All sessions were recorded and will be available online if I understood things rightly, so I’m gonna give you my top 3 recommendations on which ones to see first.

Bill Buxton – Ubiquitous Computing and the Emerging Digital Eco-system

I might be childishly fond of veterans in our field, but Bill gave us a lecture of the importance of knowing our history and a crash course in ubiquitous computing with a few sweet examples. He was passionate and open about how we work and gave us all a bit of a lesson on several topics, for example on the topic of storyboarding;

It’s all about the transitions – make them seamless and graceful (and if you need arrows, rethink your job).

An inspirational talk and I found myself sitting with my mouth wide open several times.

Now that we can make anything, whats worth making?

Gerry McGovern – The Long Neck vs The Long Tail

Gerry energized the audience with his storytelling and passionate crusade about ever-growing websites that ”eat and eat, but never poop” and that the cult of production is killing many web experiences.

Ovations for Gerry for waking up the crowd after a pretty slow session and for his presentation skills. Inspiring, even if you’ve heard about task management before.

Bonus points for telling success stories from the client I’m working with at the moment.

Jesse James Garret – Design for Engagement

JJG held a less practical and more philosophical talk that made us think about our practice and what we’re actually doing and who’s really a designer (Beethoven was an experience designer through his music, he claimed).

The user experience mindset is an acquired conditions where there is no cure.

He drew a parallel to the craft known as cinematography and said it’s all about engagement, creating experiences for users regardless of the context.

A great day, and a great conference all in all. I’m happy I went, I’m sad that it’s over but I’m glad I have another couple of days to spend here in Lisbon before going home. Thanks to the organizers and all the people I met!

Follow me on Twitter if you like to stay in touch.

I started off with a session with legendary Gerry McGovern, who I finally got to see in person as he passionately talked about the importance of identifying the top tasks of your site’s visitors. The first thing he, not very surprisingly but very convincingly, pointed out was that there’s no point in asking your users directly what they want but rather to test and observe how they behave.

He went on a crusade against poorly focused websites, lack of testing with users and highlighted that everyone on the web has a task they want to get done.

When was the last time you went to Google and didn’t know what to look for?

He also claimed that no one goes to your website just for the content or information itself. There content always supports a task.

The long tail is killing the long neck.

He spent half of the workshop explaining and demonstrating how to identify and prioritize these top tasks, a process suitable for large, complex organizations, but possibly too advanced for smaller ones.

I’d love to see an alternative for these smaller companies or organizations. They sure have the need for it as well.

Today’s shorter talks was for me a great walk through of how mapping the user experience across multiple situations and interactions could be done at Adaptive Path, a session with Jamin Hegeman. Probably the best spent 20 minutes during these days so far. Extremely effective and fascinating.

I also spent another 20 minutes on the topic of how designers and developers can work together as a close team – a timely subject for me and quite a few good tips on how to make it work (and not). I’d love to hear more about it from Samuel Mike Bowles some time.

On the last session, after endless amounts of food, wine, pastries and coffee, I squeezed myself into the very popular Mobile Prototyping workshop – a hands on 3 hours session with Rachel Hinman of Nokia Research Center. It was all good and I enjoyed the storyboarding, examples and different techniques of prototyping (Keynote rocks!), but I felt kind of sad for her cause the air kind of went out of the auditorium at the end of the day and it seems like people’s energy went out with it. Still a great workshop!

Massively tight schedule the whole day and later me and my colleagues from Bekk ended up on a local seafood joint downtown, strolling around in the city center enjoying life and a few beers.

Good times, and tomorrow there’s a rock star line up through the day and I’m really looking forward to both that as well as the closing party tomorrow night.

If you’re curious of what I’m talking about, just check out the schedule here in Lisbon and UXLx.

First thing this morning I went to Ginny Redish’s workshop about writing web content that works. It was a good mix of the importance of personas, content strategy, real world examples of what works and not and facts like

People don’t come to your website to read, they come to get the information they want, to complete their task.

If I could take away one thing from this session, it’s the lesson that

Every use of your website is a conversation

and content should be designed thereafter.

After a sweaty lunch I went to Dave Malouf’s short talk about designing gestures like a choreographer. An inspirational talk helping us interaction designers to understand motion as a tool in our designs. The better things feel, the more effective they are. Bring the love, fun, emotions and expressiveness!

I also listened to Yolanda Martins advice on how to integrate UX in agile environments. A hands-on talk about the challenges of Scrum and UX, with good discussions on top.

The last workshop/talk (it wasn’t much work, more listening, but today I didn’t really mind, with a talk as good as this) was Arnie Lunds about strategic UX management. A lot of practical advice on how to promote yourself and your practice and on to win the confidence of the organization you work for. For example;

• have a point of view! Even if it’s not always correct, stand for it and make a difference. Be passionate and guide the conversation.
• have a great elevator pitch. Tell stories, keep them real and surprising and keep them to the point.
• identify ”champions” and help them achieve their goals with help from your expertise

This plus a lot of talk about mission, vision and strategy among 100 other things helped me straighten out quite a few thoughts I’ve been having on my mind lately.

All in all, great talks and fabulous people. On top of that, I think I’ve probably never been as full as I am right now after this evenings barbecue.

More good stuff to come tomorrow!

For sketch notes, summaries and presentations I highly recommend the unofficial UXLx blog at uxlx.posterous.com.

I’ve been using the phone for both work and pleasure and here are my key impressions so far.

THE GOOD

The UI is fresh and truly minimalistic. As a sucker for everything minimalistic, I think it’s a beauty.

It’s fast. There’s basically no lag at all while you navigate through the views.

It was quite easy to get all accounts linked up. I got Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Windows Live and two email accounts (Exchange for work and Google Apps for personal use) up and running pretty much instantly. I’ve heard of others having problems with this part, but for me it worked flawlessly. This is a fundamental setup to get working to be able to enjoy the People Hub for instance for easily sharing stuff and see what your friends are up to.

Another good thing is the fact that you don’t need a Windows computer to hook up to to sync or anything. You can buy apps in the web based Marketplace (which has it’s flaws…) and they get synced to the Windows Phone right away (most of the time…). There’s also a Windows Phone 7 Connector in the Mac App Store that I used primarily to get all my podcast subscriptions from iTunes onto the phone.

THE BAD

The extreme minimalistic design makes a great first impression but it gets quite annoying when so many apps look more or less the same. In far too many cases it’s basically a list of headlines and text below. The fonts are beautiful and everything but it ends up just being… boring.

The Metro design puts information architecture heavily in the centre and it’s not always obvious where things are. Whereas in iOS I often find myself thinking “I could probably find item X in view Y” and be correct, on this phone I need to look all over the place to find the right menu and the right list to find it. Maybe it’s a learning thing, but even the basic things feel hard when I need to guess where stuff are.

I don’t know how many times I accidentally launched an app instead of scrolling in a list. It’s like I need to touch the screen and hold the finger on the same pixel for just a nanosecond and the phone interprets it as a tap. It drives me mad when all I want do do is scroll (and you need to scroll A LOT).

All the little details that make absolutely no sense: I upload a picture via Twitter and the image gets hidden behind Windows Live with a link three miles long, Spotify offline playlists that suddenly aren’t available offline, apps that are downloaded and installed but can’t be found anywhere, the fact that my Windows Live account is Swedish but everything about the phone is Norwegian messes things up in the Marketplace, the phone is by default looking for wrong iTunes library, there’s no way to take screenshots… The list goes on.

The web based Marketplace. Besides looking like it’s being designed in Frontpage by a enthusiastic teenager in 1998, it’s full of broken links, mobile hostile pages and is generally a pain to use unless you get a direct link to the app you want.

Marketplace on the phone. Maybe it’s due to the fact that it’s full of incredibly crappy apps (as the app store was for iOS in it’s young days), it’s hard to find the good apps and to see the really great stuff. If there is any. Even the list of recommended apps and top lists are full of shit, to be honest.

App quality. As I said, there are so much crap out there, it’s hard to not get lost. Many of the good iOS apps (e.g. GetGlue) are websites wrapped in the Windows Phone app format and it’s obvious how young the Windows Phone world is.

Battery life is a joke. Most days I run out of it before the workday is over, and I barely use the phone for talking.

ALL IN ALL

Competition is great and I love seeing Microsoft trying out new solutions and UI’s but, perhaps I had too big expectations because after these 4 weeks I mostly feel disappointed.

I like the look of Metro, but it’s not enough. It’s a decent phone, with a decent UI and I’ve heard that the Windows Phone tools are convenient for .NET developers who wants to create mobile apps, but unless you’re a huge Microsoft or Nokia fan, I suggest you get an iPhone instead.

By Geek, found via @kottkrig on Twitter

Beginning March 1st I will be working as an interaction designer and functional advisor, doing what I do best – creating interactive web and app based solutions for some of Norway’s most exciting companies.

I’m really stoked to get my hands dirty again. See you in Oslo!