I was doing some research for a project and ran across this bit on the W3C website titled How People with Disabilities Use the Web. I love this section as it goes into something I’m really a fan of in user stories as they not only crisply get across a set of requirements, it personalizes a cold sterile set of requirements that seem fairly arbitrary to a warm and living » read more.
UX
That’s a bold statement but it’s true – any kid even can write games for Kinect with Scratch. Scratch is a programming language for kids out of the MIT Media Labs. Steven Howell saw the potential of combining this with the Kinect and connected them together. Kids all over the world can now write natural user interface games with the Kinect. This project is not for you to write XBox » read more.
One of the things that gets me excited is working with new forms of user interaction. Or rather old forms of user interaction that humans use being used with our users. Amulet devices are doing just that. They are a BizSpark startup based in Dublin, Ireland. They are a device and software company. The software does voice control of Windows Media Center which can be the hub of your home » read more.
I was asked earlier when to use what Microsoft client Technology. I thought about just sending a link to Michael Schroeder’s post but decided I should put in my own thoughts on the matter first. At the heart of Michael’s post is this table. WPF WPF XBAP Silverlight ASP.Net + AJAX Client Windows XP SP2 (With .Net 3.0), Vista and obviously Windows 7 Internet Explorer + Windows XP SP2 (with » read more.
I’ve come to realize that many web designers don’t understand what “Above the Fold” and how it really should be used. Above the Fold is an old print newspaper layout term for what’s on the top part of the page, the part that is displayed in the window at the newspaper stand. In web design, the term is used for the bits that the user can see without having to » read more.
I had heard about this effort a few weeks back but I’m thrilled that it’s public and I can talk about it now. Karsten Januszewski and some of the other whiz kids on the MIX team have put together a visual designer for jQuery called Glimmer. Right now, they’ve got a number of design wizards that you can leverage but they’ve built a great plug-in model so that you can » read more.
Expression Blend, believe or not, has an add-in model. It’s highly unsupported but it exists. The unsupported nature of it means that you have to do a little Red Green style patching to get them to run in the first place and if they cause instability, don’t call Microsoft support. However, there are a couple of really cool ones that are out there. There are three that I think that » read more.
I’m at an internal conference at Microsoft this week and one of the sessions that I attended was called Practical Design tips and tricks for Developers. It was a set of hands on labs that were created out of the Expression team. It was really slick and I learned a whole lot of new techniques and am feeling a whole lot more confident in my Expression Blend abilities. The really » read more.
Jared Spool is one of my heroes. I go hear him speak every time that I get a chance to and have often retold a number of his stories with various clients. One of the first times that I heard him speak was at the Software Development Conference in 2000. Jared is a usability expert. That does not mean graphic designer. That means that his expertise is understanding the user » read more.
This past week, I had the privilege to be involved with the Phizzpop Design Challenge in Austin. I was called in by Chris Bernard as a technical mentor to the contestants who needed help and to help him run things on the night of the presentations. What is the Phizzpop Design Challenge? Let me back up here and explain what the Phizzpop Design Challenge is. Phizzpop, the new Microsoft center » read more.
