Age of UX - one down

Well the first Age of UX event really well - I think. The numbers were great, there were lots of good questions (and one sticky question - Kordsey knows what I mean), the pizza's were good and on the roadtrip home Kordsey and I got to bond as only newbies can - by complaining and eating jelly snakes.

There are definitely some things we can tune up. For a start I need to tighten up my opening presentation, and next time I want more time to demo Blend!

Kordesy did a great job demoing Expression Web - the first time I've seen him do it with enough time to get in up to his elbows. He only had one demo blooper when he temporarily misplaced the feature to visually edit CSS styles, which is a shame, since this is a cool way to make basic tweaks to styles without having to see the CSS source. There was much interest in the standards stuff, including some good discussion about just how far to go when it comes to 'enforcing' standards and semantic markup, as opposed to just 'advising'. This included Kordesy's sticky question.

So to rub salt into Kordsey's wounds, I awarded the prize for best question (questions?) to said sticky question - I took a quick mobile phone shot of Alexi from Oxide Interactive with his free full-version of Expression Web, but it came out looking like a Kandinsky left out in the rain, so sorry Alexi - you don't get to see your face up in lights on UXB.

Thanks also to Alinta Thornton from Hiser for provding her views on future directions for UX. I really have to blog sometime about the whole 'good tools don't make good design' discussion.

I'll try and get time with Monique over the next couple of days while I'm in Sydney and we'll lock in the next one - which I am going to suggest should be Brisbane.

Finally, if you were at the briefing last night and have any questions or comments about how we could have done better, then send 'em through, or leave a comment below.

Next stop, Brisvegas. (Kordesy, we might have to fly for this one, mate...)