User Experience (UX) at Microsoft

During April Michael Koster, Designer Marketing Manager, Microsoft CEE HQ visited Pakistan and brought a new concept of "User Experience" into my life, he was supposed to deliver trainings on Expression Studio covering WPF, Silverlight etc but the way he started off with things was really fantastic. I got the chance to grasp this concept from him and was later able to share this within the community..

The UX some what tells us that designing great sofware is not only the science but is an art activity too and too often we miss or ignore the Art part of any application or software which ends up increasing User's frustration and the Users claim our application as to be unintutive, ugly and low performance however we have putted in our best of the best which designing and developing them.

One thing which we are required to understand being an IT application developer that we often miss the user while developing a craft but the Users don't they really care about it and the "Experience of the User is the Product". If it's good your product is good, if bad then bad.

The attached presentation highlights 4 basic elements of the UX which are fucntionality, beauty, affinity and the story which revolves around.

Most of the people think while sitting at MS one shouldn't not be taking about the UX i think this is not appropriate our transition from XP to Win 7, from Office 2003 to 2007 the UX has been taken care a lot, which can be proved and seen from the attached presentation.

Microsoft Expression Studio is an excellent product facilitating the Designer & Developer workflow, which helps designer & developers to stay in their own world, work with their own tools in their respective way but can easily share their deliverables with each other and can easily integrate their work pieces with other deliverables.

I presented on UX & Expression Studio at Sheraton hotel during i guess April end where around 60+ Customer Organizations were present. The main theme of the session was "Microsoft Developer Network" MSDN. Naveed Bajwa, DPE Lead MSPK was the key speaker of this seminar giving a great presentation on Visual Studio Team System 2008 and discussing it's Architecture and Technical aspects where as he was also facilitated by Viqar Madni, Partner Account Manager, MSPK who helped customers to develop a good understanding on licencing and deployment model of VSTS within their organization.

My presentation was of around 30 mins in which nearly half of the time was taken developing the base on UX and rest exploring different products under Expression Studio 2. A small live demo on developing a WPF application by a designer and developer was also given to the audience in order to further brush-up the discussion.
Presentation: http://cid-866cd84756fa9077.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Documents/UX%20Introduction%20and%20Overview.pptx