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Microsoft MIX10: Day One

March 17th, 2010

Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Technology, User Experience Design, Visual Design, Web Development

There’s a lot going on at MIX10, here are my thoughts on day one:

Keynote introduced the design and development community to the new Windows phone. The interface is interesting. As with most new concepts, there are some good things and some bad. Also introduced the Pivot Control for Silverlight 4, which uses content type attributes and values to help winnow down a large set of similar content types down to a narrow set.

Windows Phone:

Navigation – the concept of panning across a panorama using navigation to pan from one part to the next. The concept of clipping text and images that live in the next screen to indicate more content/functionality is available. This seemed awkward. Providing common real estate for functions is a plus, which makes creating applications for the phone less complicated and makes it less cumbersome to use. However, the use of overly simplistic icons makes the user think.

Microsoft also demonstrated two ways to create applications for their new phone: Visual Studio for developers and Silverlight Expression Blend for designers. One interesting aspect of this was the inherent collaboration required by design and development, which is the real theme of this conference. Developers using  Visual Studio will need to leverage work created for them by design to execute an application, and designers will need to leverage work created for them by development to execute their application creation using Expression Blend. Lastly, they also introduced the Windows Phone emulator for Visual Studio 2010 that will allow developers to toggle between code and design.

Session Bits:

• AKQA used SharePoint 2007 as the platform for an externally facing Ferrari.com, albeit stripped-down. SharePoint 2010 is said to have stripped out the junk code and left the semantic. SharePoint 2010 removes tables for DIVs and disconnects CSS from HTML in favor of external CSS files and JavaScript Libraries. Crossing fingers on that one, since several clients have been sold SharePoint as externally facing and we want to make full use of previous purchase decisions when possible.
• Bing Maps allows designers significant flexibility to brand and stylize the map experience for their clients. This will eliminate a disconnected user experience for brand-centric sites utilizing mapping features.
• OST Halo was built using Microsoft Smooth Streaming. This is significant, since all videos are required to load seamlessly without chop given it’s a video site and not just a collection of videos on a web site.
• Paul Dawson from EMC2 talked about Total Experience Design. Not only should you design for the problem, you should design for the whole experience. We must think of all customer touch points, and provide a seamless, empathetic and delightful experience for them when designing solutions for our client’s problems.

Stay tuned for day two highlights.