Canadian User Experience

Microsofties in Residence Silverlight Training - Day 3

qixing — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:42:41 GMT

John and I started parallel working in Day 3 and chatted back and forth on each other's progress using Office Communicator.

On the Design side, I first focused on creating graphical elements in Expression Design. For each of our application scenario: sending gift, touching hands, and playing games, I created graphics for three different states: the normal states, the mouseover state when a user enters the tool/object, and a disable state when a user starts to drag the object onto the surface table.

The second part of my work is to create controls and animation using these graphics in Blend. The left image below is the initial wireframe, and the image on the right is after editing XAML and important XAML from Design. Creating a button with different interaction states is quite easy in Blend using visual state manager. Basically, I created a button template with three graphics as its content and then depending on the state to set the proper graphics to fade in and the current graphics to fade out.

On the development side, here's from John's own words.

Today, I focused two aspects of the LACT(Live Apart but Connect Together) application. First, I wrote a quick implementation of drag & drop functionality that our users will experience as they interact with the application. It was important for me to implement this feature early on in the development lifecycle since a visual element like this is critically important to a positive user experience. Second, I began working on the underlying implementation of the messaging framework that will be used for the LACT application. In retrospect, I should have probably thought a little more about its possible implementation. As I walked through the design of the architecture, I began to realize just how complex it was! For the LACT application, we’ll be looking at using some of the new HTTP duplex mechanisms now supported in Silverlight 2 Beta 2. I’m glad that this feature was added recently. Otherwise, I’d be stuck coding sockets. Yuck.

Here’s a screenshot (below left) of the drag & drop implementation I built earlier today:

The black background for each element has been designated our non-hittable area. This space is reserved for navigation items (i.e. close icon) and allows us to support non-rectangular objects in a 2-D space. Note: The black will be made fully-translucent once we get closer to our “RTM”. This white ellipse represents our objects. These could be anything, really. They support a drag & drop functionality that will elevate them to the top of the z-index when they are selected. This is a common implementation for more 2-D surfaces you see in the industry today.

I also made sure that the implementation can scale. Here’s a screenshot with 500 objects. (see above right) I wasn’t able to see any flickering with this many objects on the surface. Hooray!

Day 4, we'll start integrating XAML with code so that instead of dragging dummy objects above, users will be able to drag objects I created above to the table and see animation occur. Let's wish the best luck for John to make breakthrough in implementing the underlying messaging framework so that two instances of the application can communicate with each other.

Technorati Tags: training,Microsoft,Silverlight 2

Microsofties in Residence Silverlight Training - Day 2

qixing — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:04:32 GMT

Another day of collaborating virtually with John. This morning we learnt about creating handoff animations and editing control templates in Blend for designers.

Handoff animation is something Frame-based animation model can't do. Handoff animation means an animation timeline can interject another timeline of an object, no matter where the object is.

The rest of morning was focused more on Silverlight development such as creating event handlers and databinding in Visual Studio 2008. The first milestone we accomplished today is on our project idea and scope.

The project we are going to build is a simulation to explore a future Surface Computing usage. Imagine using Surface tables as virtual shared spaces for long distance love ones. For example, Judy lives in Vancouver and has a surface table as her coffee table. Judy's boyfriend, Jack, lives in Toronto and also has a surface table as his coffee table. The two tables can communicate with each other. It's important for long distance love ones to

have subtle awareness of each other
have a shared space together to make them feel they are close to each other
something to help them enhance emotional connection with each other
and be more involved in each other's live

We'll use Silverlight to simulate two surface tables communicating with each other in three scenarios:

Jack and Judy send gifts to each other through surface tables.
Jack and Judy hold hands together virtually.
Jack and Judy can play games together on the tables.

I've included all my storyboards for the above scenarios in the below DeepZoom control. You can zoom in to see the details.

John and I collaborated on Live Meeting using the whiteboard tool (see below) to decide the design and development priorities for the project, the initial wireframes, and naming conventions for major UI components. The next stop I'll focus on creating graphics comps using Expression Design and creating user controls and animations using Blend. He'll test out the communication strategy between two silverlight applications and drag and drop interactions. Stay tuned for Day 3.

Technorati Tags: Training,Microsoft,Silverlight 2

Microsofties in Residence Silverlight Training - Day 1

qixing — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:52:55 GMT

This week my teammate John Bristowe and I are participating in the Microsofties in Residence Training (MiR). It's a five-day Silverlight training for Microsoft internal designers and developers. A designer is paired with a developer, so in our case I'm the designer and John is the developer. First a day and half is instructor led training, and the rest is hands-on project time. The goal is to finish a project at the end of Day 5. It's a quite intense training considering we need to finish a project from concept to completion in just 5 days.

John and I have an extra challenge because he injured his foot during our offsite last week and wasn't able to come to Redmond for training in person. We are collaborating remotely. See the picture above, I'm in Microsoft headquarter at Redmond, and John is working from his home at Calgary. This is actually a real-world situation that many designers and developers face when collaborating on projects. We used Live Meeting for John to participate in the class virtually (see below). He can see through my web camera on what's going on in the room and talk through the audio conference bridge, which was connected with the Live Meeting. As we going forward, we'll use more Live Meeting's sharing capabilities. I want to share our training experience as it progresses this week. I hope you find our learning from the training useful as well.

Day 1 Training agenda and notes:

Different than either designer-centric and developer-centric linear style workflow, the workflow for building Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIA) is parallel. This means after conceptual design, there are two things a designer and a developer need to agree on, then they can work in parallel. First thing is a wireframe(more explanation in the next bullet) in Expression Blend, and the second is a naming convention document.
Wireframing in Blend is quite different than wireframe is used in other context. For example, it's very different than sketching. When you do wireframes in Blend, you are focusing on the layout of the UI components, the organization of the components (i.e.how they are grouped), and what UI controls to use to create the desired behaviour or experience.
"Naming Convention Document" is another important strategy for successful designer-developer working flow. Making sure all the UI controls, animation storyboards, and events have proper names reduce a lot of error and save time. For example, use "stb_something" type of name to indicate it's a storyboard. Similarly, use "evt_" before events' names.
creating a customized control and set its states using State View Manager.
The workflow between Expression Design and Blend. If you apply effects to vector art in Design, it'll export as images (i.e.pngs) to Blend. Also, Silverlight doesn't support "gif."

That's it for today. See you tomorrow!

Qixing

Technorati Tags: Silverlight 2,Training,Microsoft

Design Student of the Month - Hannah Johnston

qixing — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:52:09 GMT

There are a lot of creative students in Canada who are doing innovative work to improve people's life through interactive, visual, informational, and other aspects of User Experience Design. I invited them to introduce who they are and share their work with you. To nominate a Design Student of the Month, email us. The Design Student of the Month for July 2008 is Hannah Johnston! Congratulations!! Let's hear from Hannah.

Who’s Hannah?

I recently completed my Bachelor's degree in Information Technology - Interactive Multimedia and Design at Carleton University in Ottawa. I think it’s a great time to be designing technology as ubiquitous computing is taking off and technological interfaces are going far beyond the limitations of standard computer inputs. I'm primarily interested in using technology to design interactive media and games that are both entertaining and practical.

What cool stuff is Hannah doing?

I’m currently researching the use of inertial sensors for video game input in order to change the way people play. With accelerometers strapped to the body, we’re able to detect different body poses as well as some basic gestures, such as running and jumping. The system, Sensor Network for Active Play (SNAP ), aims to enforce more rigorous movement on the part of the player and encourages active involvement in the games.

One of the games we’ve developed is called Posemania. It is essentially a full-body version of Dance Dance Revolution, where players replicate full-body poses instead of pushing buttons with their feet. Track Heroes is a track and field based game where players can compete in the 100m dash and hurdles events, while running and jumping on the spot.

What are Hannah’s plans after graduation?

In September, I’ll be starting a Master’s in Information Systems Science at Carleton University. After that, I might continue with Doctoral studies towards becoming a Professor. Alternatively, I’d like to find employment designing and creating interactive experiences that engage users and have a positive impact on society.

Want to learn more about Hannah?

Please visit hannahj.ca to contact me or to find out more about me and my projects.

Technorati Tags: Carleton University,Design Student of the Month,Canadian

DesignCamp Waterloo Makes Great Impact

qixing — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 22:50:56 GMT

I really enjoyed the speech given by University of Waterloo Dean's Arts, Ken Coates, at last DesignCamp Waterloo back in March. It took me a while to get the video clip for speech, but it's a great one to share. He only spoke for 10 mins. However, it was short and powerful. First he highlighted the impact of student-run events like DesignCamp Waterloo, which the university leadership team used as examples to describe the spirit of Waterloo. Second, Ken talked about the serious problem of "Innovation stickiness" Canada is facing and the 21 century economy is about digital media, digital design, digital enabled technologies.

Check it out.

Technorati Tags: DesignCamp Waterloo

Canada Wins!

qixing — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:32:19 GMT

Congratulations to GreenNet from Simon Fraser University, on winning the 2nd place in the Imagine Cup 2008 Interface Design competition!

Congratulations to RoboTree from Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario on winning the 3rd place in the Imagine Cup 2008 Short Film competition!

Below is an impressive shot of all the global finalists.

Imagine Cup 2009 website is already up. Check it out! More details on individual competition will be available in August. Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup 2008,Canadian winners,Interface Design,Short Film

Expression Resource

qixing — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:49:13 GMT

Lately, I received several requests from both designers and UX professors about training on Expression Studio, which can help them jump start with the tools. There are so many different online training out there, so it's hard to figure out where to get started. I've looked through the training focusing on Expression and created the training list below ordered by learning progress. Hope you find them useful!

Before learning about the tools, you may want to watch the following webcast, which captures the essence of Expression Studio - the seamless design workflow and the strong support for designer-developer collaboration.

"Designing Windows Experiences by Robby Ingebretsen (Identity Mine) and Beau Ambur (Metaliq) Join two top designers as they show how they created next generation experiences using Expression Blend and Expression Design. Learn best practices for creating experiences that are anything but lowest-common-denominator. View this webcast"

Expression Quick start Guides: http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc184877.aspx
It includes information on installation and other basic initial steps to set up the tools.

Lynda.com Training. There are very good training videos to give you an overview of the tools and very easy to follow. Although the trainings are on the first version of Expression, but they still apply. After you finish watching the videos, you should be able to build prototypes using the tools.

Expression Blend: http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=384
Expression Design: http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=339
Expression Web: http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=301

HOT! Expression Hands-on labs. These hands-on labs you can follow step by step. They were used the MIX08 conference this year. If you are teaching a course that uses Expression, these materials can be used for students to learn about the tools in a lab setting.

Expression Web 2 Hands-on Lab: Manual, Lab Assets
Expression Blend 2 Hands-on Lab: Manual, Lab Assets
Expression Design 2 Hands-on Lab: Manual, Lab Assets
Expression Encoder 2 Hands-on Lab: Manual, Lab Assets
Expression Media 2 Hands-on Lab: Manual, Lab Assets

A Note about Expression Blend 2.5 Preview: use Expression Blend 2.5 to create and modify managed Silverlight 2-based applications. Expression Blend 2.5 for Silverlight 2 includes all of the features in Expression Blend 2 but has not reached the quality level of Expression Blend 2 for WPF or Silverlight 1 development. Check out the new features in Blend 2.5 that can increase your work productivity.

Expression training videos and tutorials by topic:
http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc136535.aspx , http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/cc136536.aspx
This is a list of video by topics. It's good to view these videos after you get an overall understanding of the tools. You can then pick a topic and learn in more detail.

Technorati Tags: Expression Studio 2,Expression,Training,Resource,Expression Blend 2.5

Imagine Cup Finals in Paris

qixing — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:42:09 GMT

My teammate Jean-Luc David is now in Paris with the Canadian finalists: Team RoboTree (short film) and Team GreenNet (Interface Design). Check out how our Canadian teams are doing on CanDev blog and JL's personal Flickr site. Let's send the best wishes to them from home!

"Imagine Cup 2008: Day 2 - Working Long Hours

Team RoboTree (Short Film)
The team is well on it's way to create a new short film for the competition. The students were thrown a curveball as the theme and the guidelines for the finals are the same for the second round. Essentially, the goal is to "share a perspective on how technology enables a sustainable environment". The team worked into the wee hours of the morning, took a break and then kick started this morning. Media, Drake and Ryan have been travelling all over the city by rented bicycle and using the Métro. The deadline for the film is 2:00 AM tomorrow morning, then a presentation at the Digital Theatre on Monday.

Team GreeNet (Interface Design)

Jin and Kevin are furiously working on their interface. As I type this, it's the final hour of the competition for them - then well deserved sleep as they have been awake working for the past 24hrs. The goal for the finals is to innovate and envision revolutionary interfaces for a mobile devices, a Web application and Web portal based on the theme "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment". After today, the team gets to relax a bit and wait for the judging results.

You can view more photos here. Best of luck to both Robotree and GreeNet. Go Canada!"

Technorati Tags: Imagine Cup 2008,Canada

Microsoft Designer: Jeffrey Dunn

qixing — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:57:00 GMT

There are about 500 designers working at Microsoft. People in the UX community are often very surprised to hear about it. I think part of it is we haven't given our designers enough opportunities to talk about what they do and what's it like to work as designers at Microsoft. Therefore, I used my spared time during my visit to Redmond last time to chat with Jeffrey Dunn, who is a UX Designer at Office Design Team. Jeff mainly works on SharePoint UI.

In the 11 minutes interview below, I asked Jeff about:

How does his team working together to create the UX vision?
What is it like to work as a UX Designer at Microsoft?
Office applications are so established, does it limited Office designers' creativity since they can't build something from scratch?
What are Jeff's daily activities?
What are some necessary skills to be a good UX Designer?

Technorati Tags: UX Design,SharePoint,Microsoft Designer,UX

Sports and Silverlight

qixing — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 08:55:00 GMT

This year is definitely a big year for sports. Euro 2008 just ended over the weekend, Wimbledon 2008 is happening now, and the most splendid sports event of all - summer Olympics is just a little over a month away. It's also a big year for using Silverlight supporting an online rich experience to view these sports events as they happen. I collected a list of Silverlight sports site below.

Euro 2008 in Germany, Italy, and Netherlands

Wimbledon 2008 streaming site in Netherlands

The user can select the match/court to look at. When you go to the score list, the played matches can be watched on-demand. The statistics of the match are streamed in the video and therefore also showed in the on-demand views.

Beijing Summer Olympics streaming on NBC.com

NBC Olympics Player

Other sport sites:

Technorati Tags: Sports,Silverlight,streaming

Design Student of the Month - David Chang

qixing — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:49:56 GMT

There are a lot of creative students in Canada who are doing innovative work to improve people's life through interactive, visual, informational, and other aspects of User Experience Design. I invited them to introduce who they are and share their work with you. To nominate a Design Student of the Month, email us. The Design Student of the Month for June 2008 is David Chang! Congratulations!! Let's hear from David.

Who’s David?

I am a recent graduate from the Industrial Design program from the Ontario College of Art and Design. My primary interest has been in the development of unique furniture that offer a unique perspective on what objects can be and how they can perform. Although there is a growing interest in creating virtual experiences as a designer of physical objects I am fascinated with how new narratives and forms of dialogue can be created through these objects and generate unexpected experiences.

What cool things is David working on?

My end of year thesis project revolved around creating new experiences for spaces in need of revitalization. In this case I was looking at the library as the subject matter and in particular the library carrel. Through extensive research of what types of furniture are currently available on the market for libraries and how guests are currently using the various facilities and services I developed a hybrid desk that fuses together characteristics and functions of a shopping cart and a personal work desk. The concept was to bring some energy, movement and fun to the library space while providing guests with the necessary tools to complete certain tasks. The library shouldn’t be boring; it should be stimulating in every way possible.

Currently I am working as Visual Stylist for Canadian retailer Holt Renfrew, working on creating unique narratives and installations for the company’s downtown flagship store windows in Toronto. My experience in model making and my background as a fine artist has allowed me to create one of a kind pieces, such as photo installations and headpieces, for many of the store’s well-recognized and revered displays.

What are David’s plans after graduation?

I am currently doing some summer traveling in Europe with the hopes of getting a grander understanding of what design could do, the types of stories it can tell and how it builds unique relationships with people from various backgrounds. I am continuously looking for new opportunities to enrich my own practice as a designer and could see myself involved with others who seek to push the boundaries of design through multiple forms and outlets.

Want to learn more about David?

If you are interested in other work I have created I can be reached at david.hyun.chang@gmail.com. A web portfolio is currently on the works so keep your eyes peeled. Thank you.

Technorati Tags: OCAD,Design Student of the Month,Industrial Design,Canadian

Design Story: Managing Human Capital for Large Organization

qixing — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:37:06 GMT

After joining Microsoft for almost a year and an half now, I'm still finding my way through the company organizational structure. Whenever I met a new person at Microsoft, I'd like to see the organizational tree they belong to and how their orgs relate to mine. A good visualization tool is definitely needed. :)

In this design story, we introduce you the R&D team at Nakisa. They are a Canadian software company who is specialized in building Visual Workspace Management Solutions. I asked their master minds who are the architects and designers behind their OrgManagement Series application to share the high level design challenges, process, and best practice with you.

Farzin Davari

Manager, Process Engineering

Research & Development

Charles Lai

VP Engineering

Research & Development

"Nakisa OrgManagement Series is a powerful web-based suite of enterprise software solutions used to access, visualize and model human capital and organizational directory information as well as enhance communication and collaboration company-wide. Nakisa’s goal is to help organizations make strategic decisions about how to better manage their global talent and optimize workforce performance by empowering them with a 360-degree view into their human capital data. " - Nakisa

What are some high level design goals for OrgManagement Series?

Charles: We wanted to deliver inaccessible HCM information to an entire organization in a very visual and easy to understand format. Surprisingly, if you talk to employees in large organizations, they generally have no idea where they actually fit in the organizational structure or understand how the corporate entity is organized!

HCM systems in large enterprises are very rich in information that can help information workers make better decisions each and every day. The problem is that this information is often stored in many different systems, in a format that is difficult to understand and difficult to access because of strict security requirements.

In the future, we want to, not only introduce a fresh new look and feel that is in tune with the current trends, we also want to bring a richer user experience to the thin client. It is critical for us to continue to improve the user interface while make our application as accessible as possible.

Farzin: Organizational information is difficult to visualize because it depicts the relationships between individuals within the organization. It is much easier to visualize as a ‘tree’ or ‘graph’, rather than trying to imagine it just by looking at flat text. Nakisa presents this information as an organizational chart, which is easy to understand, and very intuitive for any information worker, so that they not only have access to information they did not have before they are able to understand and use it.

How did you involve users throughout your design and development process?

Charles: Actually, inspiration for our orgchart solution came from a user who shared with us, the pain of trying to access and visualize organizational information. From that humble beginning, we realized that the end user was truly the person that needed to be happy with the solution. As a result, we always approached the product as an evolving entity, taking the user’s feedback to guide us.

The first iterations of the product provided users with a static orgchart that helped them solve their problem of visualizing organizational structure. The users looked at the static orgchart, and then asked about how they can see how the orgchart can be linked with other information within the organization, and we realized that the ability to navigate through the orgchart was a need that we had not foreseen! Taking that lesson to heart, we went through much iteration to add in functionality that included navigation and user customization, while always making sure that the application is easy to use.

What are some design challenges when you were designing the system?

Charles: Actually, just trying to make an application intuitive and easy to use can get really difficult. We try to balance offering many capabilities while keeping the interface simple so that the user doesn’t get confused!

We looked at many ways to create our design so that actions are very obvious, but at the same time, every function available that is not visible must be hidden in the user interface somewhere… sometimes making it difficult for the user to remember and use.

Farzin: Another design challenge we faced was to make the orgcharts customizable for any organization. The problem is that the requirements for displaying organizational information is very specific to each company, so we needed to develop a very customizable engine so that we can meet all the client’s requirements.

What’s your team’s design process and some best practices that we can learn from?

Charles: I think the most unique aspect of Nakisa’s design process is that we involve each and every developer in the user interface design. I find that there is this perception that developers don’t care about the user experience, and that they are perfectly to happy create bad user interfaces so long as it meets the requirements. I think that is actually very wrong! Developers are very in-tune with how the user experience is presented because they use a wide variety of software every day. They appreciate good designs, and can easily find flaws in the bad ones. The problem is that the industry puts a creative barrier around developers, saying that they are too technical, so they should not be involved with user interfaces.

In Nakisa’s case, we bring the developers together to critique the user design, they often leverage their own experiences with new and nifty user interfaces into our design, keeping our product design cutting edge. Sometimes, we need to put a brake on ideas that are too different because we need to ensure that we always maintain a clean, professional look. To achieve that look, we focus on small details to introduce a new and trendy UI (such as reflections, shadows, use of different palettes and icon design), while maintaining a strong consistent layout to achieve a clean and professional user interface.

Farzin: Yes, talking about focusing on details, that is one of the best achievements in our design process. We have several internal and cross team meetings where developers can share their ideas and reuse their experiences. Developers come up with new UI ideas in these meetings that we then have to capture and align together. Some ideas are ready to use right away, some of them have to be broken down and polished.

To solve this issue, we came up with UI design pattern. So before jumping into code, a dedicated team finalizes and documents the UI design. This process is an iterative process and the rest of the developers act as stakeholders. The outcome of this effort is a reusable UI design pattern that we can apply it on all of our products.

Technorati Tags: UI Design,Nakisa,Design Story,visualization,OrgChart

Where do you get your inspiration?

qixing — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:52:32 GMT

Lately I ran into different blogs and articles that talk about inspiration. So, where do you get your inspiration? Here are some tools and resource for inspiration.

Inspired by Mood

Moodstream: Getty’s Streaming Inspiration

“The site cycles through photos, videos and music using their huge cache of media as source material. Getty has created a tool for creative professionals (or everyone else) to find fresh inspiration. The control panel has sliders to adjust the mood and tone of the media; happy to sad, warm to cool. You’re also able to save favorites, and (of course) purchase the media.”

Listen to Experts

"I’ve often believed that the best designers don’t get their ideas and inspiration from the place they work. As a designer that works in the social web space, I do look at a large number of new sites that come through the pipeline for inspiration. However, I also am a big advocate of experimenting with things that are seemingly unrelated and trying to connect those experiences to my work on the web." - Kev/null

A Twitter account called Inspiring, where Stephen, Coley, Patrick Haney (who runs a web inspiration Flickr set) and kev/null post inspiring, innovative or beautiful artifacts.

Kev/null's review of Stephen's presentation on inspiration.

| View | Upload your own

My Suggestions

I consider myself in Software User Experience Design, but I often find myself inspired by other design disciplines such as Industrial Design and Fashion Design. I read the Modern and Contemporary Design Blog and love to flip through Vogue magazine.

Other good inspiration sources:

information aesthetics and visualcomplexity for new ways to look at all the information around us
Smashing Magazine - "we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. Really."
Future Perfect - inspiration from everyday people's life around the world

Finally, be inspired by nature. Go to your favourite outdoor places that give you a peaceful mind and great inspiration.

I'd love to hear how you get your inspiration, so drop me a line!

Qixing

Technorati Tags: inspiration,resource

IxDA Interation|09 in Vancouver

qixing — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:52:02 GMT

One of my favourite discussion list is IxDA. It's a great place for interaction designers to ask design questions, share best practices, and virtually network with each other. Some members have met each other at various ID and web conferences, but this year IxDA had its very first conference in Savannah College of Arts and Design. I didn't get a chance to go but heard great feedback about it.

IxDA recently announced Interaction|09 with Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, B.C. February 5-8, 2009. That's something I'm not planning to miss. :)

"The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) is pleased to announce Interaction|09, to be held February 5-8, 2009 in conjunction with Simon Fraser University's School of Interactive Arts + Technology, and the Faculty of Business, located in lovely Vancouver, B.C. Mark your calendars now for what promises to be another exciting and informative conference centered around the design of interactive systems of all types, from web and desktop applications, to mobile devices, consumer electronics, digitally-enhanced environments, and more. This will be our growing community's second annual opportunity to gather with several hundred other Interaction Design professionals from around the world.

About IxDA: http://ixda.org
Founded in 2003, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) is a member- supported organization committed to serving the needs of the international interaction design community. With the help of thousands of members worldwide, we provide a forum for the discussion of interaction design issues. IxDA's mission includes evangelism of our field, innovation in our discipline, professionalism in our standards of practice, support for interaction design education in academic programs, and community building for our growing global community of interaction design professionals."

Technorati Tags: IxDA,SFU. Interaction Design,conference

[Mini-Tutorial] Creating a Silverlight Video Gallery

qixing — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:33:39 GMT

As I promised in one of my earlier posts to do a tutorial on how to create a Silverlight Video Gallery, here is the mini-tutorial (about 10 mins). It has two parts:

Use Expression Encoder 2 to create a standard Silverlight video gallery
Customize your video gallery in Expression Blend and save it back to Encoder as a template for future use

To follow the mini-tutorial, you need the following software:

Watch it streaming below or download it here.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Video Gallery,Expression Encoder 2