Windows 8 UX Design Jump Start

Windows 8 is a new digital canvas where you can showcase your creativity and flair with apps that reach hundreds of millions of people. The platform provides unique features like Live Tiles, Contracts and Cloud services, so you can engage your audience more deeply in new and creative ways. Get ready for Microsoft Sr. Technical Evangelist  Chris Mayo, and Big Nerd Ranch, Director Of Design Brandy Porter to show you the ins and outs of designing a better UX for Windows 8!

Course Outline

01 |  The Microsoft Design Language
07 |  Charms, Contracts and Extensions

02 |  Less is More
08 |  Tiles and Notifications

03 |  Navigation
09 |  Touch

04 |  Layout
10 |  Animation

05 |  UI Elements
11 |  Accessibility

06 |  Snap and Scale Beautifully
12 |  Globalization

13 |  The Windows Store

Instructor Team

Chris Mayo | Senior Technical Evangelist | @chrisdmayo

Chris is a designer and developer focusing the design of Windows Store apps.  Chris has been with Microsoft for 12 years. Prior to joining Microsoft, he served as a designer, developer and architect in the IT departments of Fortune 500 companies in the retail and finance industries. Keep up with Mayo at his blog.

Brandy Porter | Director of Design and Instructor | @bignerdranch

Brandy has spent much of her career creating award-winning solutions for top consumer brands across all manner of media and has created results-driven interactive experiences on multiple platforms and devices, and has also taught interaction design at corporate and collegiate levels with a focus on user behavior, intuitive design and critical thinking. She leads the Design team at Big Nerd Ranch, a company known for its immersive bootcamps, corporate training and elegantly designed mobile apps. The Nerds are fluent in multiple operating systems and languages, including Windows 8, Android, iOS and HTML5. Brandy and her team also teach holistic design practices for major mobile operating systems. They have delivered courses to designers, developers and content strategists from Fortune 100 companies in multiple countries.

Register Today

MIX11 – A recap you can’t afford to miss

MIX, is a gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals creating the most innovative and profitable sites on the web. This year’s event offers two days of keynotes streamed live and approximately 130 sessions available for download.

Sessions range from content strategy, usability and design topics to technical, code-based topics. You can watch the most  important announcements that were done during the keynotes of day 1 and day 2 but here are some of the
highlights:

-     Perhaps the biggest announcement at MIX11 was the release of IE10 Platform Preview 1, just a month after shipping IE9 RTW.  Microsoft showed-off several amazing experiences built on IE9, including World’s Biggest Pac-man and  htttp://foursquareplayground.com. All demo’s are available at 
http://ietestdrive.com

- New Opportunities and Capabilities for Windows Phone are coming later this year: IE9 for Windows Phone 7, multi-tasking, ringtone API, new languages support  (including Dutch), … If you want to get started now: All Windows Phone Developper tools are free.

- Windows Azure: Windows Azure helps developers build, host and scale web applications through Microsoft datacenters. New capabilities announced include services that accelerate application performance and enable secure and open access to Web applications through popular identity providers, including Microsoft, Facebook and Google. There was also a specific announcement on Umbraco and it’s Azure support. Umbraco is a very popular open source, .NET-based CMS application that is powering over 85K sites today.

- WebMatrix updates: WebMatrix is a free web development tool from Microsoft that includes everything you need for website
development. Start from open source web applications, built-in web templates or just start writing code yourself. It’s all-inclusive, simple and best of all free.

-  Silverlight 5: Microsoft also announced the immediate availability of the beta for Microsoft Silverlight 5, which provides advances in rich media and application development. New capabilities include Hardware Video Decode, for
enhanced video quality and performance. More information and a download of the beta are available at
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight
.

- The Kinect for Windows SDK: a programming toolkit that will enable researchers and enthusiasts to access Kinect device
capabilities for  computers running Microsoft Windows 7 will become available. Check out the website for the SDK.

Recommendation: Watch the Day 2 keynote and browse through all available sessions and pick out the ones you find
interesting !