UX Strategy Musings from Will Tschumy, Microsoft User Experience Evangelist

After much deliberation, the judges decided that AKQA won the competition with their “Mosaic” solution.
The judges felt that Mosaic came closest to being a complete solution. 
While the judges felt that none of the teams completely solved the design problem, the felt that AKQA’s solution balanced the constraints best.  Congratulations to AKQA!

 Vertigo’s solution was entirely different from any of the other contestants.  Rather than focusing on the exchange of media between friends, Vertigo focused on the ongoing conversation between friends.
“It’s like Tivo for the conversation” said Susan - the developer from the team.  Bluejay allows a group of friends send messages to a common, location agnostic [...]

IndustryNext fielded an extremely strong solution.  They focused on using different layers of collaborative filtering on content, and more innovatively, friends.
Like AKQA’s solution, IndustryNext chose to create an environment where content from other internet services can be shared.
Each parent and child can rate both different categories of content, as well as friends.  Because parents [...]

Ascentium really did a great job.  Of any of the teams, they went the broadest in terms of their solutions.  Not only did they come up with an extremely complete idea, they also got among the farthest in terms of implementing their solution.
In additional to being able to pass messages, share photos, and movies, [...]

AKQA really committed to the project - their designer, Cameron, pulled an all-nighter Thursday night just to complete their idea.
Mosaic is a meta social environment - the team made a specific decision not to create a “walled garden” for the teens.  While this makes it a little harder to control the content, it also [...]

Of any of the teams, I think Avenue A | Razorfish had the hardest time.
Their idea was that Top Shelf would provide collaboratively filtered product environment.  Each member would submit a product, media, etc, only to have it filtered by the rest of the community members, not to mention their parents.
In practice, however, this [...]

Now that the Express Yourself event has come and gone (and it was great to see those of you who made it, I wanted to present to you, the faithful readers of UX-Strategy an in-depth view of the event.
We had a great event, with more than 166 people attending - it was a great joy [...]

 Microsoft, here in the Bay Area, is happy to announce “Express Yourself” at 111 Minna on June 22nd.  Doors open at 6:00pm.
One of the strengths of Microsoft’s UX platform (Expression, Silverlight, WPF, et al) is the designer/developer workflow.  With this in mind, we’ve asked 5 of the many talented design firms to send us their [...]