Josh Holmes is a User Experience Architect Evangelist for Microsoft.

Josh recently did the  keynote at the Central Ohio Day of .NET and a session at Kalamazoo X called "The Lost Art of Simplicity".    

 

Simplicity is a lost art in the application development space. The Wikipedia definition of Simplicity is Simplicity is the property, condition, or quality of being simple or un-combined. It often denotes beauty, purity or clarity. Simple things are usually easier to explain and understand than complicated ones.

Simplicity can mean freedom from hardship, effort or confusion.

This is a beautiful statement that we often lose sight of when we are building our applications. Instead we are on a never ending quest to fill out a checklist of features or to build something clever forgetting about the actual needs of our users to get a specific task done.

This talk takes complexity to task and challenges you to bring simplicity to the center of your development with some straightforward ideas and guidance.

 

Josh Holmes is a RIA Architect Evangelist with Microsoft focused on building and educating the dev partners with a UX or Rich Internet Application offering in Central Region. Prior to joining Microsoft in October 2006, Josh was a consultant with SRT Solutions working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. In most situations, Josh was called in as the technical leader on a project to lead the clients team to success. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences, including VSLive, Software Development Expo (East and West), Basta and the Rich Web Experience,  focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development with an emphasis on mobility and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Josh has written and delivered many training classes over time for both public audiences as  well as courses tightly tailored for the clients needs. The topics of these classes ranged from XML to ASP.NET to the Compact Framework. Josh speaks from his experience and conviction based on many production successes that his clients have experienced. Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. You can contact Josh through his blog at http://www.joshholmes.com.

 

Joining us will be The Michigan Chapter of the Usability Professionals' Association  http://miupa. org/

The goals of the MI-UPA are to:

• Promote and support the principles of usability and user-centered design in products, software, and web sites for Michigan companies. 
• Bring user interface designers, usability engineers, human factors engineers, and more together to network and learn. 
• Organize and hold events on topics of interest to our members. Events may be a formal presentation or workshop on a usability-related topic. 

 

 

For location maps.