UXer's blog

Todd Wilkens: The end of products

Friday night

• Last night, had a nice dinner with folks from Electronic Ink, including Liza Potts, who is a student of Bill Hart-Davidson, who was a student of mine (over 10 years ago).

Jamin Hegeman, Shelley Evenson: About the conference

I just registered for Emergence 2007 - "Exploring the boundaries of service design." I have been reading up on various service innovation topics and I see a lot of connections with user experience. The Emergence conference looked perfect because it was within driving distance and focuses on the design aspect.

Chris Anderson of Long tail fame compares the "economic" models of abundance with scarcity. (I found it reading Abundance and UX at UX Magazine.) He explains that user experience improvements like the GUI are the result of thinking as computing power as an abundant resource, vs. poorer experiences because you have limited CPU cycles. A summary:

In the June 2007 Communications of the ACM (Vol 50 #6), Ben Shneiderman has a "Viewpoint" article that hits close to home. "Web science: A provocative invitation to computer science," subtitled "Here's how it can awaken computer science to the interdisciplinary possibilities of the Web's socially embedded computing technology."

Josh Holmes (Architect Evangelist for Microsoft) is speaking at our local .net user group next week. The topic is Silverlight. I won't be able to make this one, but "Architect Evangelist for Microsoft" reminded me of those User Experience Evangelist job postings from last year - what ever happened with that?

The parade of interviews continues - I love it. Last night was one about integrating user-centered design into Agile methods with David Fox, a student of Frank Maurer. I met Frank at CASCON where we did a workshop together on the human element of Agile.

I have been interviewed twice in the last 3 days about how I got started doing what I do, what influenced me along the way, what were the major events in my career. (Not sure when each interview will debut.)

Reporting from the Nexus for change conference. First activity was what I would call nametagging - where you add labels to your name tag to classify yourself and help start conversations.

The date and location for DUX 2007 were just made public: November 5-7, Chicago, Illinois, USA. This is the 3rd Conference on designing for user experience. I missed the first DUX in 2003, attended the second in 2005.