Counting Down to Seven: User Experience with Microsoft User Experience Gurus Bill Buxton and Albert “Windows Phone 7” Shum

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Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

We’re a week away from the start of the MIX10 conference! I like to refer to this as Microsoft’s most “right-brained” gathering, as its target audience and topic isn’t just developers and writing software, but designers, design and user experience.

With designers and design in mind, it’s only fitting that I show you a video featuring Nic Fillingham interviewing a couple of Microsoft User Experience gurus who also hail from Canada:

• Bill Buxton: He’s a Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research, and before that, he was Chief Scientist at Alias Wavefront and a professor at University of Toronto. And I’m pleased to report that he got his bachelor’s degree – in music – from my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University (which some of you may know as Queen’s University). He was the guy who thought of applying Fitts’ Law to human-computer interaction, did some pioneering work with multi-touch interfaces and invented the pie menu (which means that we owe weapon selection in Saints Row 2 and the full combat/spellcasting system in Dragon Age: Origins to him).
• Albert Shum: He’s the Director of Mobile Experience Design for Windows Phone 7. Albert’s from Winnipeg, studied engineering and architecture at University of Waterloo and went on to do design work at Nike before joining Microsoft. You can watch a video showing him talking about the new Windows Phone 7 experience and the thinking behind it in a previous article of mine, Albert Shum on Windows Phone 7.

[This article also appears in Global Nerdy.]