IdentityMine, UX, NUI and 2010

Last night I was reading a blog post about IdentityMine from a local UW director. Look at that... We share the same blogger template. I was confused for a second. Isn't it sad I have a creative company and don't have a custom one? (hint, hint if any of our creative folks are reading this) I'm sure they'll just tell me to switch to WordPress.

Anyway, I appreciated Andrew's comments and it inspired me to take a few minutes and post again. It's been awhile.

Yes, we are busy and last year was our biggest year ever with 2010 looking better yet - despite the downturn. I thank all you out there who demand a better user experience for that. People have been given a taste of good UX and now they have an appetite for more. After all, what good is a feature rich application if the features remain buried in a help file somewhere begging to be used? What good is a collection of data that hasn’t been turned into information via a rich visualization?

The technology is no longer a limiting factor. With presentation technologies like WPF and Silverlight and NUI platforms like Surface, Windows 7 and the various multi-touch overlays, an applications UX is only limited to your creativity and willingness to invest in the engineering required to build the vision. Of course, the “appetite for innovation” and change is only so big depending on which ecosystem your “experience” is targeting. Therefore UX innovation must be managed with good user research and tested with proof of concepts and prototypes. I’m very proud of IdentityMine. One of the things I’m most proud of is the culture which allows all competencies required to deliver the perfect balance of UX innovation to live under one roof.

Collectively we all expect more from the interfaces we use day to day at work, home or during play. The UX is now a major component in our perception of “quality”. As a result, the next couple years will offer companies the opportunity to meet or exceed this new and constantly raising UX bar or disappear into yesterday. Exciting times indeed.

IdentityMine HealthCare Product Selector for Microsoft Surface

Great article from uihero regarding the IdentityMine presence at TechEd this year. Well done Jason! 

I especially appreciated the context around the IdentityMine effort as we supported the Surface team highlight the release of Surface SP1 within an accelerated timeline.

The HealthCare Product Selector IdentityMine built proved to be a testament to both Microsoft Surface SP1 and the IdentityMine Product Selector Solution Starter. Well done team! 

FYI - since our application leverages the IdentityMine Product Selector you can expect it to be available on both Microsoft Surface and Windows 7.

Jonah Sterling Joins IdentityMine as Creative Director

IdentityMine welcomes Jonah Sterling to the team! (Official Press Release) Although relatively new to IdentityMine I’ve had the privilege of working and interacting with Jonah quite a bit over the last several days. It’s clear that Jonah is going to make a positive impact on the unique challenges IdentityMine faces on a daily basis.

Although Jonah loves “shiny things” he’s very much driven by the scientific aspects presented in UX challenges. He’ll fit in nicely as we very rarely get the request to simply make something look pretty. Rather, the requests are more like: “Can you get 1000 pages of data translated into a single interactive page of information?” or “Can you coordinate the interactions of four people standing around a Microsoft Surface table?” or “Is it possible to make Windows 7 do a pinch, rotate and flick gesture at the same time?”

Jonah’s diverse background ranging from Taco Bell toy design to TommyBahama.com web re-design will bring some fresh and creative ideas to our UX challenges.

Again... Welcome Jonah!

IdentityMine at MIX09 – 10K challenge

Quick shout-out to some friends who submitted entries for the 10K challenge… Yes that’s my personally best Verdant score! I thought I was pretty cool until I found out some green-thumb scored 18K.

Karim Hernandez – Verdant
Jobi Joy – Twitter Search
George Phillip – WPF Word Game
Dr. WPF – JAGS 10K
Robby Ingebretsen – MOUSTACHR
Laurent Bugnion – ColorClock 10K

Nice job on your submissions guys! Don’t forget to MIXTIFY.

XAML Guidelines from the experts

Jaime Rodriguez and Adam Kinney... Thanks for the visit. Well done Jonathan Russ, Jared Potter and Nathan Dunlap.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Continuum/XAML-Guidelines-Part-1/

First Ever Production Microsoft Surface in the UK / EMEA

For those of you who read my blog regularly you might be sick of my “First Ever” series. (First ever WPF, First ever Silverlight, First ever Surface) To that I say… Cut me some slack. I want at least one more “FIRST EVER”!

(FYI – I’m moving on to “First Time Ever!”)

Our understanding is that IdentityMine was the first to bring Microsoft Surface to the UK public via the Tesco London and Bristol Wine Club Fair events. This was a fantastic experience for us as we shared a custom IdentityMine Microsoft Surface application with a non-technical audience. As you will see in the video below the response was fantastic and entertaining to boot. Enjoy!

Windows 7 + Microsoft Surface = Success at PDC2008

What a fantastic showing for IdentityMine at PDC this year. So many people to thank. Between the demo development, IdentityMine website update, press releases, logistics and booth support I could literally list all 70 members of our team as contributors. Thanks everyone!

A special highlight this year was an application we built to show off our unique design and development capability on emerging platforms. Take a look at an Event Photos application we built for PDC2008 using Microsoft Surface, Windows 7, NextWindow and some Secret Sauce from IdentityMine:



More on our Windows 7 Secret Sauce (below):