I was recently able to spend three weeks in Europe – two weeks working in London, and one week traveling to Brussels and Amsterdam. I haven’t had a lot of long work engagements outside the states, but it really helps get a more global view, and in my case, getting some insights around our international audience.

When starting at GameStop towards the end of 2010 I posted about all the reasons I was interested in getting into gaming – and while being in the middle of it all at GameStop has been fun, I’ve decided to go back to my first love… Travel.

This week the local Dallas UPA held a Big Design Preview event, where 40+ people got to hear 10 minute previews on some of the great upcoming talks here at the GameStop office.

Whenever you switch jobs, there is a trend to blog about it. Along with that, there is a formula involved: announce, give history, praise current position, talk up new position, and finally recruit for your new company. So, as not to disappoint – and not to deviate from the formula, here I go…

Not that I knew it at the time, but going into User Experience turned out to be a great career move. I’ve always thought there would be job security with the number of new technologies and devices that will need designing – think of everything that will have a “screen” in the future. Who’s designing for these screens? Who’s creating the interactions, workflows, graphics? That would be us!

Last week me and Stephen Thomas presented to our company’s UXC Luncheon. This is a quarterly event open to all the different User Experience groups in the company. Our topic was upcoming trends in Design and technology. This is actually the fifth time I’ve presented a presentation like this one, starting back in 2005. While some trends are still developing, there are some new and interesting things that will shape the years to come.

User Experience Groups within a large organization are all a little different. We have multiple UX groups here were I work, and I’ve either read about or talked to people from a wide assortment of large companies. This has the disadvantage of diluting the idea of a UX Group to the outside world. What do you do? How do you work? What tasks does your group perform? To help everyone understand In-house UX Groups better, I’ve broken down the 7 areas of focus – where I see every group having varying degrees of commonality.

I personally think prototyping is the way to go when creating a new software product (or any product really). You get to “blueprint” out how something is going to work, how the pieces fit together, and how it will really work once launched. I think most people are sold on the concept, so it’s a matter of how to build this close-to-real product that you can test with your user base. Do you use paper? Mock-ups? Tools like iRise and Axure, or get real and build a non-functioning ready to reuse front-end?

Last month I gave a talk here at our Customer Experience University about what I call “Emerging Interface Patterns”. Very often we get buried in day-to-day work and miss out on new experiences, new things that are going on in interaction design just pass us by. This is tragic for those who don’t take the time to stop smell the pixels Everyone should be paying attention because these new experiences are great creative stimulus for innovative ideas.

Yesterday I got to hear John Maeda speak at Sabre as part of the Wundermind series of speakers. I’ve read John’s book (The Laws of Simplicity), and really enjoyed it. He gave a great presentation – it’s rare to hear someone who really gets both technology and design (and he’s met Paul Rand!).

So when is simple, too simple? A great quote near the beginning of John’s book reads: “Imagine a world in which software companies simplified their programs every year by shipping with 10% fewer features at 10% higher cost due to the expense of simplification.” Maeda uses the iPod as an example of a product that has succeeded with this model. I also see this in the iPhone. As a new iPhone owner, I’ve been able to discover some great ways Apple’s removed features, without diminishing the experience, and simplified the iPhone UI.