Outlook 2007: More is better?
I have just installed Outlook 2007 beta 2, because I'm keen to see what new things have been added, to help my work.
So far I haven't found too many changes of significance. This is what seems to stand out:
1) The UI has been 'gilded' - general changes to fonts and the chrome of the application, plus new views in most places. In some cases this is confusing because you can't find familiar things like the Save button on an open message! I am sure I will get used to this. This is part of the new Office look and feel.
2) Tasks due today. In the calendar view, you can now see tasks due at the foot of each day. This is nice - you can drag tasks around and see what has to be done without leaving the calendar. This is closer to how you use a paper diary (wonder why we don't copy this more closely?)
3) RSS feeds. I will be using this. It doesn't have a blog posting mechanism, only reading.
4) Busy!!! It's an extremely busy interface. Ugh. Take a look at the screen shot below, grabbed from my 14" laptop screen. I have deliberately blurred this so you can get a feel for the "information confrontation" which is the new Outlook experience. It's all about information density, and apparently More Is Better! It's amazing the amount of information Outlook pushes at you. There appears to be very little differentiation: what is more important or less important in all this data?
This is very significant. In my opinion, Outlook is an irony - a productivity tool which distracts and overloads. Outlook knows so much about me - my contacts, my activities, my communications - and yet it doesn't use this knowledge to guide what information should be given or hidden in a given context. Instead it just presents as much as possible. I want Outlook to present me with clarity and focus, not information overload. All of this is doubly ironic since Microsoft Research is studying concepts like "continuous partial attention" and attention being the new comodity.
What's missing in Outlook 2007?
Personally I think the big missing ticket is personal project management. Outlook still doesn't understand the idea of hierarchical tasks that contribute to an overall objective I'm trying to reach. This idea is in keeping with David Allen and Sally McGhee's work on getting things done (Sally's MS-Press book is full of ideas on this subject, but the new Outlook doesn't support her recommendations particularly well). Elsewhere there's a very unconvincing blog post by Melissa Macbeth on why better task management and personal projects were omitted from Outlook 2007. She recommends using Microsoft Project instead! Seriously? (I don't want to be mean to Melissa's blog, she does have useful content on using Outlook - worth a visit).
Overall first impressions of Outlook 2007 - not a huge amount of change, a busier UI with new chrome, daily tasks are nice. The lack of personal project management features leaves an open door for 3rd parties to make clean, uncluttered personal productivity software as a much needed add-on to Outlook, including hierarchical task lists like this. I'm in the market for such a product!
As I write this, I am reminded of that classic book by Alan Cooper (The Inmates Are Running The Asylum) which talks about how software UI design lost the plot about 10 years ago. A recommended read.
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