Michael Leis

In one of the sadder moments of SXSW, as I was feverishly typing away on a live post about Gaming the Crowd: Turning Work Into Play presented by Andy Baio when the WordPress iPhone app crashed. Worse yet, Mr. Baio has not published the slides. Hope he will soon, because he presented a lot of [...]

Though our wide-ranging crepe-based discussion panel on Saturday morning was a highlight, I’m seated in the cavernous ballroom A for Brynn “No relation to Will or Bob” Evans is sitting on this panel, so I really wanted to hear it. Brynn is kicking things off. She is concerned with the interaction design of search and [...]

Only got to see the tail end of RWTW part one. Fred opens by saying it’s time to nut up, He also admits that he loves prototyping, and can’t think of a situation where prototyping can’t help your design. As designers, we’re not making solutions, we’re making hypotheses, and building towards a solution. So the [...]

As noticed by Amy Cueva as we walked around Austin, looking at this bunch of oddly adorned bicyclists, there seems to be a trend this year by brands to be as silly as possible, ultimately humiliating themselves before this audience in the hopes that (I guess) people take some pity on them and buy something? [...]

Psyched since yesterday to watch Margot Bloomstein open SXSWi with her presentation on content strategy, how to include it in a workflow, and budget appropriately for it. She is absolutely brilliant and a great choice to open the conference with. She’s also a JUXer, which means she’s been training a lifetime in how to structure [...]

If you know me, you know that I volunteer my time to lead sponsorship and marketing for the IDEA conference because I believe it’s an incredibly valuable learning experience for the UX community. Designing for complex information spaces melding the physical and virtual is critical knowledge for anyone with a stake in designing digital today, [...]

Reflecting on my recent experience talking with a range of senior agency leaders, as well as senior practice leads in traditional shops across PR and Direct marketing, the race for the middle (as Forrester calls it) is not only on, it’s getting kinda heated. Regardless of the background of the agency, leadership understands that clients [...]

So Nick Jefferson at LikeMinded wrote this excellent post, but their CAPTCHA is hidden without scrollbars under an iframe on their blog. I did not realize this until after I was compelled to write a comment. So in the spirit of sharing, here’s the original Valentine’s day post, and my response. What Value Do You [...]

One interesting aspect of watching societal computing habits right now is around metrics. We all love them, we like to see who the influencers are, how many unique vistis happen over a period of time, how many times a cartoon got stumbled. Many companies right now, especially those that tout themselves as eminently “open” and [...]

Email has become the elephant in the room. For just about every single business and education institution, the utter dependence on email as a primary communications and knowledge sharing channel is putting a quiet stranglehold on every aspect of operation. Email as a problem space goes so deep and so wide, it’s difficult for most [...]