After two years of working with Don Norman on jnd.org I actually got the opportunity to meet him in person on Monday (6/11/06).
The double pleasure for me was that our meeting coincided with NNG User Experience 2006 Conference which meant I also got to attend a rather wonderful seminar on managing the user experience team delivered by Janice Rohn of the World Savings Bank and I had the great pleasure to meet, talk to and have lunch with Jakob Nielsen and most of the other speakers - not Scott McCloud unfortunately!
To top it all off Don delivered a truly passionate keynote speech on the future of design where he described his guidelines for future design:
- Task Centered not Human Centered
- Users? People not Users
- Personas for applications
- Separate design from study
- no more error messages
- Take the business point of view
and gave an outline of his forthcoming book "The future of everyday things" due out in 2007; which incidentally you can read the first chapter, Cautions Cars & Cantankerous Kitchens, at Don's website jnd.org. Don also described a future for User Experience professionals moving away from application design to integrated product design, as there is further convergence of computer systems and appliances into a fully connected environment. I personally can't wait for the toilet to analyse my stool and send a report off to the doctor perhaps by then the NHS Connecting for health project will actually be finished!
Oh and if you want to find out more, consider man+car, man+fridge as one entity - the horse metaphor is the new black!
Congratulations, man. I'm envious.