The existence of Office on the Mac platform has always been a bit of quandary for Microsoft. On the one hand, they sell a lot of copies and make a good chunk of revenue on it. On the other hand, they sell it to people who don't buy Windows (unless they're going to run it in Parallels or Fusion) and are therefore helping to support the existence of a platform which directly competes with two of their primary money makers (Windows and Office for Windows). There was actually a point in history, back in the dark days of 1997, when Microsoft invested $150m in Apple and pledged to continue to develop versions of Office (and InternetExplorer!) for Mac OS — a move which may well have saved Apple's bacon. Fast forward 10 years and we have a new release of Office, so what's changed?

On the surface, this is a great update. Lots of thought has gone into the UI, which resembles a Mac OS native version of the Ribbon seen in Office 2007 for Windows. It's Intel native, which makes it much faster on modern Macs than Office 2004 was (mostly because it's no longer running in the Rosetta emulation layer). What's not to like? Well, there's one thing. It's a small thing when you read it in a long list of changes, but when you actually stop to think about it, it's not such a little footnote.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS no longer supports Visual Basic for Applications Macros. VBA has been the standard Macro language for Office releases on both Mac OS and Windows for a long, long time and there are probably millions of Office documents out there that have embedded macros. I regularly use two such documents, an Excel spreadsheet which we built internally and which helps us calculate accurate estimates for clients, and a Word document which was provided to me for a project I'm working on and which I have to use to complete my work. Opening our Costing Workbook in Excel gives the following error dialog:

The first time it came up, I didn't read it properly and thought it was the old security warning that Excel used to give when opening a document with macros in it. It was only on the second pass that I realized what I was seeing: we will never be able to use our Costing Workbook again. This is a little more insidious in the project document I have to use, as it opens without a warning but none of the built-in functions and buttons do anything. Clicking on the "Learn more about macros and Office for Mac" shows a Help window with the following contents:

Cause: Office 2008 for Mac cannot run Visual Basic macros or load add-ins that contain Visual Basic macros.
    Solution: Keep the macro in the file.
    Solution: Remove the macro from the file.
    Solution: Save the macro in another macro-enabled file format.
    Solution: Create a new macro by using AppleScript.

The first three are just solutions which allow you to keep the macros from getting destroyed when the file is saved in Office 2008 format. The last one is the real kicker: the only actual solution is to recreate your macros in AppleScript format. Kudos to Microsoft for beefing up AppleScript support for the suite (and it does look pretty thorough), but what they're basically saying is that you can no longer interop with your Windows colleagues and you have to recreate any macros you had in a completely new language. You may find yourself scratching your head at this point, much as I was when I made this discovery. Why would they do such a seemingly stupid thing? Erik Schwiebert ("Schwieb"), a member of the Mac team, explains in an excellent blog post Saying Goodbye to Visual Basic (have I mentioned how much I love Microsoft's approach to corporate blogging? No? It's awesome. Everyone should learn from them). I completely sympathize with Erik's description of their plight and I agree that a two year delay would have been unacceptable, but I also think this decisions has some very serious consequences for Apple's potential in the corporate market.

We basically run Office only because our clients do. If we had our choice, we'd probably run Pages for word processing, we would definitely run Keynote for presentations (and I use it for any of mine already), and would be stumped to replace Excel (Numbers is a nice start but it's a long way from ready). If we felt that there were other applications out there which would flawlessly handle our clients' documents, we'd probably switch today (we've tried NeoOffice and OpenOffice with mixed results — suggest alternatives in the comments). We're a small shop though, and we get to set our own IT direction. Many of our colleagues work in large organizations who have IT departments which have been actively hostile toward Macs until recently and have only just started to come around (if they have at all). A big reason for that change has been Office, since Mac users can work seamlessly with their Windows colleagues (particularly in an Exchange environment using Entourage). If you work in an organization large enough to have an IT department, there's a pretty good chance that your company has also got some complex documents with macros in them (likely in Excel, which sees a lot more scripting than Word). The very rock and hard place described by Erik is about to crush your chances of getting a Mac on your desk, since any new Mac will be Intel-based and any new license of Office will be 2008 and now you'll be back into no-interop land. I'm not the only one who finds this so disheartening: in an opinion piece published in Macworld way back in December 2006 (when Microsoft first announced that they were removing VBA support), Rob Griffiths said:

Microsoft Office isn'€™t among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs, ”and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite.

He also points to a thread on Ars Technica, which includes 3 pages of angry feedback from people who will be seriously affected by this decision. I feel for the Microsoft Mac Business Unit (MacBU) team members who had to make this decision, even though I'm sure that ditching VB's ten year old implementation was a weight off their shoulders. Unfortunately for me, and for many of you, it was really just a transfer of weight onto our shoulders.

So, if you're feeling that weight, MacTech Magazine published their Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript: MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition guide in their April 2007 issue (which is now entirely available online), which I recommend as a fantastic starting point. I agree with their introduction in that there is an advantage for Mac users who take the time to learn AppleScript: it's the scripting language for the whole platform so you can easily build scripts which integrate Office into other apps, and you'll know how to script non-Office things as well. I actually do a fair bit of AppleScripting from time to time and have made some great little scripts (particularly Copy Path, which copies the path to the current Finder window onto the Clipboard), and I encourage Mac users with a programming bent to learn it. I'm just not sure you should be forced to do so in order to keep using your own documents.

But that was not to be! Thanks to the incredible generosity of the conference organizers, I've been invited to attend the upcoming Supernova next week in San Francisco. I'm particularly excited about this one because it combines two of my passions - technology and business - in a forum packed with industry leaders and mover/shakers (similar to cocktail shakers in that their presence at these events is often combined with a fair amount of alcohol and that merely standing near them can sometimes make you tipsy with excitement). A particular thanks to Deb Schultz for the gracious invitation, and for some advice on an upcoming Radiant Core project which I can't talk about just yet.

The schedule looks particularly tasty: they're running an OpenSpaces event on Tuesday at Wharton West, and those who know me know that I'm drawn to those events like a moth to a self-organized, community-driven, meritocracy-based flame. Be still my beating heart and pray that AA gets me to SF in time to catch part of it!

Wednesday is Challenge Day, a series of workshop like events "designed to provoke opinions from leading technology and business thought-leaders on key Supernova topics". I'm particularly looking forward to Making Computers Smart: A Dumb Idea? (Moderator: John Markoff, Barney Pell, Elizabeth Charnock, Nova Spivack), Introducing the Relationship Economy (Jerry Michalski, David Weinberger, Doc Searls), Research and Relationships (Discussion Lead Max Kalehoff, Aaron Coldiron, Steven Haskel, Jonathan Carson), and Where's the Innovation? (Lightning Talks).

Thursday and Friday move into more traditional session days, with everybody moving through a series of talks and presentations together. Topics range from Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy? to The Social Web: Choices and Voices to Disorder: Feature or Bug?. It all looks pretty interesting, and I plan to blog as much of it as I can, bandwidth allowing (in both the time and network senses).

Registration is still open and I highly recommend it if you're involved in the web. It's not a particularly cheap conference (the Challenge Day is a great deal at $695, the full three days will run you $2,595), but the caliber of the participants is high and the sessions are quite small so you're virtually guaranteed to make some good contacts. If you're going and want to meet, drop a comment on this post or find me on Twitter.

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:

Turns out that the folks who work at Microsoft are good people! We're particularly enamoured with John Oxley, Director Community Evangelism Microsoft Canada, who graciously ignored the above mentioned glowing fruit and invited yours truly down to Bellevue to participate in the first Microsoft User Experience (UX) Round Table. Despite any harsh criticisms of the past, I'm not above turning a new leaf and it's definitely true that Microsoft's UX Research teams are the hot spot du jour (not disimilar to Xeorx PARC in days of yore). Besides, free trips are always good trips, particularly when accompanied by Mr. David Crow, whose penchant for double bourbons is well known (particularly to my own precious liver who strains vainly to keep up).

We caught an Air Canada flight from Pearson to Settle-Tacoma which turned out to be delayed an hour. The plane was an Embraer 190 which was equipped with the very latest in En Route Inflight Entertainment systems, a topic which I'm becoming increasingly familiar with (see my recent I've-never-even-touched-it review of Virgin America's Red). The E190s feature the Thales Group's TopSeries Inflight Entertainment system, in this case heavily branded with the Air Canada livery and delivered in both English and French. I wasn't able to snap any shots on the way down (I'll try to grab some on the way back), but picture your basic 9" touchscreen embedded in the seat in front of you. These units lacked remotes and many of the features were "Unavailable" (including the Map, News, and Games), though they did feature a USB plug to the left of the screen for charging your ever present array of electronica. Placing the plug at eye level guarantees you'll see it - though the lack of markings might make you hesitate before you plugged in your trusty iPod. Not I! In the interest of journalism, I can confirm that it provides a steady charge but no much else (it might be more natural to place the plug in the armrest, nearer to where the iPod is likely to rest, but progress is progress and who are we to stand in its way?).

The system seemed a little buggy - David's seatmate crashed his twice (though no Blue Screen of Death, so one supposes that it's running on some Linux derivative). There's some markedly weird Information Architecture in the menu system (e.g.: going into the Kids section and selecting Movies drops you into a hidden section of the Movies menu, bizarely merging the first and second level menus), and the touch screens weren't overly responsive (the "Fullscreen" button in movie mode had to be mashed at least three times before it stuck, as did the "Turn off Display" button in the "Screen Brightness" control), but the fact that you can watch or listen to (almost) whatever you'd like elevates airtravel from tedious to almost pleasant. As noted in the review of Red, introducing this kind of tech into a cramped space repleat with expected interactions can bring some unexpected behaviours into play. The screens definitely pumped out a fair amount of heat - noticeable by placing your hand near them - and the cabin was a fair bit warmer than usual, bringing to mind all kinds of stories about library architects not taking into account the weight of books. I also found it surprisingly difficult to settle into Clint Eastwood's excellent Flags of our Fathers after my seatmate started the same film about three minutes before me. Whenever the action lulled, my eyes were inevitably drawn to his screen where the future was foretold in off-colour, angled LCD watching. All the same, the mere fact that I could choose to watch a seemingly unedited print of a great film instead of a heavily censored version or poorly selected rubbish more than made up for it. Sure, it lacks the über cool social chat features and inseat food ordering from Red, but it's aeromiles ahead of craning over heads and seatbacks to see a blown out projection and listening to a tinny soundtrack through a set of hollow rubber tubes.

Further excitement lurked in our shuttle when we blew out a tire on the highway from the airport to the hotel. It was pretty uneventful in the end; a fifteen minute wait on the shoulder until a different van - complete with cracked windshield and flaming skull license plate frame - picked us up. The Westin Bellevue hotel itself is brand new and beautifully decorated and I'm moments away from crashing in the Heavenly Bed. More tomorrow as we start the sessions!

I’ve installed the software on my Toshiba Tecra S1 laptop, and on my HP TC1100 tablet.  Both of these systems are a little underpowered for Vista, which means it runs a little slowly on them.  The Tecra is a 1.4Ghz Centrino system with 1.2 gigs of memory, and the TC1100 is a 1.4Ghz system with 1 gig of memory.