Antoine Valot

The iPad’s true target might just be to offer high-end print publishing to the masses. More than an eBook reader: The new printing press.

Rocket surgery has nothing on immunobiology and proteomics. With over 100,000 products, in a dozen categories, and the most complex set of product attributes and filters I’ve ever had the honor of untangling, the Novus Biological website was a textbook case of Information Architecture challenges…

Had a good day. I delivered a presentation to a new client in Colorado Springs, and I’m pretty sure I blew their minds.
It’s all pretty hush-hush, but this is basically an old media company trying to break into a lucrative new growth market through the web… and I was brought in to assess their efforts.
I [...]

A whopper of a project!
I was able to set a good direction on the information architecture, and to keep everyone committed to a more-or-less standard navigation scheme. There was little I could do to influence the tone and tenor of the copy, but I did help cut down the marketese to a manageable level. In [...]

Built a flash-based complex data visualization and stratification tool for a higher education consultancy. The company helps higher ed institutions to recruit and retain students. This tool is aimed at targeting outreach and marketing efforts to the right populations of high-school students, to maximize recruitment success.
In technical terms, it’s a statistical analysis tool. Likelihood to [...]

Delivered a series of Lovable Sharepoint training sessions for Breakthrough Management Group. BMG is an exciting company, that does what I do: Consult on process. They do it mostly with large industrial clients, where a little process can save a lot of money. I was out training their staff on the user-directed approach to SharePoint. [...]

Well, I’m down in San Francisco for the Microsoft Expression Launch, and I’m intrigued. Not so much by Expression, which is promising, but not yet a slam-dunk, but mostly by the trend that’s developing in Redmond. Microsoft looks like it might be ready to get design.
Now, don’t get me wrong: We’re not there yet. At [...]

Over the last few months, I’ve been making a big splash around town with my latest crazy invention: Lovable Sharepoint. It’s a new service offering, that proposes to take a behemoth of a gas factory, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, affectionately known as MOSS, and implement it in full-scale, gas-factory enterprise environments… with UX spearheading the [...]

I’ve been sent to Los Angeles to help a CTO make a case, in one week, for a MOSS implementation. I approached the process with personas & goals, ethnographic interviews, and a usability-oriented review of their current systems. I also established a good rapport with the CTO, by listening to her business goals and inferring [...]

I’m currently taking a training class on K2.Net, a .NET-based workflow system. It’s an interesting tool, quite powerful and usable, and the training is also of high quality. Still, it has me shaking my head, because it teaches worst practices.
The lab section of the training has us building a sample workflow, and it is riddled [...]