Written by David Charney
Posted: June 2, 2008 (2 months, 3 weeks ago) | 0 comments
Well the first RIApalooza event has come and gone and I must say I enjoyed it. This two day event had good speakers, good topics, a nice mix of theory and demonstrations, good networking, and a healthy turnout of supporters. It was great to see Microsoft and Adobe (both sponsors) working together for the good of the cause. It was also nice to see all programs and platforms recognized.
Dave Meeker from Roundarch did a great job kicking off the event by discussing the core of all this RIAmadness. What, Why, Who, When - it was all covered.
Tim Heuer & Corrina Barber from Microsoft showed the ease designers and developers can look forward to using Blend. Good demonstration. I saw Blend on a lot of laptops by the end of the day.
Josh Holmes from Microsoft & Michael Labriola from Digital Primates had a great presentation on RIA. From practices to theory they covered a broad spectrum of the key components of RIA and answered that big question, “What’s the big deal?”.
Geoff Cubitt, President & CTO of Roundarch (and a Purdue man) discussed RIA while relating it to the fine work of Roundarch. He discussed different technologies (Flash, Flex, Dojo, AJAX, Silverlight) and touched a bit on selling RIA to the client.
Anthony Handley from Magenic did a great job showing designer & developer collaboration while bringing life to an application using Silverlight and XAML. He made it look so easy.
The one and only Corey Miller from Magenic (the guy who put Purdue on the map) recreated a Flash image gallery inside Silverlight and showed how to populate it with Flickr images. He did a nice job showing the many Flash designers and developers in the room that they don’t have to take that many steps back to start exploring Silverlight.
Ka Wai Cheung from We Are Mammoth discussed time saving RIA models and the power behind smart design.
So that’s a wrap. I hope this is the first of many.
Written by David Charney
Posted: May 26, 2008 (3 months ago) | 0 comments
Hey all. I am happy to announce cd2, the new Chicago Designers & Developers User Group.
cd2 is dedicated to bridging the gap between design & development to improve the user experience and user-centered design. Function meets design in this group as we focus on creativity as it relates to design and development processes and the collaboration between the two.
If you are interested, we ask that you visit our site at www.cd2ug.org and let us know what you would like to see in the group. We will be posting more information soon detailing the group and our first meeting.
Written by David Charney
Posted: April 30, 2008 (4 months ago) | 0 comments
I sometimes worry that many of those great words we tend to use such as usability, user experience, engage, and motivate, to name a few, are going to lose their value. I keep seeing these words being used by companies to sell their products and services and then their products and services don’t even come close to providing a usable, engaging, motivating user experience. Don’t get me wrong, it is great to see that these words are getting in the limelight. But it needs to go past the words. These values need to show themselves in the delivery as well. How do we keep these words from fizzling out? We just need to keep doing what we are doing. Keep working hard to deliver the best user experiences we can. …thunder, thunder, thunder, thunder Cats!
That is all. As always… go outside and play.
Written by David Charney
Posted: April 17, 2008 (4 months, 1 week ago) | 0 comments
Hey all. For fun over a few evenings I put this UI design together. I am a big fan of the Apollo space program and thought I would build up a conceptual design based on that. I am actually interested in building a full-on Apollo interactive site where you can interactively go to the Moon. I wonder if I can get NASA interested in the idea…
Update: I had sent out a quick email to Jim Lovell, who owns a restaurant with his son about 5 minutes from me and was lucky to get a short reply (as I have in the past). He said the design looks great! Sweeeeeet. OMG (”Oh My God” for those over 16)! Mr. Apollo 13 likes it! Besides my telling everyone about this I am speechless! I am going to go have a Flavor Ice.
Written by David Charney
Posted: April 14, 2008 (4 months, 2 weeks ago) | 0 comments
I was doing some research on several learning and training applications that are out there and I started to realize most of them are quite boring. I try to focus but my mind keeps wandering. I would much rather drink my Diet Mountain Dew and ponder what might be causing the strange beeping sound I keep hearing in a distant room. Many of these solutions say they are powerful eLearning applications but all they seem to be doing is shoving text, videos and some multiple choice questions down my throat. Some use words like “interactive” to market their solutions but all this seems to mean is that you can drag and drop the correct word into the blank during one of a series of quizzes and tests. Yawn.
At Illumen, we spend a lot of time developing cognitive learning challenges that use motivating scenarios in subject driven environments to educate the audience. The words educate and learning are important here. The goal to learning is not just in memorization but in understanding and retaining information so it can be applied.
I will get into the topic of motivating experiences in another article. Right now I want to focus on the end goal of a learning solution.
1. Develop the State of Mind
Our ability to think tends to be based on our experiences. Don’t just push facts in our faces, give us scenarios, explain processes, drive our minds to think the way they should on each given topic.
2. Develop Problem Solving Skills
Parallel to the development of our state of minds, being able to use our thought processes to make decisions on each given topic separates us from those that know facts to those that can solve problems.
3. Develop Experience
Being able to to have a strong state of mind and the ability to problem solve stems from experience. Experience stems from the state of mind and ability to problem solve.
I will get into examples in coming articles. For now we must keep open minds and, dare I say it, think outside the box when it comes to these solutions. Speaking of “outside the box”… I figured out what that distant beeping was. Here I assumed it was digital. It turns out it is from a baseball hitting an aluminum bat during a little league game not far from here. Ding! Time to break out the headphones.
