Wednesday I begin a new round teaching IMD335 (User Centered Design II – Testing). I’ve taught this class every year for the last three and for the most part it’s always been the same.

With the huge move towards user experience in the last 12 months or so, I’ve decided to change the class up a bit this time around. First, a new textbook – Measuring the User Experience by noted guru and researcher Tom Tullis. I think it might just be what we need to introduce more experience and less testing. Second, we’ll focus more on task accomplishment and user satisfaction in the past by using some pre-defined testing, sprinkled with a lot of web-based issues as opposed to general interface issues, and wrap that up nicely in a site building exercise designed to take what we’ve learned and applying it to a development.

I’m also continuing my support of WordPress by introducing it as the tool of choice for both blogging as well as general site development.

For those of you in the class, get ready for a hopefully fun, definitely challenging, and mostly a good learning experience with lots of information that I hope you take and reflect on every now and then. I have the benefit of 15 years of experience in the business – some good, some bad, a lot of great designs and experiences and a lot of bad ones too. It would be unfair to say that I hope you can live these experiences within the 3 short months of the course (or 6 if you count IMD345) but I certainly hope you can take from what I have learned and use it to your advantages.

That being said, I hope you all take a bit of time to check out some of the upcoming work that my team at iStream has been working on. Right now the prominent projects we have in the still include:

• A redesign of the iStreamPlanet corporate web site
• A launch of the iStreamPlanet Sales Portal
• The official release of iStream Director, a digital asset management system
• AT&T Blueroom Masters Golf Silverlight application with Move Networks technology
• Three interactive Silverlight applications to replace some existing Flash interfaces for a major broadcast network
• New Silverlight interfaces featuring Smooth Streaming
• A Flash video player featuring slow motion techniques for Ballpark Preps
• PlayReady digital rights management

And plenty more to come…