Flex and Flash Developer - Jesse Warden dot Kizz-ohm

Who: Brandy Fortune
What: Usability for Designers & Developers
Where: RoundBox Global (Directions)
When: Thursday, May 8 at 6:30PM

Usability for Designers & Developers
Have you ever wished you had factual data to show your manager in order to prove a point about functionality you believed strongly in including or removing? Have you ever gotten frustrated by your clients requesting you change an image or add a button to a page? Have you ever wondered if in the end the design changed so many times it lost its original purpose?

Session Detail
If you can answer yes to any of these questions then this session is for you. Learn how usability testing will allow you to put factual information behind design direction and functionality, while improving the quality of your product.

Technical “how-to” presentation, user will leave session knowing how to conduct their own usability tests and will have example protocol testing documents to build their own tests on, as well as a list of which equipment to buy and an overview of how it all works together.

• Part 1: How I came to be involved in usability testing.
• Part 2: Participatory Design & User Testing - What value does it have? Why should you do it?
• Part 3: Participatory Design Sessions - Creating Mood Boards based on user feedback and brainstorming, picking a design direction. (Real world example screens from Cingular.com resulting from Mood Board exercises)
• Part 4: Iterative User Centered Design Sessions - Showing multiple designs to users. (Real world example design comps from internal Customer Sales Portal)
• Part 5: Usability Tests on functional areas - Live and Protocol Based sessions. (This will include protocol examples, transcripts, data extraction, as well as how to present findings and recommendations)
• Part 6: How to facilitate, How to setup equipment. (Detailed list provided for equipment purchases)

Speaker
Brandy Fortune currently works for AT&T (formerly Cingular Wireless), the United States largest wireless carrier. In April 2003 Brandy was a part of the team that made Cingular Wireless was one of the first commercial websites to embrace CSS layout and XHTML. As Brandy moved back and forth between creating clean and simple user interfaces and coding them, she mastered the translation of design into code.

Throughout her career Brandy was continually exposed to Information Architecture and Usability Studies, this fueled her desire to create designs that had longevity and document-able success. Brandy was granted a promotion and left the “Human Centered Design” group within Cingular to move into the Sales organization, to proliferate the Usability Methodologies she had found to be successful over the years.

Please RSVP to info@xdatlanta.org

Via the Atlanta Adobe Experience Design Users Group.

My dad has a Motorola T605 cell phone with Verizon. Most of the time, if he received a call when the phone was on the holder and connected to Bluetooth, it wouldn’t work. Dialing out was no problem. The phone would remain on, but no audio could be heard. If he attempted to re-dial, you couldn’t hear any audio either. So, while voice activation might be working, you couldn’t hear the robot chick on the phone prompting you. Basically, when receiving an incoming call while connected to the hands free Bluetooth, the phone would mute once you answered.

We fixed this by plugging in the car charger into the cell phone. That seemed to fix it.

Some additional details for Google searchers: He recently had Circuit City come on-site install the Bluetooth Hands Free set. He’s got an older Toyota Tacoma, so it doesn’t integrate with his stereo. It merely has the stand, the included speaker the size of a brick, and whatever connections for power. I read on a forum that the yellow wire was mis-documented to be the mute wire, and the orange the correct one. However, since this was wired in the back of his dashboard, and I’m not a mechanic, I figured maybe the phone couldn’t do certain functions when not plugged in. A lot of computers run at half power when on battery. Apparently the phone is the same way.

Via Bobby from the Flash Mobile Group. Sounds more like management transition & shuffling if you read the press release.

…the Mobile and Devices Business Unit will be folded under Adobe’s Experience and Technology group.

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…and end the drawNow madness.

I knew something was SERIOUSLY wrong when I read in the official docs (Part 3) from Adobe that if your code doesn’t work correctly, try using “drawNow”, and failing that, “validateNow”. What do you mean “try”? What… the… hell…

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If you are in a hurry, here are some links with excerpts about the section.

Contents

• Introduction - What and Why MIX?
• Conference Grounds - Where was MIX and how did it go down
• DoubleClick - Syndication ready Silverlight
• Have we seen this before? - “Dude, Flash did that years ago.”
• Silverlight Adaptive Streaming - Curious about how the buffering works.
• Silverlight on Mobile - Same problems as Flash Lite has.
• Silverlight for Flash Developers - I do Flash; can I do Silverlight?
• AOL’s Silverlight Email App - Enterprise Silverlight
• Bloggers Mingling - A-list bloggers, and who I met
• Conclusions - What I took away from MIX.
• History Repeating - Some of the .NET crew is doing what the Java crew already did.
• Force Fed Silverlight - Silverlight is an alternative, not a choice.

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