GregBellDesign

"You know your conference has hit the big time when Robin Williams steps up from the audience to fill the dead air during an embarrassing, show-stopping technical glitch." - Wired

It appears that Robin Williams stood up and proceeded to do a 10 minute impromptu act while the BBC was fixing a technical glitch before a panel discussion at TED. Just one more reason why I wish I was at TED.

Full Wired Article

Well, another great CanUX has come and gone and we're left to only dream about the beautiful crisp mornings in Banff. As usual, some of the best content was found in the hallways talking to peers and colleagues. But, many of the presentation were also inspiring and insightful.

Here's a roundup of some of the presentations given at CanUX this year...

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Well it's that time of year again. I'm off to the Canadian User Experience '07 conference in Banff. This years looks like it will be a great event (as was last year) with a wide range of talks and topics.

Check out the list of speakers:

• Lou Rosenfeld, founding figure in modern information architecture, author of the best selling Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and publisher at Rosenfeld Media.
• Dave Armano, VP, Experience Design for Critical Mass. An active thought leader in the industry, David authors the popular Logic + Emotion blog currently ranked in the top 20 media + marketing blogs according to Advertising Age.
• Derek Featherstone, leading authority on accessibility and its implications for user experience.
• Gene Smith, author of the definitive book on tagging, coming early 2008 from New Riders, and principal at nForm User Experience.
• The Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble, world-renowned facilitators who work to help executives develop leadership capacity through the combination of the arts, creativity, and leadership principles.
• Kes and Sue Sampanthar, founders of Metamemes, producer of generative thinking tools and experts in moving beyond brainstorming for innovation.
• Jess McMullin, business and design evangelist, advocate for increasing practitioners’ influence in the organizations they serve, CanUX program chair and nForm User Experience founder.
• Brad Nemer, Product Portfolio Manager for Motorola’s Asian 3G business, and pioneer in combining business and design thinking.

Speaker write ups from: http://www.canux2007.com/

See ya in Banff!

The IxDA has announced its first ever conference, IxDA Interaction 08! The conference will be held in Savannah, Georgia, February 8-10.

The program looks like it will be a great event, just waiting for registration to open.

Until then, check out the conference site at: interaction80.ixda.org.

Banff is beautiful! Especially when it is inhabited by some of the best minds in UX today. The CanUX conference was a great experience. I would definitely recommend it to anybody who is interested in attending next year. There were some amazing speakers as well some awesome conversations sparked by the insights of the group.

One of my favorite presentations was done by Microsoft Windows Client Usability Lead, Joey Benedek, on testing, measuring and validating visual design (desirability). I found this extremely interesting because of my past as a visual designer.

He discussed three methods that he used to test and measure the visual design of the upcoming Microsoft Vista.

1. The Microsoft Desirability Toolkit
2. Instantaneous Reaction Dials (like they use to test movies)
3. Electromyography

The thing that really interested me about the talk, and he didn't talk about this too much, was how the desigers used this data and how they felt about receiving it. I would be very interested to know how much the data and research actually dictated the design process, from the designer's perspective.

Visual design is such a difficult thing to measure and quantify, but I think that Joey's research is moving in the right direction. It should be a very interesting topic to watch over the next couple of years.