User Experience / Design and Innovation On The Web

A little known fact about me is that early in my Microsoft career I spent a great deal of time working in our Internet Customer Unit helping grow the adoption of Internet Explorer, IIS and later in my career I worked with some of the eCommerce and Dot-Com pioneers of Canada (such as Chapters.ca, Futureshop.com and my friend Rick Segal).

Microsoft has had tremendous impact on the development of the web in the past decade.  Our platform has unlocked tremendous potential and with the launch of several key technologies this year (including Vista, .NET 3.0, WPF, etc) we are hoping to help drive innovation on the web even further. 

My team is on point for driving this innovation on behlaf of Microsoft Canada.  One of the core areas of innovation we will see as the Web evolves is in the area of User Experience and application design.  This is in some ways a new area for our team to focus on and a major undertaking to say the least.  WPF and Expression alone represent a major changes in our toolset for the UX / Designer audience. 

Earlier in the year we let you know that we were looking to hire a UX Advisor.  We were looking to hire in an "intern" style role, but my Director Of The Community Team, John Oxley, has challenged me in his post on our UX blog to invest more deeply in this area. 

I completely agree with him and we are now searching for 2 people to join the team.  The first will be a seasoned veteran in UX and design.  The second will be our UX Advisor Intern role.

All the details will be on the Canadian UX blog.