I'm heading out tomorrow night to attend and speak at Software Design & Development which is a yearly conference in London, UK. My talk is on May 14th and is called "Assessing UX" and provides a 360-degree view on what the different dimensions of user experience are, and what concrete things you want to look for when assessing these dimensions. Free tools are presented that help to check concepts and products…

This year, instead of hosting the World IA day like we did over the last couple of years, we brought our own UX conference UXify that we've been running very successfully in Sofia (Bulgaria) to North America. 

UXify was hosted on April 11 at the Infragistics world headquarters in Cranbury, NJ. Our theme was "The Future of UX Design". We had an impressive line-up of speakers who shared their experiences and inspired…

I ran out of time to blog about this before the event, but hey, I went to DevWeek 2015 in London, UK last week. It's the largest developer conference in the UK and I gave two presentations - one about the width of UX and the other more focused on visual design best practices and principles.

Compared to the last years, the number of UX presentations has increased and those sessions have been well filled. This shows…

As noted in our 14.1 launch in the spring, we talked about three main areas of focus for this year:

• Touch Everywhere, Office-Inspired Apps on Every Platform
• Deliver Outstanding Experiences with Awesome Branding & Styling
• Developer Productivity Across Every Device, Every Platform

These three themes are carrying into 14.2, and when we talk about 2015 later this year, we’ll evolve these themes even further. Coming…

You may have heard the rumblings already—Infragistics is working on a new HTML5 page designer to make developing modern Web apps for line of business much easier. In this post, I’m glad to announce and introduce you to more of the details of that designer.

Check out this full walkthrough video here and/or read on for a quick overview of the highlights. When you're done, just click the BECOME A BETA TESTER…

Hey, do you know about the Infragistics Web Design Council? If not, read on!

What is the Infragistics Web Design Council?
It’s a select group of Infragistics customers who want to have early access to what we are working on to provide early feedback and help shape the Web products to better suit your needs.

Why join?
In this program, you will have access to exclusive information, early-preview software, and avenues…

If you haven’t heard of Yeoman, I gladly recommend you check it out. It’s a nifty little CLI-based scaffolding tool for modern Web apps.

One of the nifty things about it is that their generator (scaffolding) architecture is extensible, so anybody can add to it, and many have, such as the popular Angular generator. And now we have a simple one ready for you to use with Ignite UI.

Because Ignite UI is not…

The word "intuitive" as applied to design is a bad word; it is just shorthand for "I like it" or "I find it easy or familiar." As such, it has no place in design critiques and discussions, unless it is heavily qualified. For instance, "our primary audience of professional statisticians will find it intuitive if we represent the normal distribution using this chart." But even in this case…

What is responsive Web design (RWD)? You don't need me to tell you--there are hundreds if not thousands of articles on the Web, not to mention a few books. I've personally read about twenty some odd articles on it, as well as books/booklets. So far, this is my favorite primer, although one of the more thorough and up to date pieces can be found in Smashing's Mobile Book. I don't need to tell you who coined…

Have you ever found yourself in the situation where you had an app idea, but you didn’t have the time, or maybe even the skills, to prototype it? Have you tried using some of the existing app prototyping tools on the market today only to find that they were either too basic in their interactions support, too technical, or just too fiddly and complicated? Have you tried to give a set of static wireframes or mockups…

UX for Devs Manifesto Design from the outside in. Make time for research. Keep your hands off the keyboard. Try many things. Keep none of them. Test designs with people. When all else fails, code. Details make or break it.

If you're scratching your head at or intrigued by some of these, that's a good sign. If you're feeling a bit indignant, that's even better. If you totally agree--awesome! So lemme splain…

You've probably heard someone say "skeuomorphic design is bad" by now, or maybe they wrote "skewomorphic" or even "skuomorphic" (who knows, maybe even "skeumorphism")--it's a tough word to spell. However you spell it, you can read the article on skeuomorphism on good ol' Wikipedia to get the more or less official meaning. Also, here's an article that lavishes you…

John Kolko, a well-respected colleague in the interaction design world, just posted his thoughts on why designers must learn to code.  As he points out, he's not the first to suggest this, and in fact, there have been several conversations in blogs and on IxDA that I've observed over the years. For myself, having been a software developer and architect prior to moving into Design, I can say that having that background…

Creating good software design is hard. You can read all the books. You can go to all the conferences. You can practice practice practice.  But it all comes down to making judgment calls, millions of tiny, tiny judgments that all add up to create the whole design, which becomes so many particular experiences with your software, experiences that you can never fully foresee, kinds of people you never knew, contexts that…

Since Microsoft debuted the new Windows 8 "Metro" OS interface, there has been no end of people in the Microsoft dev space opining on both the interface and its applicability or lack of applicability.  Not long after BUILD last year, one blogger announced that there are "only five Metro style apps in the world," definitely not including LOB.  (I'm not linking so as not to embarrass that person..) …

Over this last weekend, I and a couple of Infragistics colleagues spoke at TechBash 2012 in NE Pennsylvania. The talk is one that I've shared at a number of places over the years, but because it's not technology based, it doesn't really age much (apart from my hair).  

The content is all about UX--providing a brief intro, some of the key aspects/disciplines, why devs should care, what they can do to improve UX…

Did you know we CTP'd a new Undo/Redo framework with our last release?  Well, we did!

And we'd love to get feedback from you--do you think it's useful? How would you use it? How would you change it?  That sort of thing.

Here's a quick rundown of the key features:

• Undo/Redo History Stacks – The UndoManager automatically manages the Undo/Redo history stacks. The collections raise change notifications and therefore…

With the release of NetAdvantage 2011 Volume 1, Infragistics has significantly updated our installation experience. In this post, let’s dig into what that means concretely.

First, we made a new “Platform Installer” to help you manage all your Infragistics products. (I strongly recommend grabbing this instead of the individual installers from now on, but you can still get the others if you want.)

https…

A crew of us at Infragistics just got back from our PDC 2008 trip last week.  It was pretty awesome.

Sunday - Party with Palermo
Sunday night, we were the "supergreen!" sponsor of the recurring Party with Palermo.

Kathleen (sporting our "I heart geeks" shirt) welcomed folks to the party with our "I got lucky at PDC" shirts, exclusive to this party.

The party was packed--there was a waiting…

There are a ton of resources out there to help developers (and designers) make better Web sites and applications, but I wanted to draw out three that I think will have a very high ROI for any developer who is building for the Web.  You could easily consume these three resources in a weekend and, if you apply them, will see immediate positive effects on your Web interfaces that your managers, customers, and the world will…

One of our IG champs (unofficial term), Christopher Bishop, has put up a really snazzy independent community site called VisualStudioTutorials.com:

It has a tutorials, code snippets, and forums, and he'd love to get more folks using Infragistics and/or VS to share their stuff.  An interesting feature of the site is "The Challenge" area.  The general idea, as I understand it, is to try to reverse engineer…

As reported by Dave Sussman (and others), the initial version expected to be running on US systems (thanks to some hard-coded US date formats in the sample XML data).  I've since updated faceOut to handle those peculiarities (including forcing use of the USD ($) while respecting other locale settings) and added a little "about" popup.

Nothing major at this point, but I wanted to let folks know in case they…

I just wanted to point out an article written by one of our top German community members, André Krämer.  Thanks, Andre!

"Wenn Excel mehr als eine Datensenke sein soll"

"Optisch ansprechenden Excel-Dateien zu erzeugen, erfordert normalerweise fehleranfälligen Automatisierungscode. DevDorado.de zeigt Ihnen, wie Sie mit Hilfe der Infragistics Excel Engine fehlerfrei zu eindrucksvollen Ergebnissen…

If you want to get an [updated] overview of what we're doing with Silverlight, go to our Focus on Silverlight area.  We've published a high-level roadmap there and that's also where you can get an intro and overview of faceOut (as well as launch it or download it). 

Random Thoughts/Tech Tidbits You Might Find Interesting About faceOut
The app itself is a salesperson dashboard that mashes up "representative sales…

This year—coming up very soon—Infragistics will be co-hosting devscovery with Wintellect!  This is going to be awesome.  Not too long ago, I blogged about how Infragistics is an MVP squirrel.  We’re bringing those nuts to this conference as well as some of our seasoned control developers and designers to bring you the best content on .NET and Infragistics you can find anywhere.  In addition to the 22 Infragistics…