UX Roundtable Comments

Ever since John told me about the UX Roundtable event at Redmond last month, I’ve been really curious about what designers think Microsoft can do to reach out and help support the UX community in Canada? As user experience specialists (IAS, IxDs, UI designers, web designers, etc.), we have compassion for users. Often times, in order to help the users be successful, we need to know them better than they know themselves. However, the purpose of the UX Roundtable is to explore what we as designers need to feel connected and to be successful in what we do.

I want to share with you some the comments I gathered from the UX Roundtable discussion notes. I should mention that what I refer to "community" below, I mean all the UX professionals involved in the creative design process including IxDs, IAs, visual designers, usability analysts,...)

• Showing the community more of the creative process behind UX projects such as the User-centered design for Office 2007. Jensen Harris' talk on Word 2007 design was very well received at the VanUE event in Vancouver. However. past MS product talks were focused too much on the technology and not on the design process.
• Sharing Microsoft’s design processes (e.g. activities, timeline, design documents) more and creating an open/transparent reputation in the community. For example, open APIs for design patterns for others to improve and leverage.
• Helping designers show the business value of having an elegant user experience to business decision makers (CEOs and CFOs)
• Making an effort to connect to the academic UX community such as design schools and digital design/ HCI programs at universities
• Hosting design events to share best practices in design
• Improving developers’ understanding of UX and providing tools to support designer-developer workflow

Jay Goldman from Radiant Core has a very detailed and insightful write-up of the UX Roundtable event.

 

Qixing

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 20, 2007
  To begin with can we have a public event of similar nature in Canada preferably in Toronto or Vancouver where this event is open to public users or partners. I agree with your findings here and doing some/all of the steps in finding will be huge. Doing some of this on Channel9 would be a big help.

• Anonymous
  March 22, 2007
  Thanks Ian for the comment! I think it's a great idea to have a similar event like UX roundtables in Canada. I'll look into organizing it. The biggest challenge and excitement in my new role is to help Microsoft support the UX professionals to be successful. In order to accomplish this goal, we would need people like you in the community to support us and continue giving us feedback.