mikemccarron:

davidkaneda:

Outside is an upcoming weather app for the iPhone with a beautiful UI and push notifications.

Going to see my ATL family for Thanksgiving and I am so excited it’s hard to sit still. So much has happened since I last visited and I can’t wait to see my family, kids and friends.

Wish wish wish I had gone to PDC09, not only for the free tablets they gave out.

Silverlight 4 buzz is all over twitter and many of my friends from the dev community have messaged me directly to let me know how much I’m going to love it.

Download the Blend 4 Preview:

http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/archive/2009/11/18/download-expression-blend-preview-for-net-4.aspx

Download the Codeplex SL4 Toolkit (Beta):

http://silverlight.codeplex.com/

Enjoy!

Hey all,

I arrived in London to work on a Silverlight + Sketchflow demo for Lab49. Yes, yes, we have a London office! Vivake, Matt Davey, Mark Plant and the rest of the team here have given me a proper welcome to the UK and I am very happy to be working with this talented team.

I’m also going to be learning Flex from the team here, they are doing some seriously amazing applications and the best people I could hope to learn from. I’ve got a list of objectives that are going to keep me very busy!

I’m also working on finishing an article for .NET magazine on Sketchflow, hopefully will have that wrapped up soon. I made it an epic tutorial (read: complicated) so edits are in order, but right now I’ve got super jet lag….

I’ll keep everyone posted on my London UX adventures, among other things.

Cheers,

Kristie

Always a fan of Meetups.com, I registered to attend the .NET meetup Lab49 hosts @ Microsoft on the first Tuesday of each month. Meetups.com NYC is a new territory for me so I went curiously searching for UX meetups in the city. Bingo! Agile Experience Design meetup  scheduled for… bummer, the same night as the .NET meetup. Bummer that I’m going to have to miss the .NET meetup!

The Agile Experience Design group was hosting its first roundtable meetup @ Direct Brands, organized by Anders Ramsay. I had to miss the IXDA meetup for my holiday and was seriously looking forward to meeting UX people here in New York. The rsvp list filled up and they had to get a larger space to accept the waiting list.. anticipation!

I was not let down, a very talented group of 20 or so professionals attended who had varying degrees of experience and a lot of challenges with integrating User Experience design and agile development methodologies. Their roles varied from managers to designers and many different industries were represented in the group. Direct Brands themselves had recently transitioned to agile and they were very engaged with the meetup.

During arrivals everyone was able to submit their topics so Anders began the meetup by sorting and creating a very compelling agenda for the discussions. I think they are onto something with this group, as long as I’ve been doing agile + design it still amazes me how different the challenges are from one project to another. There are very serious issues with design & agile and this is the forum for the practice of User Experience design that works together with development teams on an agile projects.

Questions and Topic:

- Little or no support from leadership for agile

- One week iterations! (yikes)

- Transitioning from waterfall to agile

- Changes

- No iteration zero

- Offsite clients & development teams

- Design & developing in the same iteration vs ahead

While recognizing the amount of process topics were submitted, Anders made the good point that processes are all local. Deciding to go with more specific topics, one member explained he is designing almost solo with a project new to agile and with no support from his users and stakeholders. How frustrating!

Success is defined by the committment, in my opinion, and the most successful and productive projects I’ve been on had a strong contract of committment from all parties: users, stakeholders, sponsors, developers, designers, managers.. you get the idea. Communicating and understanding expectations clearly was a big part of those committments, however, and the individuals who were new to the process (and present at the meetup) have a hard time communicating what those expectations are. Most didn’t have a clear definition of how they were supposed to design, implement, test and engage with their development teams… The root of the problem.

Another specific topic I have more experience with than I’d like to admit is the No Iteration Zero scenario… I’ve got a post coming all about it.

Conclusion: Process was the main theme of the group & questions… There are so many ways to do the ux design+development process that I don’t believe we will run out of things to talk about for a while.

Today, while on vacation, I received a call from Syncfusion saying they heard I am using the controls and they wanted to see if I was having any problems.

Sweet! Although I haven’t actually started working with the charts, the call had impeccable timing. I begin my chart design work this week and I hope with this contact I will be successful.. quickly!

The lab is busy right now with projects left and right, and working with all the great technology we use means I need to get productive fast in quite a few new environments.

Well, I am going to return to my vacation now. Back in the office tomorrow.

Lab49 is hiring UX professionals! The right tools, amazing tech, smart teams, fun projects! Interested? Message me or visit www.lab49.com for information, we want to meet you.

Hey now. So I need to custom style this blog… but actually writing something could be a good idea, too.

Welcome to my new blog. Tumblr is so cool, it’s going to post on my twitter when I finish this post. My name is Kristie Weatherford and I just moved to NYC to work @ Lab49.

UX, Silverlight, Sketchflow, Blend, WPF, C#, Flash, Flex, .NET, Design, Typography, Rounded Corners, Animation and so much more = endless fun. When you get good tools, new tech and smart people together you get good things.

I hope to keep some people informed, inspired and slightly entertained along the way.

Kristie