In this small survey you will find the different topics that Archetype, Adam Kinney and I will be covering during the workshop. We have 3 areas we want to cover at the MIX10 Design Tools and Techniques Workshop: 1) Design Concept 2) Interactive Design 3) UI Development.

Design Concept are activities you perform while capturing the needs of your customers and putting together that early concept that you can then sell to your client, get their approval and get started. This early concept needs to look great and communicate the UX vision you have for the client.

Interactive Design is about creating compelling, rich and engaging UIs. Learning more about Animation, Effects, Transitions and Controls in Expression Blend.

UI Development is about learning coding techniques to bring up your UIs to the next level in terms of interactivity and richness. From creating your own Behaviors, Controls, Layout panels to Pixels Shaders and exposing all these in a Expression Blend friendly manner for designers

Fill the survey… 

Leave me a comment if you are have more comments or ideas. Archetype is a tremendous agency who have done amazing work with Silverlight and Flash. They will be sharing with us real world tips and tricks on stage. The format of the workshop is not exactly a lab but we’ll assets you can use to follow along.

As part of the CRE8 Conference last week in Miami, August de los Reyes and I presented a collection of the cool videos, websites and customer stories. Here is a great list for you with the best of best in Silverlight and UX.

Should I add any other cool website, video or customer story about Silverlight and Microsoft UX? Leave me a comment and I’ll be happy to add to the list.

August de los Reyes, Director of UX for Surface and I just came back from cold Miami… yes cold! I had to use a sweater all the time - It was sunny though and beautiful. My first time in Miami. I can’t believe the color of the ocean there - it’s all emerald. I’m looking forward to going back sometime in the future, in summer with more time to go to the beach.

One thing that wasn’t cold at all was the warm reception we got from our partners at AGI Training and GOA. We had a great time with everyone during the event. Thank you to all attendees who where there during the event.

Continue reading the full article with 25 Inspiring Silverlight Websites, Videos and Customer Stories here…

August and I had the opportunity to participate in the CRE8 Conference and deliver the keynote. I belive the keynote was recorded but I wanted to share with you all the links of demos we showed during the keynote. I think you will find this list handy as a guide of what is possible with Silverlight. Most of these real websites are built with Silverlight 3 and Expression Blend 3. Now that Silverlight 4 and Expression Studio 4 are getting closer the kinds of things you will be able to create are even cooler - remember that with Silverlight we now get Microphone and Webcam support, better and easier business application features among many other features. For Expression Blend 4 we are still not sharing some of the good and upcoming news but it will definitely be the most exciting release ever.

We’ll talk more about this at MIX in Las Vegas.

Partner Case Study - D’Strict UX Studio in Korea

Hello!, here is a summary of the activities Microsoft will host during SxSW. Hope you can join us! lots of opportunities to talk about Expression, Silverlight, Windows Mobile, Web Standards. Lots of parties too :)  Also in the Microsoft Tradeshow booth you can play with our new Microsoft Interactive Canvas… a great way to play with a wall panel with screens that react to your actions.

And on Monday 7pm don’t forget to be there for the PhizzPop Design Challenge finals!

For a full listing of sessions and after hours events, please visit the following sites:

SXSW Sessions
Parties/Lounges  

You can also follow Microsofties using Twitter:

@wtschumy | Will Tschumy - UXE
@chrisbernard  | Chris Bernard - UXE
@shanemo | Shane Morris - UXE
@arturot | Arturo Toledo - Product Manager
@seanseven | Sean Seibel - UXE

These are our daily activities during SxSW Interactive:

10am-6pm | Fri - Tues |INTERACTION AREA | Microsoft Interaction Area
Convention Center, 4th Floor NW Corner

High traffic physical presence in the main corridor of the Convention Center that will highlight Silverlight and Surface demos (to include partner applications), a lounge area, and attendee surveys to include a plant a tree reforestation incentive along with a Website Named Desire Poster giveaway incentive.

1pm-6pm | Fri – Tues | LOUNGE | TechSet Blogger Lounge, Sponsored by Windows Mobile
Convention Center, Austin Suite, 3rd Floor

Area in which bloggers can crash and work. In addition to broadband, a video recording area for podcasters and video bloggers will be provided.

12pm-6pm | Sat - Mon | EXPO BOOTH | Visit us at the Microsoft Expo Booth!
Convention Center, Grand Ballroom

Visit  us at the SXSW Tradeshow Floor with Expression Studio, Live Search, Azure Services Platform (to include partner applications), and MSN demonstrations. Meet the experts, ask questions.

2pm-6pm | Fri - Mon | VIDEO GAMES | ScreenBurn Arcade: Video game element of SXSW Interactive.
Convention Center, 1st Floor

Brings together new media, music, film, and video games.

FRIDAY, March 13th

8pm - 10pm | PARTY | The Rat Pack, Sponsored by TechSet and Windows Mobile.
Belmont Lounge, 305 W. 6th Street

SATURDAY, March 14th

10am - 11am | PANEL | Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused? with Danah Boyd, Researcher, MSFT Research
Convention Center, Room A

While many assert that “privacy is dead,” the complex ways in which people try to control access and visibility suggest that it’s just very confused. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water, let’s discuss people’s understanding and experiences of privacy and find ways to 2.0-ify it.

11:30 - 12:30am | PANEL | Microformats – A Quiet Revolution with Karsten Januszewski, MSFT Sr. Tech Evangelist
Convention Center, Room 10

Microformats are quietly changing the landscape of the web, achieving some of the original ideals of the “semantic web.” In the past year, we’ve seen increased adoption from web designers and popular web sites, improved browser support for microformats in both Firefox and IE, and search engines beginning to support microformats.  Come hear from the leaders who are driving these changes in the industry, and find out what the future holds for microformats.

3:30-4:30 | PANEL | Everything I Needed to Know About the Web I Learned from Feminism with Danah Boyd, Researcher, MSFT Research
Convention Center, Room 9

Feminism teaches “the personal is political” and the web shows that the personal is now public. Christmas newsletters and recipes are the social media of their time, and women are the key social nodes of our culture. In her comic and thought-provoking style, Heather Gold brings together 4 very different feminist and web thinkers to discuss what makes social networks strong and predict where they’re heading next online.

6pm-8pm | PARTY | SXSW Interactive Opening Happy Hour hosted by Razorfish
The Madison, 307 W. 5th Street

8pm-11pm | PARTY: SxSW Interactive Opening Party hosted by frog design
Mexican American Cultural Center, 600 River Street

Official kickoff of the 16th year of SXSW Interactive

SUNDAY, March 15th

11:30-12:30 | PANEL | Violating the Warranty on Your Touch Computing Device with Chris Bernard, MSFT UXE
Convention Center, Room 10

Simple touch computing is taking the world by storm in desktop, mobile, and environmental computing. The best and brightest are taking their gloves off, drawing inspiration from Star Wars to James Bond, and going beyond the conventional bounds of touch computing. See what design and technology leaders are doing next with technology like Microsoft Surface and other touch computer platforms.

11:30-12:30 | PANEL | Taking Responsibility for the Quality of Your Life with Brian Yeung, MSFT Design Strategist
Convention Center, Room 5C

How can we live so that things that drive us to be great don’t have to make us miserable every step of the way, and that the way in which we make great things can also make us happy in and of itself? This talk will discuss ways to think about goals, personal expectations, and boundaries, and how to take control of your own personal happiness.

2pm-3pm | PANEL | CSS3: What’s Now, What’s New and What’s Not? with Sylvain Galineau, MSFT PM; Chris Wilson, MSFT IE Principal PM
Convention Center, Room 8

This panel explores how major browsers implement CSS3. The focus is on finding effective and efficient methods for developers to unleash their creativity while maintaining cross-browser compatibility. The panel covers current implementations, future plans from the major browser vendors and some discussion of the current progress on the standard itself.

2pm-3pm | KEYNOTE | Nate Silver, fivethirtyeight.com interviewed by Steve Baker, Business Week
Convention Center, Room A

9am-11am | PARTY | FG Squared Party
Lucky Lounge, 209 W. 5th Street

Gathering of influential interactive marketers

MONDAY, March 16th

10am-4pm | START UPS | SXSW Accelerator, sponsored by BizSpark
Hilton Downtown, 500 E. 4th Street

Pitch competition featuring 16 top startups and showcasing some of the Web’s most exciting new innovations.

11:30-12:30 | PANEL | Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins with Chris Wilson, MSFT IE Principal PM
Convention Center, Room Hilton C

We’re doing *so darn much* with the Web platform these days, from cross-domain access mechanisms to new drawing and graphics tools. But in the end, we still have to deal with different web browsers. This discussion brings the leads from Mozilla (Firefox), Microsoft (IE), Apple (Safari) and Opera (Opera) together for yet another incendiary discussion about the future of the web.

11:30-12:30 | PANEL | Entrepreneurship in the Belly of the Beast with Chris Bernard, MSFT UXE
Convention Center, Room 18 BCD

Small is beautiful at SXSW. From Getting Real to starting up, the ethos is largely anti-large corporation. This attitude overlooks one of the most satisfying professional accomplishments: doing your own thing while working for The Man. This presentation uses examples to offer strategies for making the corporation work for you.

11:30-12:30 | PANEL | My Car is Talking to Me But What’s It Saying? with Jason Kriese, MSFT Autos UX PM
Convention Center, Room 9

We call it the 60 MPH User Interface. Challenges abound in designing multi-modal voice and touch interactive user experiences in the car, for directions, traffic, information and communication. Come learn guiding design principles, see examples from today and talk about the experience of tomorrow.

2pm-3pm | KEYNOTE | James Powderly, Graffiti Research Lab, interviewed by Virginia Heffernan, NYT Magazine
Convention Center, Room A

4pm-8pm | PARTY | Rackspace Cloud Lounge Party
Brush Square Park West Tent

BizSpark hosting partner sponsored party.

5:30-7pm | DEMOS | Sensorium: Exploring the Digital Universe with Next Generation Interfaces
Pangaea, 409 Colorado Street

Live demonstrations focused around how Microsoft is coupling computing hardware with software and Web services. Presented by Microsoft.

7pm-10pm | PhizzPop Design Challenge: Tour Finale
Pangaea, 409 Colorado Street

Register for FREE! Here…

Winning teams from each city present their applications in the final square off. Get more info here.

TUESDAY, March 17th

10am-11am | PANEL | Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable with Yousef Khalidi, MSFT Engineer
Convention Center, Room 8

The brave new world of cloud computing is radically changing how we build web applications. What is a platform, what is a service, and how will the future of web applications be built? More importantly, how do these various clouds compare, and what do the differences mean? Are they ready for your world-rockin’ startup? In this panel, we’ll get nerdy with technical details, you’ll yell at us, and we’ll argue why your app should already be in the cloud.

10am-11am | PANEL | Latino Digital Drive: Why this Audience Matters with Javier Farfan, MSFT Zune Sr. PM
Convention Center, Room Hilton A

An in-depth look at the growing Latin music market, why this demographic represents an alluring audience, who and how they should be targeted and in what language. What’s the secret and should there be an English crossover? More and more artists are noticing this community - even Beyonce singing in Spanish.

10am-11am | PANEL | Collabotition: Can Companies Work With Their Competitors with Niko Chauls, MSFT Managing Editor
Convention Center, Room A

Costless organization of people, ideas, and information has changed how we collaborate and compete. Social media companies that might be competitors are working together to beat each other; sharing gossip, using each other’s products and making the battle a bit more efficient. Will the cream rise to the top?

2pm-3pm | KEYNOTE | Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine; Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures
Convention Center, Room A

3:30pm4:30pm | PANEL | Brave NUI World: The Fearless Future of Device Interaction with Kristen Alexander, MSFT Xbox
Convention Center, Room 9

Designers and engineers are focusing attention on the NUI - Natural User Interface. As computing becomes more powerful and ubiquitous, ways we interact with computing will shift from classic keyboard/mouse to natural intuitive interactions. NUIs present new opportunities and challenges, as they become the next wave of computer/human interaction design.

Here are some goodies for you:

• AQUENT gave us a discount code ‘holytoledo’ which will give you a $50 discount.
• Also, AQUENT will give away a box of Expression Studio ($699 value) to the first 5 people who sign up to an event.  

Join an AQUENT seminar and learn more about designing Silverlight experiences with Expression Blend and other Expression tools. I reviewed their 3 day course in Redmond a few months ago when we hosted a pilot event. The event went great. They put together fun materials to go through. The theme for the course is creating a website and assets for an aquarium. You get to design some fun and wacky fish in Expression Design, you take those into Blend and they teach how to animate. You also build a video gallery with shark and other fish videos. You learn how to create and customize Silverlight controls and on the third day, mainly for designers you learn the basics of how to code in C# with fun activities like generating a new human race with code .

Here is the outline/curriculum for the course.

Our friends from AQUENT GRAPHICS INSTITUTE have been in the business of training designers for almost 15 years. Last year we began working with them to produce training content for us. Collaborating with such an amazing team of talented trainers who know how to talk to designers has paid of tremendously as they are helping us bridge the initial gap between designers who have previous experience with Flash and the new concepts now available in Expression Blend and Silverlight. They are also providing training to our internal Microsoft design community via events we call Expression Sessions. These events help us train our internal design team (Office, MS.COM, MSN, Game Studios, Live, Windows etc) in the use of Silverlight and Expression. In February AQUENT will visit Redmond to train our internal design teams once more, this time to provide a course called Coding for Designers which is a fun one day event where AQUENT will teach designers in a fun and creative way the basics of coding with C#. We are recording that day in video so I will share the videos soon after. Jennifer Smith and Fred Gerantabee will also be presenting at MIX, also covering a C# for Designers session so visit MIX. AQUENT is also the official training partner for PhizzPop both online and in person design challenges.

Anyway, going back to the seminar tour that AQUENT is running… you can visit their Seminar site and learn more about how to participate. It is a 3 Day course for designers (although UI Developers who are relatively new to Silverlight would also find it very useful). They are currently offering events in NY, Boston and LA but if you want them to visit you in other cities in the US or around the world just drop them an email.

Hello Central Eastern Europe!   I hope you are already having an amazing time in the Microsoft virtual event REMIX event called VORTEX. If you are still not there visit the VORTEX site and login into the sessions which are being broadcasted live! I have a session at 4PM CET this Wednesday 19th (6AM PST USA) called Creating Silverlight 2 Experiences with Expression Studio. I hope you like it. We also have many other sessions related to Silverlight, WPF, Live Services, Mobile and more… here is the agenda.

**************** 

Now, for people joining my session on Microsoft Expression here are the assets that I will be using in the session. Feel free to download and play with them. I will be using Expression Design 2 and Expression Blend 2 SP1. You can get a trial of these tools from www.microsoft.com/expression. To install Blend install Blend 2 first and then after install Blend 2 SP1 in top. You will of course need to install the Silverlight 2 plugin from here.

In my session I will be showing how to create Silverlight in Expression Blend, then we will build a full Custom User Control (which is like a MovieClip in Flash but with additional capabilities like multiple timelines, extensibility, custom properties, custom states, customs property groups and more…). We will also take a look at Animation, Events and UI Control development collaboration between designers and developers.

Hello!

A moment ago we launched the PhizzPop Design Challenge . PhizzPop is a series of activities for designers and Agencies to have fun and learn how to create experiences using Silverlight, WPF, Expression Studio and Live Services. PhizzPop has different activities:

PhizzPop Online

Everyone can participate here starting TODAY! Join the first online challenge and Build Games with Silverlight. We are providing a couple sample games you can customize with you own visual design elements. Deisgn new characters and settings, add sound or extend the game. You will also find 12 videos from AQUENT that will help you learn more about Expression and Silverlight and how to modify these games. If you need more training check out Total Training’s series on Expression Studio 2 tools. Participating in the PhizzPop Online Challenge is a great way to learn how to use Expression. If you are a designer, partner with a developer and customize and extend the game. If  you are a developer, partner with a designer and work together to enhance those games. If you want to learn more about games with Silverlight check out the following links:

Andy Beaulieu - Andy has some amazing information and samples games for you to learn from. The Avalanche game in the PhizzPop Challenge is based on Andie’s SilverlightRock game.

SilverlighRocks - Beginning game programming in Microsoft Silverlight 2 using C#, presented by Bill Reiss and Silverlight Rocks!

PhizzPop Design Challenge

A web design and development competition. It is comprised of the PhizzPop Tour, a set of in-person challenges targeting top U.S. agencies; and PhizzPop Online, four online challenges targeting the broad community of Web professionals. 

PhizzPop Tour

Between November 2008-March 2009 we’ll touch down in seven major cities. In each location, agencies will compete to design the best solution that solves a unique design challenge using Microsoft technologies. More info here…

Bon jour!

Paris, France.

This has been a fun week. I had the opportunity to visit France and the UK. This Wednesday Microsoft participated in the DDB Digital Days 2008 event in Paris. It was a fun event in a very social environment. The presentation has held in an open area in the building and not in the typical conference room. I liked that approach as it felt more like a casual conversation with the 100+ attendees that participated in the event. It was great to see the interest of designers and agencies for Silverlight and Expression. As promised below is a link to the assets I used in my session. It was also fun to visit the Microsoft office in Paris where I had a chance to visit the MCT, a technology center where Microsoft collaborates with Design Agencies, ISVs and SIs to produce WPF and Silverlight applications and provides the means to bring them all together around a common project for Enterprise customers. I learned from designers and developers the different ways they work together, the things that are smooth and easy and the ones that are more challenging. Very useful feedback for me to bring back to Redmond. In general there is an agreement that with XAML (Silverlight and WPF) designers can now not only participate in Microsoft based technology projects (something that in the past was possible only for developers) but now with Expression I met a couple agencies who are leading the projects themselves. At the same time, I found that designers take a little longer to learn the use of Expression as it incorporates many different ways of doing things compared to Flash. For example, our animation system is time based where the Flash system is frame based. Once designers cross this first stage, there seems to be a quick ramp up into being creative and productive with the tools.

Microsoft® Expression® Studio 2 vous ouvre de nouveaux horizons de créativité. Ses outils de création professionnels et ses technologies innovantes vous laissent libre de réaliser votre vision, que ce soit pour la création de sites Web, la réalisation d’interfaces riches ou la gestion des actifs numériques

Hello!

Brighton, UK

In Brighton, Microsoft hosted the REMIX08 event. It was big event with dual tracks for designers and developers. I missed the keynote! @%#!!! as I was flying in from Paris. I would have loved to see Scott Guthrie and Bill Buxton, together in action. As you know, Scott is our biggest technology ambassador and spokesperson. His background is completely in the development world. Developers love him and he is really popular. Bill Buxton is just as big of a figure but in the Design space. He is a UX and Design researcher at Microsoft. Bill has been designing UIs and drilling deep into design processes all his life. As deep as Scott can get development topics, Bill can do in Design concepts and theory and practice…  I had the opportunity of participating in a Discussion Board with other friends from UK agencies and Bill Buxton. It was the first time I talked to him. As expected he was a very kind person. We got some questions and Bill just kept providing not just answers but truly inspiring messages… I was just in awe. The depth of thinking he has gotten to after all this years of experiencing “Design” have definitely provided him amazing insights into practical approach to design. Check out his book Sketching User Experiences.

There was a question about the word Devigner. There were different opinions about it. I understand the role though and it exists undeniably but the word devigner just doesn’t resonate to me. I like to call them hybrids (which is not a great word either!) or “integrators”.  I’ve found that the majority of times it is a person with a developer background who executes this role. This role is defined at a technical level. The devigner, hybrid or integrator is the person who takes code files from a developer and visuals from a designers and integrates them. It is not a “management”/creative director type or role. It is the middle man in between the two worlds that for some reason cannot integrate or share assets directly. For me even though the devigner role exists, it shouldn’t. I think it is an opportunity to come up with ways to “delete” that role. In an ideal world the tools that both profiles use, designers and devs, should help these two people communicate with each other *directly* (that is exchange files and assets without the need of a person acting as an interpreter, patching files, making little changes in code and visuals so they can work together). I think we will see interactive/UI design tools evolve towards this paradigm in the near future but the role devigner IMO is not a “new role” or “something emerging” as being a “new way of doing things”… it’s just that tools in the industry are not fully achieving the goal of having designers and developers work together, hence an “integrator” role is needed. To be clear, this is at the technical level… there will ALWAYS be the need to Creative Directors, UX architects, Software Architects, Information Architects or even CTOs who can manage, inspire and motivate different profiles like designers and developers to work together.

On Friday I gave a session on Expression. I tried a different approach this time and worked well. Doing my “slides” in DeepZoom continues to work great. I love it. It’s not a linear Powerpoint presentation anymore but a “mind map”. I’m still afraid of making people dizzy when I pan around but apparently everyone was walking straight at the end of the session

Here are the assets for the Paris and Brighton sessions. I hope they are useful for you

Hello! Thank you everyone for joining us at the CRE8 Conference last week at Orlando. It was an amazing experience being there with you. Thanks to everyone for being there at the keynote (early in the morning after a party! ).

After the keynote we also hosted some technical sessions. You can find the assets I used for those sessions here. The first session we had was focused on creating Silverlight using Expression Blend and Design. We went through the basics of using Design to create vector based graphics and then export those to Expression Blend. Then we learned more about Blend mainly discovering some of the differences with Flash. Like I said during the session, I like not to add adjectives before these comparisons as in “better” “worse” but simply using Flash as a point of reference given so many of us have that background. We learned a few tricks on how to do things you would normally do in Flash but now in Expression Blend. We also learned about other features, exclusive of Silverlight and Expression Blend like DeepZoom, Hand Off timelines, the ability to have any tumber of Storyboards per object (we call them Storyboards in Blend, where in Flash we call them Timelines) and to the question of “Where are my movieclips” well, we showed User Controls which is the way you do movieclip-like objects in Silverlight 2.

A surprise for you: New DeepZoom composer release!  Remember the DeepZoom Brian used for the keynote? or the one we used in the Silverlight Authoring session?… you can now create those DeepZoom experiences in a snap using the new DeepZoom composer release. Kirupa, an Expression Blend Program Manager announced a new version of DeepZoom Composer. This is the release I used when showing you how to create these experiences.

Also, during CRE8, Microsoft release the version 2 of our products. That makes you all attendees very special since you where there with us right we announced this publicaly. You can check out the new site at www.microsoft.com/expression and download trials of the tools. We also welcome you to visit http://expression.microsoft.com which is the community website. Lot’s of good content there.

Please drop me any question you might have. I’d love to hear your ideas for our products and the types of features you would like us to incorporate in there. The Expression team has opened a thread for you to post your ideas. Believe me, I know these guys, the read this with passion! so post anything you like. It’s all being heard in detail. You can truly influence the creation of the tools.

Please join us to watch the first live concert cybercast by Microsoft Silverlight - Tomorrow Saturday March 15th, 8pm Central/6pm Pacific

Microsoft has partnered with UVNTV.com to cybercast Ice Cube Live from SxSW Music festival in Austin, TX. Ice Cube, hip hop legend, performing classics and his new album “Raw Footage”. Register online- http://home.uvntv.com/events/view/event/sxsw_ice_cube

More info… http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003723151

I’ve posted a summary of the MIX08 event with the items I believe are most relevant for Designers.  Check it out here…

Hello!

We had such a blast at MIX08!  I hope you had a great time too. I had a session on Friday called XAML-Ready Design Agency with Expression Blend. I feel very happy for meeting all the folks that were able to join us during the session. I have published all the assets for my session including the DeepZoom “slide deck” we used during the session (I decided I wouldn’t use PowerPoint anymore, just DeepZoom ). I’m also including my source Expression Design file to my slides.  Feel free to re-use, just add a note mentioning the source  - Arturo Toledo | ux.artu.tv

I was reviewing the www.visitmix.com site yesterday night and I discovered all the videos for entire event are already published there!  All these videos represent an amazing source of training and information. I personally learned Silverlight 1 by watching the MIX07 sessions. Now with the MIX08 you literally have days of recorded video with amazing content, technical, creative and even on Design theory with the UX track.

Nishant Kothary, Microsoft User Experience evangelist here in Redmond recently announced a very exciting side of MIX08… Come join us!

MIX UX, a three-day user experience track that debuts at the MIX 2008 Conference, is dedicated to exploring and evolving the practice of user experience. Through unique content delivered by user experience thought-leaders, MIX UX broadens the content choices for designers and creative professionals to include broad and relevant UX topics that are not specifically related to Microsoft products and services. Each day MIX UX will focus on a particular theme, the sum of which exposes the essence of MIX UX: Discovery, Exploration and Inspiration. It is no coincidence that these qualities are also at the core of designing great products and software.

Discover. A broad look at UX through the visionary minds of Lou Carbone, Dave Armano, and Dan Roam

Explore. An in-depth, practical workshop on user experience in the real world lead by Adaptive Path

Inspire. Microsoft’s new perspective on UX viewed through the eyes of Office, Zune, and Surface.

MIX UX is one of the many great reasons for all types of designers and creative professionals to attend MIX this year. 

 Debuting at MIX08, MIX UX puts the focus on the practice of user experience through the insights of visionaries like Lou Carbone, Dan Roam, David Armano and the Microsoft Surface, Office and Zune UX teams.

Microsoft will be hosting the first PhizzPop Design Challenge, a fun one week event where designers and developers work together in teams to create cool Silverlight websites. The teams have been chosen but on Friday we’ll have a final show where teams will demonstrate their achievements and the PhizzPop team is inviting you to attend that day, watch final show and the some creative projects, meet fun people and enjoy some cocktails. To register visit the site http://designchallenge.phizzpop.com/. There are events at: NY, Chicago, LA, Austin and Boston.

[from the PhizzPop site] 

Welcome to the PhizzPop Design Challenge!
36 teams enter. 1 team leaves.

The PhizzPop Design Challenge pits top interactive, Web, and design agencies against one another to push the limits of technology and creativity in a battle royale. Think Mad Max for design.

The regional teams have been selected and will duke it out in New York, Boston, Chicago, Austin, and Los Angeles, with the regional winners competing against one another, and San Francisco winner AKQA, at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX.

We invite you to register and watch the creativity unfold as you enjoy cocktails.

Some buddies and I  will be hosting an free public training day for Silverlight 1.0 here in Redmond. Everyone is welcome! Ernie and Adam work for DPE, which means they are evangelists of our technologies. They both work in Tim Sneath’s team so as you can imagine they have tons of experience with both WPF and Silverlight and their job is to hang out with customers and partners and help them be successful with our platform and tools. Laurence Moroney will also present that day. As you have probably heard he wrote and recently released the first Silverlight 1.0 book which is really fantastic. I’ll be showing the Expression tools, mainly Design and Blend (and a little of Visual Studio) to create a small Silverlight site.

Tomorrow we have the final presentation of this week’s MIR event (Microsoftie Artist in Residence).  This MIR was particularly fun and educational. I’ll post a summary of my findings but we learned a lot about Workflow between designers and developers. I’m also collecting a list of all things I’m finding some Designers find confussing when learning Silverlight. Most of these little challenges are because they have used Flash for years (like me) so our minds are wrapped around other concepts and paradigms. I’ve been experimenting in explaining concepts in different ways and this week I had plenty of breakthroughs in the way to explain these concepts… I’ll share this with you soon. I also put into action, for the first time, my personal Silverlight creation workflow process with the MIRs this week which includes a Naming Convention document close to the beginning of the process. I’ll also drill down deeper into this in the next few days.

Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter
On November 29, 2007 Microsoft will be hosting Silverlight 1.0 Fire Starter on the Redmond, Washington campus. This daylong event is free to anyone who wants to learn about designing and developing with Microsoft Silverlight 1.0.

Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 is a cross platform browser plug-in that enables for easy development of media rich web sites.  For more information, visit http://silverlight.net.
November 29, 2007
Microsoft Redmond Campus
1 Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA
Building 33, Kodiak Room
** Please have a photo ID with you to register onsite and park

Check-in: 8:00 am
Event: 8:30 am – 5:00 pm
Register: http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032359153&Culture=en-US
or by calling 1-877-673-8368 and referencing Event ID 1032359153

AGENDA
Introduction to Silverlight Mithun Dhar
Getting Started with Silverlight Laurence Moroney
Microsoft Expression Design Tools Arturo Toledo
XAML Essentials for Silverlight Laurence Moroney
Developer Tools for Silverlight Adam Kinney
Media, Markers and More Ernie Booth
Popfly and Silverlight – Writing a Silverlight ‘Social’ app Popfly Team
What will Silverlight look like in future versions? Ernie Booth
Post Event Evening event with XBOX, networking and refreshments