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Abstract: At Explore Design 2009, North America’s first design education fair , I lead a team to showcase Microsoft’s design innovations and our future initiatives. Historically, Microsoft has not been associated with design in students’ mind and design schools have been skeptical of Microsoft’s commitment to the future of design. Also, our team had never participated in an education fair before and were new to communicate with a younger design audience.

Contribute as: Project Architect, Presenter Solution: I convinced our team that we needed to make a big splash at the event by becoming a title sponsor. I designed our Multi-faceted Approach (see the figure on the right) to make sure we communicated the Microsoft Design story using all the venues at this conference: keynote, seminars, interactive displays, and design dialogues. Key components were keynote speeches from design leads at Office UX and Surface UX team and the acquisition of a Surface table which provided a rich, collaborative, interactive experience that was extremely successful with young students. Results: We reached 5000 high school students, 250 design faculties from 50 universities and colleges and had several positive news paper and TV interviews including an article in largest Canadian newspaper the Global and Mail.

Abstract: My key role in Microsoft Canada was designing and using a pyramid approach (see the figure below) to evangelize Microsoft technologies for bringing designers and developers together. Many of the assets designers create in the design process are discarded or heavily modified once they reach the developers and it’s difficult for designers to alter a design once the developers started building the application. With Expression Studio, we can provide superior workflow but very few designers or developers knew about the tools and how they can support their work.

Contribute as: UX Evangelist

Solution: To raise awareness of the new toolset and workflow, I designed a Pyramid Approach. First, I gained experience doing a Silverlight trial project with a fellow developer evangelist and shared my experience on my blog. These blog posts brought people’s attention and encouraged attendance at my presentations to community interests groups, customer sites and as a guest lecturer in universities. I then worked closely with interested companies to adopt the new technology. The resulting experiences from these new users feedback are used in my blog as stories and guest articles, creating an effective self-perpetuating cycle of communication.

Results: I gave presentations to more than 5000 designers and developers to introduce the new workflow concept at conferences such as TechDays Canada, EnergizeIT and over 40 companies across Canada last year adopted it and the Microsoft UX platform.

Odds and Ends is a list of usability consulting projects and graphics design projects I sought out in addition to my day time UX evangelism activities.