Microsoft needs to create this URL "www.microsoft.com/ux"
After MIX07 more and more people will be looking around Microsoft.com for information about UX or User Experience. If you search for it from the Microsoft home page here's what you get.
A multitude of results sprinkled around the Microsoft site.
There's links from MSDN, there's a link to the Microsoft Design page and links to Vista, however what is needed is a central location for User Experience like this one at Apple.
So Microsoft needs a URL like the one in the title. www.microsoft.com/ux
One place for different people to people to find out about User Experience. And on that page I'd have three different areas of focus (in no special order).
- Designers
- Development
- Business
In the Designers section the page would address Microsoft's greater focus on UX, what tools to use and how to use those tools, and how those tools and design in general interact with the other two areas, Development and Business.
In the Development area, I'd have two section's. One for developers, that covers similar aspects to designers. What tools to use, how to use them, the UX process and how the interaction between the design and developer portions of a project. The second section under Development would be for Architects. There it would focus on User Experience from different architectural levels. From an enterprise architecture viewpoint to the infrastructure architecture viewpoint. How to create UX driven design. (I'll talk about that in a later post. - Sean)
In the Business area, I'd talk about the increasing role of experience in everything we see today. UX has many touch points everyday whether it's a TIVO or a moleskine or your favorite burger joint. I'd explain what it can mean to their business, how it would benefit their business and how to implement it. Additionally, I add how marketing needs to reinforce User Experience and create a feedback loop. So that what people are marketing and what people experience are self reinforcing. (Thus creating customer evangelists).
This page would be a starting point and a place to create community between the three groups. (Kinda like MIX).
Sean