UX on the way to the other side of the world

Correct me in I am wrong, I think this is the first post ever from New Zealand this site has ever had.

Well, In my previous post I talked  about User eXperience (UX). For most people long flights are not the best experience- bad food, crowded seat, horrid service after long hours do not encapsulate the best things in life.

Well, I just traveled for 27 hours to New Zealand and I just had the best experience!!

Singapore Airlines is the best airline I have ever traveled with: top-restaurant food, VOD with hours and hours of TV shows and movies, windows media player for a build-in disk-on-key sockets, 12' screens, roomy seats, amazing first class service (and I got it while sitting in economy class) and lovely staff.  

Next TechEd we must use Singapore Airlines! :)

BTW, on the way I went over the Java sea - does any one know if there is a .NET sea? :)

User eXperience sessions at Tech-Ed

User experience (UX/UI) is one of the key-factors in the success of any product.

When it comes to software products it is most of the time THE KEY FACTOR.

There are a lot of insights and best practices as well as common pitfalls in regards to user experience in the software development industry.

We have three interesting sessions related to user experience and software development in Tech-Ed's dev-lead track:

6/4/08 16:45 - So, you have to build a new GUI. Which technology and UX would you select? by Dr Yaakov Greenshpan and myself.

8/4/08 9:00 - The Perfect Pattern Storm, when TDD meets UX and MVP by Ron Jacobs.

8/4/08 15:00 User Driven Software Architecture by Christof Sprenger.

I highly recommend attending these sessions.

SCRUM sessions at Tech-Ed

There are two very interesting session in the Dev-Lead track at Tech-Ed next week that provide insights into the SCRUM methodology:

Scrum! Because Reality Will Not Fit Your Plan -

Most projects "crash & burn" in all aspects of deadlines, quality, visibility and contents. Despite all attempts to improve the classic methodology they tend to do the "march of death" over and over again.
This presentation will guide you through the corridors of Scrum, a unique managerial framework which resides under the Agile umbrella. Its fundamentals are made of those ideas that others methodologies dread to confront such as; frequent changes during the project, the customer's vague idea at the early stage regarding the final product being  requested, the developers' inability to give proper estimations and more.
Scrum's innovative design theories have been proven to increase effectiveness and efficiency in project design and implementation. Using case studies and examples from both Israel and abroad, this session will argue the best benefits of Scrum. Focus will be placed on major hardships faced during project life cycle and Scrum's solution.

When Software Development and Project Management Meet -

We all want our development project to run smoothly – on time, on budget, without too many bugs, and with the required feature set.
It does not matter if we are a small startup or a large enterprise - communication, collaboration and unified processes are key factors to the success of our product development and project management.
In this session we will show how to streamline the development process between the various stakeholders, environments and disciplines to ensure project success.
We will also present the story of eyeblaster, a software development company that implemented several technologies to enable a complete end-to-end ALM solution.

In the "When Software Development and Project Management Meet"  session they have a couple of great slides about "The Way to SCRUM and a Step Back" where they provide great insight about what they use from the SCRUM methodology and what modification they did to fit there development and business realities.

Come hear David Chappell at Tech-Ed's Dev-Lead track

I am happy to invite you to attend David Chappel's session about 'Understanding Software + Services' at Tech-Ed next Monday. This session had a super high score at Tech-Ed Europe.

About the session - The move to service-orientation is well underway, both inside enterprises and on the Internet. What role does traditional software play in a world of on-line services? In particular, how is Microsoft approaching the combination of software plus services? This session provides an overview of this area, giving an introduction to and a perspective on this emerging combination.

For many software companies SaaS and Software+Services is the missing piece of the puzzle on the way to successful product.