Tonight I spoke at the Springfield .NET User's Group on the topic of User Experience.  I had a great time and appreciate everyone showing up and supporting me, and especially the great feedback and vibe that I got from the room.  Hopefully you had some fun and learned something too--I know I did both.

I promised I'd post my slide deck  so people can look back over it, as well as for those that had intended to attend but couldn't make it.  For the latter group, you missed a fair amount of context and examples that go along with it so just catch up with me sometime and I'll be happy to chat over coffee or a beer.

The slides were created in PowerPoint 2007.

User Experience.zip (3.09 mb)

Here's a link to the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines that I referenced during the Q&A session.  It's completely free and a great resource--tons of examples and detail.  I'll write another blog post soon with some books and other web sites that are also great references.

For those of you who aren't already aware, I recently left DTC to become a software engineer at Jack Henry & Associates and am in the transition of moving my family back to Springfield.  Although I will miss my friends at DTC and enjoyed my job there, it was time to move on to bigger and better things.  At Jack Henry, a large banking IT corporation with a small company feel, I work on their enterprise systems team, largely in .NET web technologies.  I still freelance web development on the side for organizations or small businesses and love learning and applying user experience knowledge and ideas.

Target is using innovative pharmaceutical packaging known as Clear Rx.  It was designed by Deborah Adler (and refined by Klaus Rosberg). More...

Tonight I gave a presentation at my local .NET user group about Windows Forms controls and Visual Studio's designer.  Attached is the VS2008 solution for my demo and I've tried to summarize the content of the presentation below.  Please comment with any thoughts or questions!

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I've been trying a few different social bookmarking options on my blog and have settled on one I really like, AddThis.

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I'm presenting at my local .NET User Group this Monday, May 11 at 6:00pm CST.  We usually have a live conference feed setup if you aren't available to attend in person, and I'll also make my content available here on the blog afterward.

I'm going to discuss some of the more advanced out-of-the-box Windows Forms controls in Visual Studio and give some tips on using the designer.  I debated about whether this is even a pertinent topic but as head of our company's .NET UX committee I see a lot of people who aren't aware of these controls or don't know how to use them to their full advantage.  Since we can't yet make the jump to WPF, and I'm sure others out there haven't/can't yet either, I figured this might be at least somewhat useful.  If nothing else, we have free food and prizes.

I'll talk about how to effectively use the Table Layout Panel, Flow Layout Panel, Split Container, Property Grid, Tool Strip Control Host, and more.  Stop by and heckle me if you're in the area and if not, be sure to check out the blog's summary afterwards!

I'm officially running my own custom blog theme, live in production!  I've had a custom theme on my family's blog for a long time but I spent a lot of time working on one for my IT blog because I had a very particular idea in mind and just couldn't quite get there.  It's amazing how much time minimalism actually takes up - it's so hard to know when to take something out and when to include it, and every pixel and line makes a dramatic difference.

I also upgraded to BlogEngine.NET 1.5--went really smooth and I love the ability to reply to comments.  Be sure to check out the about page and portfolio.  Now that I finally have the theme (mostly) finished, I can start catching up on the backlog of content!  Look forward to additional posts coming your way soon.

Let me know what you think!

Chris Koenig, a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, visited my local .NET User Group (DNUG) on Monday night and presented on one of Microsoft's latest developments, Live Mesh.

Chris gave us a basic run-down of what Mesh is: how it synchronizes information across various devices and can share information between different users' mesh accounts and the benefits of storing information in the cloud.  He also emphasized that this is not only for Microsoft products but is built so that it can work with smart phones, various Apple products, video cameras, GPS devices, and a bunch of other stuff.

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No, it isn't a typo, this is a second sneak peek at my upcoming blog theme.  I'm really tired of this canned theme but haven't had a chance to finish slicing and dicing my Photoshop file into a real working theme on BlogEngine.NET.

I took what I had before and thought it was still too busy and didn't emphasize the content that I wanted it to.  So I stripped it back to the basics and added a few nice touches--the new one is an ultra-minimal theme that hopefully will make it easy to find what you're looking for and nothing you aren't.

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Here's a glimpse of the upcoming blog theme I'm developing for Pure UX.  I'm still tinkering and it will be a while before it's pulled out of Photoshop and made into real HTML/CSS/JavaScript and attached to BlogEngine. Of course, the content is just bits and pieces from various posts so don't think that it actually makes sense when you look at the specific text.

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