Today marked another milestone in my book. I delivered a new chapter titled “The Eight Guiding Principles. This chapter wasn’t originally planned to be 8 guiding principles, but after my recent presentation for Refresh DC it was obvious this was very valuable to my audience. While you’ll have to wait for the book to read all the details of the 8 guiding principles, you can see what they are right here:

1. Understand the Audience and Intent.
2. Plan a little. Prototype the rest.
3. Set expectations.
4. You can draw.
5. It’s a prototype—not the Mona Lisa.
6. If you can’t make it, fake it.
7. Prototype only what you need.
8. Reduce risk. Prototype early and often.

Additionally, delivering this chapter broke the 12,000 word mark for my book. I can’t tell you how good it feels to get that out the door.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the Refresh DC group. I was really excited about this talk for a couple of reasons. First, Jackson, one of the guys on my Wif panel runs the group and asked me to speak. Second, it was their highest RSVP for an event yet. And Third, this was a new talk for me that actually influenced some change in my book. The talk was titled “7 Principles of Prototyping.”

Here are my slides.

I’ll be speaking at the annual STC conference in Philadelphia this year on Designing and Assessing UX. I’m on a panel with some other fabulous researchers in the field—Karen Bachmann, Jean Anderson, Whitney Quesenbery, and Janice (Ginny) Reddish. Here’s a description of our panel discussion:

A panel of thought leaders in the usability field discusses ways to gather real data about users to inform product design and development. Attendees will learn about new approaches as well as hear discussion on the best established practices.

We’re speaking from 3:30-4:30pm. Stop by and see us.

I’ll be doing a talk tomorrow evening in Arlington, VA for the Refresh DC group on prototyping. Find our more about it and RSVP via the Upcoming event. So far there are 100+ people attending.

Just found out I’ll be teaching a half-day tutorial on paper prototyping at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. Dates are August 4th-8th, 2008.