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.

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!