Combine the user group discount with Early Bird pricing (register by May 14May 21, 2010) and you can save more money!

The Voices That Matter Web Design Conference will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center. The conference brings together respected industry authors and thought-leaders of the Web design revolution including:

• Robert Hoekman, Jr.
• Dan Cederholm
• Steve Krug
• Emily Lewis
• and many others

The conference highlights web design and development advancements in:

• HTML5 & CSS3
• Content Strategy
• Microformats & Progressive Enhancement
• Social Media
• Typography & Font
• Grids
• Smart Phones

Due to the generosity of Environments for Humans, Refresh Detroit has a meeting room pass which allows us to meet in one location to attend the conference. All Refresh Detroit members are welcome to attend, there is no cost!

Location
Washtenaw Community College (map)
Student Center Building, 3rd Floor, Room SC 318
4800 East Huron River Drive
Ann Arbor MI 48105-4800
Conference runs from 10am to 6pm EDT

Schedule (as of April 15)

• 10AM: Daniel Burka and Rob Goodlatte — Designing the First 15 Minutes
• 11AM: Jackson Wilkinson — Product Strategy for UX Designers
• Noon Juliette Melton — Remote User Testing
• 1PM: Nick Finck — Sustainable UX
• 2pm to 3pm: Lunch break (lunch is not provided, plenty of restaurant options in the building)
• 3pm: Donna Spencer — Card Sorting
• 4pm: Cindy Li and Jenifer Hanen — Mobile UX
• 5pm: Dan Rubin — Practical Prototyping

Registration is first come, first served! Only 15 seats are available.

Order your ticket today through GuestList, our ticket registration site.

Building highly interactive software that users love to use is usually a challenging endeavor. However, the open source Flex SDK and Java are a perfect combination of technologies for building very rich and highly interactive software for the Web and the desktop.

The communication between the Java back-end and Flex front-end can utilize a number of different communication protocols, but the easiest and best performing is the open source BlazeDS library.

This session covers the fundamentals of using Flex, Java, Spring, and BlazeDS to build rich and highly interactive software for the web and the desktop.

James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe’s JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places.

Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including:

• Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90′s
• Perl, HTML, JavaScript in the mid 90′s;
• then Java and many of it’s frameworks beginning in the late 90′s.

Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing
and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Our meetings are free and open to the public. Space is limited; please RSVP: mckinnon.david [at] ymail.com

Food and beverages sponsored by The Epitec Group. Prizes provided by O’Reilly Media and Manning Publishing.

Thanks to Angelina Italian Bistro, on Broadway across from the Opera House, for offering drink specials to Refresh Detroit members after the panel discussion. Check out the great drinks offered:

• $5 for a 20-oz. Motor City microbrew
• $4/glass for a selection of wines – two whites and two reds

They’re close to the People Mover, so it should be easy to get to them. They also offer $5 valet parking during the week.

BNI is a business and professional networking organization whose primary purpose is to exchange qualified business referrals. The organization presently has over 5,300 chapters throughout every populated continent in the world. Last year, members of BNI passed over 5.6 million referrals which generated almost $2.3 billion (U.S.) worth of business for each other.

What makes BNI unique is that it allows only one person per profession to join a chapter. Thus, once you’ve joined, none of your competitors can participate.

Seating is limited, so please let me know if you plan to attend; call me at (734) 330-4142, or email (vince@vcwebdesign.com) and I will reserve a place for you! The fee of $15 includes continental breakfast. Remember to bring plenty of business cards to pass around as you will meet lots of local business professionals.

Vince Chmielewski

VC Web Design

Organized by Wayne State University’s ASIS&T chapter, the recap will highlight key take-aways from the conference and discuss what you need to know as an information architect in today’s rapidly changing world.

Panelists include:

• Peter Morville, president of Semantic Studios who presented a pre-conference session on IA 3.0 at the Summit.
• Keith Instone, IBM information architecture, who helped to organize the Content Strategy consortium at the Summit.
• Chris Farnum, Enlighten Senior Information Architect, who presented on remote user research at the Summit.
• Heidi Blanton, Wayne State University Information Science student and President of the ASIS&T student chapter who attended the summit as a student volunteer.

Where: Kresge Library Auditorium, Wayne State University
When: Thursday, March 26, 11:00AM
Parking: Available at several garages on the WSU campus. For visitors, parking is $3.50 at the gate, quarters or dollar bills only.
If you are interested in attending please RSVP.

Meet and greet after the panel on the 3rd Floor of the Kresge Library, with refreshments.

Can’t attend the recap? Catch the live recording on UStream.

Interested in learning the basics and benefits of user-centered design and how to introduce it into your organization? This is the event you want to attend!

Mike Beasley, the president of the Michigan UPA, and Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus, owner and principal of UsableWorld, will lead the discussion. Learn about:

• What is usability? Can you touch it? Can you measure it?
• How can you incorporate it into your organization?
• “Usability,” “User Experience,” “Human Factors,” “Information Architecture?” What do these words and phrases mean?
• What can my website analytics tell me about the usability of my site?
• How can you use user tasks and goals to organize your website?

Food and networking begins at 6:00pm, program at 7:00pm.

The introduction to the basics of usability will be followed by a Q&A session. Audience members will set the agenda for this discussion through the questions you bring, so come prepared!

Location: Quicken Loans, 20255 Victor Parkway, Livonia, MI 48152 (map)

Directions: Exit 7 Mile East from I-275. North on Victors Parkway from 7 Mile. At the Quicken Loans building, enter main door, go to 3rd floor, meeting will be in the “Puerto Rico Room”

Cost: $10 for MIUPA members, $5 for full-time non-working students, $15 for all others

RSVP via email

Join us at the fifth annual Internet User Experience 2009 at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor, Michigan the week of March 30, 2009 to April 3, 2009.

Organized by the Michigan Usabiity Professionals Association , the conference promises a week of keynote presentations, panels, training sessions, and tutorials on developing effective, compelling and profitable websites for businesses.

I’ve attended the event three of the five years, and really enjoyed meeting fellow web professionals from Michigan and outside of our state.

The conference is invaluable for

• company website managers and stakeholders
• product managers
• marketing professionals
• advertising professionals
• web developers
• web designers
• user experience professionals
• information architects
• professional communicators
• students in any program

Experts in user experience design, online branding, mobile design, field research, effective web writing, and social media will lead sessions at the conference.

Tutorials are also available to attendees with 1/2 day and full-day workshops before and after the main conference days.

Discounts are available for Usability Professionals Association members and several other organizations, as well as full-time non-working students.

The event will be held at the Morris Lawrence Auditorium at Washtenaw Community Colllege (map).

Registration is open at Internet User Experience conference website. Register before March 10 and receive a free copy of Susan Weinschenk’s new book, “Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?”

How well does your product or website meet your customers’ needs and expectations? Does your product simplify or complicate your client’s workday?

Using a combination of presentations and demonstrations with products ranging from alarm clocks to speeding cars to the high tech hands free voice activated SYNCH that was jointly developed by Ford and Microsoft, attendees will walk away with a clear understanding of the value of designing an excellent, compelling, and safe user experience into products. It will also drive home the point that usability is a rigorous design practice that is applied to much more than just web sites.

Usability in Your Life and in the Products You Use is one of many events around the world on World Usability Day, November 13, features speakers from the worlds of software development and technology integration.

This event will equip you with an overview of how to listen to your users and find out what they need. It is perfect for people and companies interested in making products that really work for users.

• Date: Thursday, November 13, 2008
• Time: 6:00pm – 9:00pm
• Cost: Free – refreshments included
• Location: Soar Technology, 3600 Green Ct #600, Ann Arbor, MI 48105 (map)

Although this event is free, please RSVP to events [at] miupa dot org to ensure that there are enough food and beverages for everyone.

Barb Hernandez, Josephine Scott, and Casey Wright of TechSmith will discuss the various methods now available to visit and observe users in their offices or homes. Gathering feedback from more users remotely is less expensive and time-consuming.

When: Monday, October 27, 6:00pm-8:30pm (Food and networking at 6:00pm, program begins at 7:00pm)

Where: ProQuest, 789 E. Eisenhower Parkway, Ann Arbor, MI 48108 (map)

Cost : $5 Students, $10 UPA members, $20 all others (includes food and beverage).

Register: Please RSVP to events@miupa.org

Questions? Visit the Michigan Usability Professionals Association website.