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.

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?)!