, and the web to create a community to share playlists, running trails, and maps, Nike has successfully created an enduring, engaging brand experience.

Both Charmr and Nike+ are great examples of building products based on understanding and analyzing behaviour. Check out Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World for a toolkit for using “customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process”.

Filed Under: Articles, Design, Innovation Tagged With: adapativepath, charmr, Design, nikeplus, ucd, user+centered

Nokia – Interactive Media Designer

April 17, 2008 by davidcrow

Burnaby, BC, Canada

Position Description
Interested in joining a small team of highly motivated usability and user interface design professionals? Excited by the prospect of bringing best-in-class user experiences to Nokia’s next generation of devices?  If so, we are currently looking for an individual with talents in creating stunning interactive experiences to join our team.  You must be creative, passionate about what you do, and able to thrive in a highly collaborative team environment.

Your role and responsibilities will include:

  • Collaborating with cross-functional teams to brainstorm new design concepts for future music-centric software and services, translating them into mockups and simulations using best practices for visual and interaction design.   
  • Supporting usability and user research efforts by creating and iterating on simulations that may range from a single feature to an entire application.
  • Understanding and aptly applying Nseries and Ovi style and branding guidelines, working with other visual design teams to help evolve those guidelines.
  • Engaging in the user experience design process by producing quick concept designs & prototypes of candidate solutions, demonstrating a flexibility to iterate frequently.

Requirements

  • Minimum of 3 years of professional experience in a commercial product environment, ideally related to mobile and web applications
  • Expert in using Flash/Flex/ActionScript or similar tools to code robust and extensible applications
  • In-depth knowledge of Photoshop and Illustrator
  • Strong visual design sense and graphical/illustration skills
  • Understanding of user experience fundamentals, including user-centered design process, information design, and industry UI standards
  • Must be a highly collaborative team player who will thrive in a fast-paced environment
  • Willingness to travel to collaborate with partners
  • Excellent oral and written communication skills
  • BS degree or equivalent experience in human-computer interaction, interaction design, web design, graphic design or a related field
  • Must have excellent portfolio to demonstrate media design expertise

To apply, please visit the Canada/Vancouver section of our careers website at:

www.nokia.com/careers

We thank all applicants for their interest, however only those selected for interview will be contacted.

Filed Under: Design, Jobs, Vancouver Tagged With: Design, nokia, Vancouver

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