UX Strategy Musings from Will Tschumy, Microsoft User Experience Advisor

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

 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 [...]

Hi All, So, for the record, a week in Vegas is really too long (at least for me).  When you measure your time at home in terms of hours, versus days or weeks, that’s too much travel.  All that said, it was so exciting to meet many of you, as well as listen to the community response [...]

As with most organizations, we at Microsoft are particularly pleased when others talk about our products in positive terms.  What’s even better is when the afore mentioned others talk about our products in terms of strategic market shifts.  Needless to say, this post made us very happy: Wake up and see the Silverlight It’s going [...]

Yesterday at NAB, Microsoft announced Silverlight. I for one am really excited for this. This is the first step towards the public unveiling of Silverlight. While I can’t go into technical details at this point, what I can say is that Silverlight (it feels so good to say that versus ‘WPF/e’!!) renders a subset of [...]

I’m really happy to announce that MSDN Premium will now include Expression Web and Expression Blend (once released).  This had been a point of some contention both within Microsoft’s UX community, as well as within the overall developer community. The great news (and one of the things that makes me happy to be at Microsoft) [...]