A long, long time ago, back when the tubes that make up the Internet were just wee little sipping straws, Bill Gates woke up one morning in a cold sweat. It was the end of 1994 or the beginning of 1995, and he suddenly had a pounding headache that wouldn't go away and that headache was called "The Internet". Some of you, those of the gray e-hairs who survived the first boom without imploding in a heap of dog food and sock puppets, will remember that Bill wrote his famous "Internet Tidal Wave" memo that woke the slumbering beast and changed the landscape of the Internet forevermore (Business Week coverage: Inside Microsoft Part 1 and Part 2 and the actual memo (PDF) thanks to the DOJ).

Well, they're at it again. It's not the first time since - there was the whole .NET movement - but one thing I did learn is that the massive ship known as the S.S. Microsoft is in the middle of another course correction, and this time I fully support the new heading. Those of us in the UX profession have been yelling this message from the hilltops for years now, but our hilltops are (I suppose) relatively short and shrouded in dense shrubs. Or perhaps we're all just low talkers. At any rate, the new direction is centered around the statement:

Design matters.

What does that mean? Within the context of our Round Table discussions, we started the two days off by talking about how Microsoft was focusing on the design of their products and on designers as an audience in ways they never had before. We saw a whole bunch of examples of the new focus in the discussions and presentations and some of it - most of it even - warmed the cockles of my heart (or possibly the subcockles - hard to say). Microsoft has some very smart people working for it, who are very passionate about the products they make. I think it's easy, sometimes, to lose site of the fact that it's not a faceless corporation and that, much like Soylent Green, it's made up of people like you and me. The Microsofties who came out and met with us were all really excited about the user experiences of the products they were working on, and it showed. A few examples:

• Both Darren McCormick and Will Tschumy, in their presentations What’s up with UX at Microsoft? and User Experience in Research - the Ribbon in Office 2007, talked about how they were somewhat surprised to have ended up doing UX work at Microsoft. Darren came from PeopleSoft, which went from three UX people to forty when he left, while Will came from Flock where he was Director of User Experience, so both have some pretty serious chops.    
         
  • Darren's talk covered the general state of UX within Microsoft today. He talked about how there is a rush of new blood being brought aboard to help with the transition and that they are slowly starting to have an effect (although he pointed out that their last two major releases - Zune and Vista - were somewhat underwhelming). He focused some discussion on the formula Platform + Tools + Craft = UX, which would also come up later during the Expression demos. I think it's an interesting base to start from, though I might even slightly rewrite it to put more emphasis on the Craft part: (Platform + Tools) + Craft = UX. He acknowledged a very important point which I'll talk about some more in tomorrow's piece, about the need to wear Evangelist hats both outside and inside the organization and how the Inside hat is often harder to wear. Most UX professionals have battled with developers and managers to make them see the value of what we do and it's often a much harder sell than to users and customers whose lives are actually bettered by it (take a look at the classic Cost Justifying Usability by Deborah Mayhew if you're stuck in that predicament). One of the more interesting ideas that came out of Darren's talk was the need for something like an MSDN subscription for the UX community, which I think this is a great idea from both the perspective of keeping people up to date on the latest UX-related info and communicating that Microsoft is serious about UX at an organizational level.
         
  • Will's talk focused on the considerable volume of work that went into the design of the Ribbon in Office 2007. Like Darren, Will was hesitant to join the company until he saw the amount of effort going into the design of the new interface at a BayCHI demo in 2005. If you're not familiar with the Ribbon, go take a peak at the user interface demo. I haven't had a chance to really play with it but I really like what I have seen. Will showed a really interesting progression that started with Office 1.0 (designed for 640 x 480, two toolbars) and ended with Office 2003 (designed for 1024 x 768, 31 toolbars, 19 task panes). The Ribbon began as a way to simplify the interface into task-based control groups with a context-based reveal of related functionality (e.g.: when you're editing a table, you get table-related controls). The cynic in me says that someone in Marketing realized that they couldn't really sell a new version of Office (and probably Word specifically) by cramming in more features (which had worked for the last ten years) because they were basically all in there already, so they hit on the idea of a radical new interface as a selling point. If that's true, I disagree with the premise (radical new interfaces should be designed because there's a need for them), but I also think it's somewhat irrelevant. It is a (somewhat) radical take on a traditional application but it's also a very strong indicator of the new Microsoft course. They spent an overwhelming amount of time studying Office 2000 and 2003 (something along the lines of a billion data points from user sessions), incluing task success/failure, time on task, and general customer satisfaction measures. They built paper prototypes, did eye tracking and card sorting excercises, instrumented prototypes and tracked their success, and did intensive field studies with functional implementations. Office represents a huge portion of Microsoft's revenue stream and their internal studies have shown that people (terrifyingly?) spend more time with Office than with their significant others, so this was a major 'bet the farm' moment. I think they made a wise bet and I hope that the Mac Business Unit gets to adopt some of Ribbon into the forthcoming update to Mac Office.       
     
• Kevin Gjerstad gave a presentation entitled A User Experience Story – NY Times Reader, which gave a case study overview of the design and development of the new New York Times Reader. The Windows application, built on the Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), downloads a special version of the Times (encoded in a modified RSS 2.0 feed and/or News Industry Text Format (NITF)) and displays it using a very clever rendering engine which displays a very newspaper-like layout and does things like dynamically calculating the number of columns and text flow around page elements based on window size. I'm not completely convinced that the best layout for reading the news online is the same as the offline one, but the demo is pretty impressive and they spent a lot of time figuring out how to hide the often-cumbersome controls you might expect to find in favour of a much sleeker and task-optimized approach. Kevin did mention that the Times has a very distinctive layout and that there was a concerted effort to replicate it in order to carry brand equity online, which is an interesting thought (how recognizable is it to the layperson? how much value is there in turning down potentially better layouts to carry forward a legacy 'brand'? etc.). There are some innovative interface bits that you can't really do in the paper version (e.g.: browse a slideshow of the 'News in Pictures' automatically compiled from articles in the feed with large photos, use the 'Topic Explorer' to browse a mind map-like display of related articles), and some that you can (write comments on articles in 'ink' or typed characters, share articles with friends - in this case by email - and including the comments you added). The Reader was built as a general purpose platform and includes a full SDK for publishers to take advantage of, as well as support for video and sound. Expect to hear more about it at the next MIX conference (April 30th to May 2nd in Las Vegas - anyone from Microsoft want to fly me down?), as well as announcements from other publishers in the US and Canada. The Reader can apparently be embedded in a browser window (though one presumes that only works in IE on Windows), and also apparently runs quite happily as a 'browser hosted application' inside of the Windows Media Center. Kevin had brought a neat Sony Vaio UX Series, which showed off the Reader running at a really high screen resolution on a small device. Although this all felt a bit like the future (reusable newspapers which download the news every day! Small hand-held mobile browsing platforms that don't suck!), come back tomorrow for some thoughts on why the Reader may not be the best solution.

UX folk are used to having our work de-prioritized when budgets shrink, being ignored by developers who think they know better, and being the first ones out the door when the calls go out for the headcount cutting, so when we actually get wined and dined we sit up extra straight and give lots of well thought out advice. It was very refreshing for the wining and dining - and especially for the listening and note taking - to be coming from Microsoft. I applaud the efforts of everyone we met, as well as the thousands of people they work with, to change the organization from the inside. They have certainly made some impressive strides which show a high-level of organizational committment to stay the new course and I hope that they are successful in wearing both the easy and harder evangelist hats. Some of the really interesting stuff coming out of Microsoft Research - like Virtual Earth 3D, Photosynth, and Seadragon (hat tip to our friend Austin Hill for the links) - combined with things like the Ribbon, give a hint that Microsoft may be an innovative company after all.

That's it for Day 2 - tune in tomorrow for Design Matters (Maybe?)!