April 2007 Archives

Welcome readers from the Technical Careers website at Microsoft!  For my regular readers wondering what the heck I am talking about, I recently had the opportunity to be a guest blogger on one of our recruiting blogs at Microsoft.  The post is mainly about learning what UX is and describing a little of what I do at Microsoft.  You can read the full post here (link goes live on 4/11/07):

http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2007/04/04/what-is-this-thing-we-call-ux.aspx

For any of you who have more questions about User Experience or what it means to be a UX Designer at Microsoft, please feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to answer your questions to the best of my ability. 

Holy smokes, has it really been that long since my last post?  I just can't believe how insane the past 4 months have been.  In my last post I mentioned that it was like someone had opened up the fire hose and shoved my face in it.  I'm here to tell you, things haven't changed.  Although I am feeling much more comfortable learning the domain space for the product I am working on, it's an awful lot of information to absorb.  But all that aside, I am having a blast and absolutely love my job.

The world has been zooming along with all sorts of new stuff happening and I barely have time to take it all in.  All sorts of craziness coming out of Apple (octacore Mac Pro - WOW!), new Xbox announcements (the new 360 Elite rocks!), Windows Mobile (v6 is out), just loads of stuff.  One of the cool things I have been able to do since working at Microsoft has been alpha & beta testing a bunch of software (a.k.a. Dogfooding), and getting to play with some way cool technology.  Since the word is out, I can talk about testing the new maps that were just released for Halo 2.  I had a great time playing the maps and met some way cool people in the process.  You might want to go check out the infamous Kari, a.k.a "TheDonWan" at http://kari.loadingreality.com. Bungie test queen by day, Halo goddess by night.  This chick can kick some serious ass on Halo lemme tell you.

There so much going on that it's hard to recap after a few months, so I'm not even going to try.  What I'll do is try to start blogging a little more frequently from here on out.  Have a great Easter everyone!