Let's MIX it up!

Just a short note to let you know that I'll be presenting a new session during MIX in Las Vegas on Friday, March 7 at 10:00 entitled "The Story of the Ribbon."

In this session, I'm going to present the story of the Ribbon--the customer problems that we were aiming to solve by designing a new user interface for Office, the prototypes we considered (but abandoned), the mistakes we learned from along the way, and the principles we used to create the Office 2007 user interface.

It will be informal narrative, with lots of pictures and screenshots--my perspective as a member of the team who worked on the user interface from day one until the day we shipped. My goal is to keep it light and fun, but hopefully also to share many of the lessons we learned along the way.

The session is part of MIX UX, a three-day user experience track which is new to MIX08.

I'm also going to be participating in a panel discussion on Wednesday, March 5 at 3:00 called "What's the Secret Formula?" This discussion will be focused on how to overcome the challenges seemingly inherent in creating software with a great user experience.  I'll be sharing the panel with participants from Mozilla, Adaptive Path, and elsewhere at Microsoft. It should be fun.

If you're at MIX, I'd love to chat, so please feel free to come by and introduce yourself. I hope to meet some of you in person either at my sessions or elsewhere at MIX!

More information about all the great MIX content is on the MIX08 web site.