We stayed at the City Inn, which turned out to be a refreshingly modern and simple hotel with free ethernet in the room (courtesy of a lovely pink CAT5 cable). We rallied the troops for a fun night on the town, taking advantage of The Commercial House's pretty fantastic pint, burger, and chips for £4.95. Tuesday morning saw us up bright and early for a walk to the University of Bristol campus, to pay a vist to 3CResearch, a member company doing "convergent technology research for digital media processing and communciations" (in case you're wondering — and I certainly was — the three C's are Communications, Content, and Creativity). We were given a demo of their Visualise project, which delivers streaming video to mobile devices (currently over WiFi but soon over faster and more pervasive delivery channels like HSDPA and WiMax). It was designed to offer a better experience to fans of events like rally racing, which generally involves standing in a cold, wet field for hours on end in the hopes that a car will hurtle past you for an exhilirating 15 seconds. Visualise means you can still stand in the same damp glen, but now you can watch the race from multiple viewpoints on your mobile, as well as peruse stats and driver info (assuming the touchscreen still responds to your frozen fingers). In all seriousness, the technology can be applied to any kind of event and would be great for things like music festivals like Coachella, at which you would need to clone yourself several times over just to catch half the bands you wanted to see. The demo was followed by a presentation by Dr. Geraint Jones about a number of the other 3CResearch projects, including Intelligent Content Based Retrieval (ICBR) (analyze video archives and index based on content, motion, etc.) and Motion Ripper (extract motion data from video and apply captured motion signals to computer animation — i.e.: analyze a video of birds flying and animate an electronic bird). Their research is very interesting, if not entirely cutting edge, but I thought the more interesting part was the conversation which erupted over licensing of technology and how pure research facilities can successfully commercialize their ventures. Sutha suggested they take a look at the MIT Media Lab model, which is basically pay-for-play (i.e.: companies can pay an upfront and quite large fee and then have access to all of the research), and I would think there's a lot to be learned from the MaRS Discovery District and from the University of Toronto's Innovations Group.

We spent the late afternoon and evening at Watershed Media Centre, a facility that reminded me of The Bookshelf in Guelph, a favourite haunt during my University years. Watershed includes a few cinemas, a caf&eaccute; and some meeting facilities, and was our home for a great mini-trade show event which consisted of 40 South West companies meeting and greeting our Canadian crew. Steve Collett (International Trade Advisor from UKTI) started us off, Ian Kelso (from Interactive Ontario) gave a quick state the union of New Media in the New World, and I followed him with a quick Introducing the Canadians rundown of the companies in the mission (and including a photo of a polar bear cub, two bears making out in the woods, and the poster from South Park: draw your own conclusions). I was followed by Mark Leaver (Director of Development from South West Screen), who mirrored Ian's talk but focused on the South West region of the UK, and then we were treated to a fantastic presentation by Adam Montandon, Director of HMC Interactive, who have built some truly amazing interactive experiences for Cadbury's Purple Planet and The Royal Obeservatory. He also has the excuisitely good taste to have fallen in love with a Canadian girl and is working on a (longish) term plan to move to our fair lands to be with her. I cornered him after and insisted that we line up a DemoCamp demo on his next visit, which he heartily agreed to (or maybe defensively, so I'd let him out of the corner — hard to tell). The trade show was a great success and I met a number of interesting people doing interesting things in which we might well take an interest, including John Bradford from jbsh, LLC (who are working on an educational product for the Canadian market), Paul Bason from University College Falmouth (who was delighted by Michael Wesch's latest and who was really interested to hear what we looked for in students and in whether we'd be into a distance-learning based partnership), David Karney from Potential Difference (a swank Bristol web shop who are basically Radiant Core's British counterparts, but on .NET), and James Ovenden from Ball Fusion (who are marketing an amazing video on street soccer skills — check out some of the tricks on their homepage). Apologies to the gentleman from Sanoodi, whose slightly odd application name I've managed to easily remember but whose much less odd personal name I've completely forgotten (owing to his lack of business cards, of course). We had a great chat about his app and where it's headed, and I showed him Toronto's own Planet Eye and the Specialized Riders Club (run by our friend Chris Matthews) for some inspiration. We ended the evening with a delicious dinner for fourteen at the Severn Shed (don't worry Mike: I didn't pick up the tab!), during which I had the pleasure of chatting about documentaries, music, books, and television with Julia Bennett (from White Pine Productions), Jason Krogh (from Zinc Roe), and Paige Chambers (from the Canadian Business College).

Stay tuned for Day 3, which will mostly be a train ride to Glasgow!

Back in early July, I was having a coffee with Ian Forrester from the BBC Backstage at our local Balzac's, when in strode Ian Kelso from Interactive Ontario. Ian to Ian (i2i?) introductions were made, and Mr. Kelso (my former boss from many moons ago!) laughingly suggested that we should join them on the Trade Mission they had just announced so that Mr. Forrester could buy me a coffee in his hometown. And here we are, three months later, sitting in the Tower 1 Meeting Room at The Tower Hotel in London, listening to John Davies, Technology & Strategy Adviser from United Kingdom Trade & Investment, talking about his country's strategic direction.

So, we're here until this afternoon, then off to lovely Bristol for a tour of 3C Research and a mini-trade show, then to beautiful Glasgow on Wednesday for some networking and a tour of the Hillington Innovation Centre on Thursday. I've got a criminally early train on Friday (5:50 am!) back to London, where I will sadly not have coffee with Mr. Forrester (who will be en route to Berlin) but rather lunch with his colleagues, a pint or two with Ian Hayward from Glaxstar (the company, not the alien galaxy), and a lovely dinner with the team from eBay UK (with whom we did the eBay Firefox Companion and are now working on a top secret new project).

I've got my trusty Rebel XTI and have been trying to capture some shots while keeping it out of the rain (no mean feat), which I'll make sure to post and link to. Many thanks to Sutha Kamal for playing tour guide yesterday and showing me around the banks of Thames, the Tate Modern, a few Starbucks (a charming little chain of coffee shops!), an historic pub (Lamb and Flag, which has been around since Charles II), and a great Vietnamese dinner at Cay Tre. More as it happens!

I was drawn to this session because we're big advocates of the semantic web, particularly focused on making sure that we implement client sites in semantically-correct HTML with embedded data like microformats. I've also had a long-standing interest in Natural Language Processing, both out of general curiousity and as a user interface mechanism. It's one of those technologies, like virtual reality and voice recognition, which has been just around the corner for the last twenty bends in the road, so I was really curious to hear what the panelists had to say and about how close they are to releasing products based on it.

It was a great session with an excellent conversation between the panelists, who were all very knowledgeable about the topic. Panels often degenerate into promos for the represented companies but the hard (and soft) sells were kept to a miminum. A quick summary of the most salient points (raw notes follow below):

    
• The much-maligned labels 'Web1.0', 'Web2.0', and 'Web3.0' could really just refer to decades (1990-1999, 2000-2009, 2010-2019 respectively) in which the priorities of the web community shifted from inventing the backend of the web to improving the user eperience and frontend, to returning to the backend and building in intelligence in the form of semantic meaning (Nova). Think of it as the shift from plumbing to meaning, over a thirty year period (Barney).
    
• The web to date has been focused on producing content for human consumption rather than on content for machine consumption and processing (Barney). The web needs to move from being a file system to a knowledge system in order for humans to be able to more efficiently extract meaning from it (Nova).
    
• The semantic web is going to require humans to add all of the semantic information, which is where search engines like Mahalo are going (search results augmented with human-created information). Radar Networks is taking this approach by building community networks which help people add and augment the semantic understanding of the web (Nova). Sometimes people aren't very good at adding that information because of the complexity of the context required (e.g.: the difficulty is in things like email messages which just say "Yeah! Let's do it!", which could mean "Let's go for lunch!" or "Let's commit securities fraud!" but which can't be understood without the context of the related emails in the thread). Humans are only right about categorization about 60% of the time but Cataphora's software has been independently evaluated as being 99.6% accurate (Elizabeth).
    
• There's an element to the semantic web which is heavily based on the concept that the work one human does can have benefit for another human, and that giving your time in one place will save you time in another (e.g.: tagging, Wikipedia, etc.). This is the begining of the semantic web and future search software (like Powerset) will need to understand the meaning that we are now creating (Barney).
    
• One of the really interesting things in this space is finding the impossible problems and figuring out how to solve them. The question of "who said a specific thing" is really hard but could be a killer app for people like journalists (Barney).
    
• The basic technology at play here is nothing new and has been around for decades.     
• Trust is a big factor affecting the success of all of these systems. It's really hard to assess how much you trust a certain source and to have that trust affect the weighting of the graph for specific knowledge, especially when people will publish information which intentionally distorts the truth (Nova). It becomes even more difficult when you consider that some people will be highly trustful about certain topics and wrong (sometimes intentionally) about others, so there's no such thing as a single trust metric per source (Elizabeth).
    
• There's a difference between trust and authoritativeness, around which there is a bunch of research into hubs and authorities. This is the area that Google's PageRank is based on and is known as Bibliometrics. A measure of authoritativeness is not always the same as a measure of trust - you might trust your friend's opinion more than an authority because of your proximity to him or her (Nova). Sometimes authoritativeness is the opposite of what you might expect in that the document seen by more people might be less authoritative than the one seen only by a few (Elizabeth).
    
• General Magic had a vision for a semantic web before the web even existed, using a collection of autonomous agents to go out into the ether and do work for you, reporting back when they were done. Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the semantic web (Semantic Web Roadmap) was basically a restatement of the same vision. The more intelligence you add to the web (in the form of metadata), the less intelligent the agents need to be. Right now, we're more at a level where the agents aren't autonomous and are more like processes which run outside of your server, like the GoogleBot. We're probably 10 - 15 years away from truly autonomous agents (Nova). That said, we don't need them to be autonomous to be useful. We should expect the tools we use on a daily basis to get smarter about who we are and what relationships we have, as well as to understand richer inputs like natural language, in the next few years (Barney).
    
• AT&T deployed a natural language voice recognition IVR some years ago which understood only five words but which saved them hundreds of millions of dollars by directing service calls automatically instead of relying on human operators (who all lost their jobs). There was a belief in the 60s that the economy always creates more jobs than it destroys, so where will the new jobs be created (John)? Some of the call centers that moved to India are moving back because it turned out to be too difficult to train Indians to look, sound, and feel like Americans (Elizabeth). Humans do a much better job of adding semantic meaning to data, so the more data we acquire, the more knowledge coders we need (Nova).  Also, keep in mind that machines don't always replace humans but rather change the interaction. ATMs replaced some tellers but also allowed us to take out money at 3am, which didn't take away any jobs (Barney).
    
• The semantic web opens up whole cans of privacy issues that haven't been dealt yet with, not least of which is determining which conclusions you can share when some of them have been derived by traversing data sets which are private (Nova).
    
• There are a bunch of efforts underway to make it easier to share the underlying data behind the semantic web, both in the form of things like RDF which make it easier to combine disparate data sources by mashing text instead of re-calculating relationships (Nova) and in developing UDBRIs in addition to our existing URIs to identifiy and open up datasources (Barney).
    
• Sometimes the real meaning of things is found in what's not there. Cataphora bases part of their analysis on looking at things like people switching languages outside of a pattern in an attempt to hide from traditional search engines or English speaking searchers (e.g.: if you always write to your grandmother in German, it will ignore emails to her in that language but it will flag an email to a colleague in which you switch languages against the trend).

Full session notes, in a strange plain text/HTML format, are available at: Supernova2007-MakingComputersSmart.

What a week it's been! Had I known that it was going to take me about 25 pages and 7,000 words to describe our trip, I never would have volunteered for this gig :) I hope you've enjoyed reading through this as much as I've enjoyed putting it together and that this information is of value to some of you out there. Today is the final post in this series and provides a blissfully short summary, so if you're only going to read one of the five posts, make it this one (although you'll miss the Ali G clip).

The New Microsoft (Again)

In Tuesday's post, I talked about how Microsoft is turning a new leaf and repositioning themselves as a design-focused organization. I touched on how there's a lot of new blood breathing life into the beast and how they are making massive investments into UX for high-risk products like Office 2007 and the Ribbon.  I covered the development of the NYT Reader application and how it carefully balances layout and readability issues with brand and content. These are both examples of the positive impact that design can have when factored into your process and a very elementary and basic level and I applauded Microsoft for their efforts. You can find out a little more about their new focus in the Microsoft Design Center website.

Design Matters (Maybe?)

In Wednesday's post, I provide the corollary in which I talked about how we saw an equal number of examples where design (and UX specifically) had not been taken into account. We looked at the Virtual Earth Windows Vista Gadget which violates the User Experience Guidelines for Gadgets, and at Expression Blend which seems to be aimed at the very broad demographic of 'designers' without much consideration as to who that might be specifically. And I managed to sneak in an Ali G clip about ice cream gloves that's still making me laugh a full 24 hours later.

Expression

In Thursday's post, I gave a review of the new Expression Studio suite, which includes the Web, Design, Blend, and Media products. I liked Web but wished for a Mac OS X version, thought Design was an Illustrator knock-off with the sole advantage of being able to handle XAML, felt that Blend would be a useful tool for us if we built Windows applications, and wished that Media provided the ability to easily work from shared catalogues.

Wrapping Up

It's been almost a month since our trip which has given me a fair bit of time to think about what we'd seen and heard. The last five days have really helped me to form some conclusions and I think, in the end, the experience was exactly what I expected it to be. It was an honour to be invited to participate and I hope that I have other opportunities to do the same with Microsoft and with other firms (though I might hold off on the epic blog post series after!). It's not often that you have an opportunity to peek inside the kimono of a big software company and to get a sense of what they're thinking and working on. Like it or not, almost all of us use their software every day of our lives and they have shaped our industry like no other force. I have a lot of respect for the Microsofties and this trip reinforced that they burn their torches with the same passion and strength of belief as our colleagues in the Open Source world.

Martin joked that I should end the series with a surprise announcement that Radiant Core was going to ditch our Macs and switch over to Windows and I really thought about it (the joke announcement, not the reverse-switch), but in the end I was worried that I'd have a revolt on my hands. The truth is that even after two days of learning about their products and plans, I still don't really get it. One of our fellow attendees, Gene Smith, commented that I was under-reporting the general scepticism in the room and I think he was right. Those of us in the industry, especially my fellow UX folk, have grown used to expecting little from Microsoft and being underwhelmed. The video which Microsoft produced as a study of their own bloated box design, entitled Microsoft re-designs the Microsoft iPod 2005 Package, was brilliant not only because it was funny but because it was true. Apple is smaller than Microsoft by several orders of magnitude and has a fraction of their cash reserves and market share, and yet they consistently lead their industry because Apple builds products which people love. We are victims of marketing as much as anything else, but Apple is cool and hip and now and Microsoft is increasingly becoming boring, square, and then. The Mac vs. PC ad campaign is winning people over, not because Macs are necessarily better at photos and video, but because people want to buy into the belief that they are. This is an important point: other than the XBOX 360, people don't tend to have an overwhelmingly positive emotional response to Microsoft's products and they don't inspire the unbridled want lust in the way that only the iPhone can. At the end of the day, we run our business on Mac OS X and Apple hardware because it is easier to use, because it just works when we need it to, and because we have far fewer issues and tech support calls than we ever did running Windows. I started this series off by saying that I was no longer the Jobs worshipping, Apple flag waving fan boy that I used to be and that's definitely true. This conclusion isn't an attempt to sell you on making a switch or on how clever we are for our platform decision, though it would have been in days of yore. Bear with me for a moment while I bring us around to the final thoughts.

We believe in Open in all of its forms. We use an operating system which is built on top of an Open Source kernel (Mac OS X runs on top of the Darwin kernel which Apple released in 2000 under the Apple Public Source License). We run an Open Source web browser which we helped to develop (Mozilla Firefox is released under the Mozilla Public License). We currently build our software on a stack which rests on the most popular web server in the world (Apache is released under the Apache License Version 2.0), includes an Open Source Java Application Server (Tomcat is also part of the Apache project) and an Open Source database (MySQL is released under the GNU General Public License). We write our software in a (mostly) Open Source language (Java was recently released under the GNU GPL Version 2) and develop in an Open Source development environment (Eclipse started life as an IBM project and is released under the Eclipse Public License). We are very active members of the BarCamp community in Toronto and around the world and we dedicate a fair portion of our time to promoting the adoption of Open outside of our industry by organizing events like TransitCamp. We believe so strongly in this movement that we are exploring the possibility of releasing Foundation, our Website Management Platform, under an Open Source License before the end of 2007.

Microsoft is typically held up as the counter-example to the Open Source world in that their business practises in the past have been very closed, proprietary, and predatory. The decision to make Expression Web speak standard XHTML is a very good one and the right thing to do, but it's tempered by the decision to build the Expression Suite on XAML, a proprietary file format published for use by the public. They occupy a strange position in the technology universe, balanced on both sides of a dichotomy in which their Research labs are building some of the most innovative software in the world and yet their product divisions build products which engender little interest from consumers (Zune) or fall short of expectations (Vista). There are rumbles out there that say Microsoft has lost their mojo and are becoming less and less relevant in a world which is focused on the web and which is starting to show a stronger and stronger interest in the value of capital-D Design (led by companies like Apple, Oxo, and Target just to name a few). I think there's some truth to those suspicions and you don't need a richter scale to measure them: just compare the worldwide festivities of the Windows 95 or XP launches to the downright mellow and uninspiring "The Wow is Now" campaign for Vista. Other than the work coming out of the Research labs and XBOX teams, Microsoft is not an innovative company. I had this conversation with a few of my fellow attendees over drinks and the best examples they could come up with to defend innovation at MS were in the data warehousing field. I didn't argue - and I'm sure they're important to Data Warehousers - but that's not much of a defence. Focusing on design is a good move (even if it is playing catch up) but it needs to be a move which starts at the very top of the organization and which inspires everyone to take part. What we were shown during our visit was a great beginning and time will tell where it leads, but given that they are a technology company driven forward by the development of technology, I suspect that it will fall short if the hardcore developers within the company don't buy into it. Bill Gates is worshipped within the organization as the Alpha Geek and his Internet Tidal Wave memo successfully mobilized Microsoft to make an enormous course change in 1995 - where's the Design Tsunami equivalent?

That's it for Day 5 and the Microsoft Trip Report series! Subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure that you don't miss out on future insights from the Radiant Core.

Today we take a look at Expression Studio,  billed as:

Better Designer Tools for Better End-User Experiences

The suite includes tools for visual and web designers (Design and Web respectively), a media cataloguing tool (Media), and a cross-discipline Windows application development environment (Blend - mentioned in yesterday's post). If you haven't heard of it yet, it's only because most of them are still in Beta. Expect the hype machine to kick into action when the full suite is ready for purchase - until then, you can buy Expression Media, buy or try Expression Web, play with the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) release of Expression Blend, or play with the Beta1 release of Expression Design.

Express Yourself

Expression Suite is really interesting in some regards and business as usual in others. The tools share some common DNA with Visual Studio in that they're all part of the .NET 3.0 framework (forgive the occasionally incorrect terminology as we're not a Microsoft development shop - it may be more correct to say that they are built on the .NET 3.0 framework). With the exception of Media, they all communicate using a new XML-based markup language invented by Microsoft, called eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML) (prounced zammel). The team behind Expression comes from a varied background of well-known players, including Silicon Beach (among many other things, makers of the awesome Dark Castle series of games), Avid, Adobe, Aldus, and Macromedia.

Our Expression day started off with a great intro by Angela Baxley, Product Manager (Expression), who stepped in for Erich Zocher, General Manager Tools (Expression), who couldn't make the morning. Despite her warnings about being new to the material, Angela did a great job presenting an overview of the platform based on one of the better PowerPoint decks we saw. As mentioned back on Day 2, her presentation saw a return of the equation Platform + Tools + Craft = UX, although in this case she was talking about the Platform + Tools piece while Darren was addressing the craft bit. Between Web and Blend (think ASP.NET and .NET Framework respectively) where the actual development work happens, the new platform provides the tools to build everything that a modern dev shop needs to produce.

The Value of Open Standards: XHTML vs. XAML

Most readers of our blog don't need a lecture on why web standards are important (for more information, see Web Standards on Wikipedia), nor do you need to be told that Microsoft has not exactly been known to embrace Open Standards in the past. Given that, you would presumably find yourselves equally as curious as I was to find out what was really meant by:

Expression Web is a professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites which deliver superior quality on the Web.

Which really makes XAML all that much odder. David and I got in a debate with Arturo about whether XAML was actually an 'open standard', during which he confirmed that it was created at Microsoft and is controlled by them. By my books, that makes XAML a published file format rather than a standard and certainly not an open one by any means. This isn't a particularly new effort, as this handy Comparison of user interface markup languages tells us, and some of the projects go back ten years. We're familiar with a different XML-based approach called XUL (eXtensible User interface Language - pronounced zool as in the ancient Sumerian deity called Zuul, who you know from Ghostbusters). The cynic in me says that having Web do proper XHTML/CSS is an admission of defeat in the sense that Microsoft has been trying for years to  embrace and extend the HTML/CSS standards and maybe they've finally given up. Or maybe they got tired of people bashing the horrible HTML that came out of FrontPage and decided to fix it. Either way, standards support is almost always a good thing so yay! But then why not open up XAML or choose to contribute and work on one of the existing efforts? This is an important issue because anyone who choses to use Expression to build their applcations will be held hostage by the XAML file format and may have to make substantial changes to future versions of their software depending on what Micrsoft chooses to do with the format. Truly Open Standards are controlled by independent third parties who have (or at least appear to have) no particular bias towards any one firm and can therefore (theoretically) make decisions which drive the whole industry forward (e.g.: the W3 'owns' a number of standards including HTML and CSS). Maybe some of the Microsoft folks want to weigh in on this in the comments.

Expression Web

Web replaces FrontPage and is an effort to bring Microsoft's web design technology up to current levels by building a new application and environment rather than trying to fix the old stuff. It's designed to do HTML and XHTML, CSS formatting and code management, and XML/XLSTs, as well as to integrate closely with ASP.NET libraries for things like AJAX (via the AJAX Extensions). The demo was given by Wayne Smith, Senior Product Manager (Expression), who started with a really quick rundown of why standards are important:

1. Speed
2. Search Engine Indexing
3. Efficiency
4. Future Proofing the Web
5. It's professional!

We've spent more time cursing at InternetExplorer's lack of support for standards than most people will ever even spend in front of a browser, so this is a very welcome change in tune from the maker of the most popular browser in the world (though, I suppose, it remains to be seen how much the one hand talks to the other). I agree with all of Wayne's points here - we've been building standard compliant sites since we started the company because they just make more sense. In addition to the standards support, Web has a bunch of other great features:

• CSS Box Model: In 'design mode', the interface goes to great lengths to expose the box model (see BrainJar's CSS Positioning, or a neat-o 3D rendering by Jon Hicks). Wayne showed us how Web uses shaded borders to make the padding and margins more obvious, which you can kinda see at about 17:50 of this training video. Grab the 'crop marks' on the edge of any element to change the margin, or hold down shift and drag to change the padding.
• Style Application Mode: Web's Page Editor options allow you to toggle between having styles applied in either Auto Mode or Manual Mode, with Manual giving choices between inline, as classes in the head of this page, or as classes in an included document. You can also configure the Manual setting on different types of elements to behave differently (e.g.: apply h1...h6 styles inline but divs get styled in the included CSS).
• Multiple Doctype Support: Web supports proper doctype declarations for XHTML1.0 Transitional and Strict, which will affect the doctype output at the top of the page as well as the options in the IntelliSense code completion menus. Web also supports a Secondary Schema, consisting of various versions of InternetExplorer, which will be used to check code compatibility when rendering Quirks Mode pages.
• Style Manager: If you've ever used Word's Styles properly, then you're familiar with the way the Style Manager works. WYSIWYG previews of styles make it easy to pick the right text formatting and apply with a simple click.

Overall, I was really impressed with the product. If they ever released a version for Mac OS there's a good chance we might start using it internally (although it looked good, it didn't look good enough to run Parallels and Vista just to use it). If you're a Windows-based web shop, especially one that does ASP.NET work, you should take a look.

Expression Design

Arturo Toledo took over to show us Expression Design, a vector-based graphic design tool. I actually have no notes from his demo other than "Adobe Illustrator", which will tell you pretty much all you need to know. Challenging Adobe in this space is like trying to take them on in the Photoshop arena, which is ill-advised unless you're even bigger than they are and have mountains of cash. Which Microsoft happens to be and have. They may, in fact, be the only company out there who could reasonably stand a chance of taking any substantial market share away from the 800-pound gorrila. Right now I think you'll have a tough time ahead of you if you need to get your designers to try and switch over, unless the tools, keyboard shortcuts, and menu items mimick Illustrator pretty closely and your designers don't have to give up years of training and muscle memory. The biggest (only?) reason you would do this is to take advantage of the fact that Design can output XAML files to pull straight into Blend. That said, Mike Swanson (a Technical Evangelist with Microsoft) has released an Adobe Illustrator to XAML Export plugin with reasonably good support for the Illustrator feature set and better support coming soon (some of the unsupported features aren't available in Design or XAML), so yeah. Draw your own conclusions (get it? draw? ha!).

Expression Blend

In the same way that you can think of Web replacing FrontPage, Blend basically replaces VisualBasic. The primary intent for the Blend is to build Windows applications on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Arturo showed us a few demos of the kinds of things which Blend is intended for (the now defunct Microsoft Max project and the Avalon Patient Monitor specifically), which made for really cool looking interfaces with debatable practical value (like the now famous Jeff Han video). I'm always slightly suspicious of totally avant garde interfaces for medical applications which include snazzy animations and effects - when life-threatening decisions need to be made, I sure hope my doctor has to wade through flipping menus and rotating panels! - but it works very well as a proof of concept to show off how flexible Blend's toolset is. I was also slightly put off by Arturo's repeated statements that Blend finally lets you escape the tyranny of the boring gray button (and the Microsoft UX Guidelines) and map full motion video to your spinning control surfaces, which brought to mind thousands of horrendous Flashtastrophes (and one of my favourite Penny Arcade cartoons ever). At any rate, if we built Windows apps (or if WPF/E does become a potential competitor to Flash and gets widespread adoption as a browser plugin), it looks like a great environment for building interfaces. I think we, as a group, were a little confused about who it's being aimed at (see yesterday's post if you haven't already), but once we had sorted out their definition of 'designer', it all made sense. I was particularly impressed when Arturo pulled in an application that only its developer could love, built in Visual Studio, and then reskinned it without affecting the functionality (I grabbed two photos of the finished login and welcome screens). Going on personal experience, I have a suspicion that a lot of shops will end up using Blend by having their Dev team build off a spec and then having their UX/Visual team polish things, so it's great to see that the app works that way too.

Expression Media

Media is actually iView Media Pro, formerly made by iView Multimedia out of London, and acquired by Microsoft on June 27th, 2006, and is the only product in the Expression Suite which is available for Mac OS X. Media is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) Tool (which is fun to say - Dam Tool!), which basically sucks in all of your media in a whole littany of formats and then provides tagging and sorting capabilities. There's an important distinction in the DAM world between browsers (which just read the info available in the media files themselves - like EXIF data in JPEGs) and catalogues (which store their own meta data about the files and can therefore provide much easier and more efficient sorting). If you've used anything like Apple's iPhoto or Aperture, Adobe's Lightroom, or even Google's Picasa, you're familiar with the basics. Media goes further in that you can build up all kinds of ways of looking at photos, including adding custom fields (e.g.: a pro photographer might add price to track how much to charge for her images), and build collections for quick access (e.g.: all potentially good backgrounds in one area). It looked like an excellent media catalogue and something that we might make use of to store assets from different clients for easy retrieval by all of our Professional Services team members. There was some discussion about how much support was included for sharing the library files (could they be checked into a version control system? read of a network mount?) which I think was left open, so if any of the Microsoft folk know the answer, please feel free to leave a comment.

Final Expressions

I really had to work at putting myself in the mindset of a potential purchaser/user of the software since our Mac bias basically rules us out. Someone did ask Erich Zocher if there were plans to do Mac versions and there clearly aren't, which I think is a real shame. We spend a lot of time in the trenches of this industry and we're seeing more and more glowing Apples while we're down there - particularly amongst the digerati whose influence reaches far and wide

That's it for Day 4 - tune in tomorrow for the big wrap up!

Yesterday's post talked about the great progress that Microsoft is making towards a company-wide focus on capital-D Design. As a brief addendum, I stumbled across the Microsoft Design Center site while preparing today's post and thought it was a great compliment. I particularly liked this quote, from the Culture page:

Good user experience is now common in the consumer space, and it's the next domain of differentiation in the enterprise.

We saw a lot of evidence of their new priority during the two days and there was a lot to be proud of. Today's post takes the opposite approach, focusing on the places where progress still needs to be made. This report is centered around the statement:

Design doesn't matter enough (yet).

In all fairness to our hosts, they're at the beginning of a very long journey to get a 30,000 person company to change the way they've always done things, in a culture not traditionally known for its attention to the needs of users. It was a fantastic opportunity to be involved and to be asked for my input and I hope that today's post helps to focus future efforts.

Some of you may have seen this corrollory to yesterday's post coming. For all of the discussion about the importance of UX and design, the Round Table was also rife with examples of things changing and yet remaining the same. You have to remember that Microsoft is a big ship and big ships turn slowly. The term "lipstick on a pig" got thrown around a lot during the two days, sometimes in reference to Microsoft not wanting to keep applying cosmetics on porcine products, sometimes in reference to the continued tradition. There were two incidents which particularly stand out in my mind.

Gadgets: Do as I Say, Not as I Do

During his talk about Gadgets in Windows Vista, Michael Suesserman showed us a Gadget he had built which interfaces with Virtual Earth. He had mentioned earlier that there is a certification process for Windows Live Gadgets (though I couldn't find any info online), so I asked if that included checking their adherence to the official Microsoft: User Experience Guidelnes for Gadgets, which would indicate a firm committment to UX at an organizational level. The answer was, unsurprisingly, no; certifcation is at a code level to  make sure that the Gadget does nothing malicious. The Guidelines are pretty explicit in terms of what controls should look like and how Gadgets should be laid out and it was disappointing to see that the Virtual Earth Gadget failed to follow most of them. I pushed Michael on why his widget doesn't and he replied that it was just a quick thing he had whipped up as a demo. I think that statement summarizes some of the challenges that Darren and crew will face in their quest: many developers have a natural tendancy to view UX as a waste of time or as unecessary (lipstick on an already very attractive sow?). If they have no problem using their products, why should anyone else? I suppose that approach is okay if you're building a little demo for your own purposes, but Michael's Virtual Earth demo is the official Sidebar Gadget Tutorial (.zip file) available for download from Microsoft's Gadget Developer site.

Why is this Bad?

This sends a message, from up on high, that no one else needs to bother with the Guidelines either (in all fairness, Apple does the same thing by continually demonstrating their determined refusal to follow their own User Experience Guides by releasing applications which violate them entirely).

How can Microsoft Fix This?

It's a pretty easy one to fix: give the Visual Earth Gadget to a designer to clean up and add some content into the Tutorial which explains why the Guidelines are important to follow.

Know Thy User

I haven't talked about Expression yet - that's tomorrow's post - but there was some confusion around Expression Blend which is relevant to today's topic. Without stealing my own thunder for Thursday, Blend is intended to end the interminable battle between Designers, who wear shirts that say "#000000 is the new black", and Developers who wear shirts that say "foo() happens;" - a rather clever way to say that it helps everyone to speak a consistent language. The goal of the app is to allow designers to build controls using drag-and-drop and simple scripting instead of handing developers specs which they won't follow. Once the controls are built, the developers can pull them into Visual Studio, integrate with the backend, and be done with it. Alternatively, in what I thought was a much more powerful (and real world) demo, Arturo went the other way and pulled a really ugly app from Visual Studio and reskinned it without breaking the functionality.

After the demo, the question was thrown out to the room about how we would use the app in our own practices. There was some confusion about what Blend actually does, which was amplified by what the differences are between WPF and WPF/E, the codename for the Everywhere version which will run on Macs, handhelds, etc. The longterm outlook for WPF/E (thankfully to be renamed very soon) is that it's a competitor to Flash (and specifically to Flex and Apollo). At the moment, it lacks any sort of interactivity and is limited to playing back media, so it's really not particularly useful. The answer to the question, at least from Radiant Core's perspective, is that we wouldn't use Blend because we're not currently in the business of building Windows applications and we couldn't reasonably deploy client projects in WPF/E in its current state. What was more interesting were the answers around the rest of the table: there was much confusion about what kind of "Designer" Microsoft had in mind to use the app. We all agreed that Visual Designers would rebel en masse if they had to start actually building controls, and that their decisions about how to build them would make Developers rip them up and start from scratch. I suggested that it might be useful for the people in the room - UX Designers - to be able to wireframe a project in Blend at a very early stage, then share those wireframes with Designers (who could use Expression Design to make the visuals, export in XAML, and then import to Blend), and Developers (who could start planning their implentation by importing the Blend XAML into Visual Studio). There seemed to be agreement around the table that people could use it that way, which seemed to be news to the Microsoft staff in attendance. In the end, Blend seems to (in a broad sense) be a replacement for VisualBasic, so the whole marketing angle of empowering Designers to build applications seems somewhat misguided. The whole conversation made me wonder if this was the first time that Microsoft had really asked people what they thought - in other words, if this was really the first UX activity which had been conducted on the product.

Why is this Bad?

The very first rule you need to know about successful UX: know thy user. Aiming a new product at the very broad market of 'designers' reminds me of Ali G's pitch to Donald Trump (and various VCs) for ice cream gloves (note: not everyone finds Ali G funny or safe for work so play carefully):

Sure, almost everyone likes ice cream and has hands, but that's not really a demographic you can market to. What do they mean by designers? From the Wikipedia article on the term , here's a selection of people who might be included:

• Automotive Designer
• Costume Designer
• Fashion Designer
• Jewelry Designer
• Game Designer
• Graphic Designer
• Industrial Designer
• Interior Designer
• Landscape Designer
• Scenic Designer
• Systems Designer
• Web Designer

I'm belabouring the point a little (though I did get to sneak Ali G in), but hopefully you get it. 'Designers' in no more a market segment than 'Canadians' or 'Dogs' or 'People who drive cars'.

How can Microsoft Fix This?

This one is much tougher, since Blend is basically ready to ship. In an ideal world, they would have involved their potential users from the very beginning to make sure that they were building something interesting to them (and they may have done so and not made that clear during our session). To fix it now, they should figure out who would find it interesting (UX folk are definitely part of that group), and then target their marketing and sales efforts at those people. Rather than the loose 'designers', focus on specific disciplines within design for whom Blend solves a real pain point.

That's it for Day 3 - tune in tomorrow for an overview of Expression!

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?)!

UX Report: The Series!

Since there's a lot to talk about, I'm going to break this up into a series of posts over the rest of the week. While many of my colleagues are down in Austin frolicking at SXSW, I'm going to stay where it's still cold and wet and tell you all about a trip to the one place in the tech industry that's pretty much the complete yang to the SXSW ying. I do it for you, really. Can you feel the love?

Today's post is about the setup and format of the two days, while the rest of the week will tackle specific sessions and presentations. Here's the breakdown:

    
• Today: Format (c:)
    
• Tuesday: The New Microsoft (Again)
    
• Wednesday: Design Matters (Maybe?)
    
• Thursday: Expression
    
• Friday: Wrapping Up

I'll come back and turn those into links as the rest of the pieces get published so you can always just tune back into this post to find them again.

Behind Enemy Lines

Let's get the bit about being the contrarion out of the way first: As a lifetime Mac user and passionate believer in Open Source, Culture, and Community, I viewed this trip as an opportunity to visit the beast's lair and to peek behind the curtain at what it contained. Back when my youthful naievity hadn't been dulled by the wisdom of time, I fought the Holy Religious War of the Operating System with all of the passion that a teenaged fan boy can muster.  I lost the need to convert the Great Unwashed Masses to the One True Jobsian Way sometime around the point where I became really interested in the User Experience of technology. As I got older, I realized that they're all just tools - some nicer than others - but in the end the importance is the outcome. I still think Apple makes better machines and software (although it has plenty of faults of its own), and we run our business almost entirely on Macs, but I'm happy to admit that there are plenty of times when their technology is not the right answer. This was a chance for me to go spend a few days with people who I respect a great deal, in a friendly and welcoming environment, and to learn what the other half will be up to for the next few years. It was interesting to note that there were four MacBookPros out of fifteen attendees and that four or five other people around the table admitted to owning a Mac at home (just for the kids to play on, of course).

Around the Table

Since the event was organized by Microsoft Canada, the Round Table consisted of some of the best and brightest Canadian UX minds. A quick introduction:

    
• Ryan Apps, Traffik Group
    
• Colin Bowern, Official Community
    
• Audrey Carr, Organic
    
• David Crow, Radiant Core
    
• Nicole Flippance, High Road Communications (Microsoft Canada's PR Company)
    
• Tom George, Design Axiom
    
• Dave Goodwin, University of Waterloo
    
• Anthony Hempel, Blast Radius
    
• Bryce Johnson, Navantis
    
• Kerri McKenna, imason
    
• Ben Skelton, Haberñero
    
• Gene Smith, nForm

Our Hosts

We were graciously hosted by a number of Microsoft Canada folk in addition to the great list of speakers. Thanks go out to:

    
• John Oxley, Microsoft Canada Director Community Evangelism
    
• Daniel Shapiro, Microsoft Canada Audience Manager
    
• Jerome Carron, Microsoft Canada Developer Evangelist

Format (c:)

As per my Reporting Live from Bellevue post, the event was held at the beautiful new Westin Bellevue hotel. We camped out in one of their conference rooms for two days and heard presentations from an amazing group of speakers:

Day One: UX at Microsoft

    
• Darren McCormick, Worldwide UX Role Owner for Microsoft: What’s up with UX at Microsoft?
    
• Will Tschumy, West Coast User Experience Evangelist (formerly Director of Experience for Flock): User Experience in Research - the Ribbon in Office 2007
    
• Jeff Pettiross, Senior Program Manager: User Experience in Practice - Health Explorer
    
• Kevin Gjerstad, Group Program Manager (WPF Reader): A User Experience Story – NY Times Reader
    
• Michael Suesserman, Technical Evangelist: Windows Vista Desktop and Live Gadgets

Day Two: Expression

    
• Erich Zocher, General Manager Tools (Expression): Turning UX Ideas into Reality (The Tools Roadmap
    
• Arturo Toledo, Technical Product Manager (Expression): Expression Design and Expression Blend
    
• Wayne Smith, Senior Product Manager (Expression): Expression Web
    
• Angela Baxley, Product Manager (Expression): Expression Media

The presentations largely consisted of someone speaking to a PowerPoint deck, followed by a Q&A with the Round Table panelists. These posts are based off my extensive notes taken during the presentations, but if I missed something and you were there to catch me on it, please add it in the comments!

That's it for Day 1 - tune in tomorrow for The New Microsoft (Again)! I'll leave you with a neat PictoBrowser of all my shots from the event: