Usability Redux

re: Usability Redux

Jim Rech — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 17:47:32 GMT

>>we'll lose a lot of valuable feedback just due to complacency.

Ahh, Jensen, this is Marketing. Lets not call our customers complacent. A bit of a negative connotation there. How about going with "we'll lose a lot of valuable feedback because of the hassle." Shift the blame to us, you know?

re: Usability Redux

Andy Cotgreave — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 18:44:28 GMT

Excellent stuff, Jensen.

I like the idea of the smiley/frowny buttons. How do you separate wheat from the chaff? YOu must get thousands of malicious/immature/stupid responses to that kind of thing.

And could you be accused that by doing this, you actually are trying to keep errors and bugs secret, and prevent them being made public?

i personally don't believe that that's the case, but you must expect that criticism to be levelled at you - would you ever make the feedback public?

re: Usability Redux

jensenh — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 19:59:51 GMT

Jim:

Perhaps complacency is a harsher word than I meant (I like your way of putting it better), but during our technical beta (beta 1), individual users are accepted into the beta program with the expectation that they provide feedback. There's an explicit understanding there--we provide an early copy of Office, and you tell us what you think.

Multi-person organizations are of course a different thing entirely--as our biggest customers, we need and want them on our early betas both to get feedback from them and so that the organizations themselves can plan.

re: Usability Redux

jensenh — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 20:06:46 GMT

Andy:

I think you'll as much of this data from Microsoft than any company in the world.

I'll continue to share general results and what we learned from them as I've done since I've started writing.

You're right, some immature responses do come in, but again beta testers are evaluated on the quality of feedback they give, so its generally worth it to them to give useful feedback.

On the back-end, it's a combination of manual tagging, search, and other technologies to make sure the right people see the feedback.

re: Usability Redux

dan.g. — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 02:36:26 GMT

thanks for the volcano reference. my 7 year old daughter and i have been having alot of fun with vinegar volcanoes recently.

dan

re: Usability Redux

TC — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 07:04:26 GMT

I keep thinking, should we all be doing similar things in our own software products? For example, I have a vertical market app where the users are opinionated, but difficult to get much detailed, usable feedback from. I can see the smile/frown thing working really well for those users. It could pop up a textbox for optional comment, then email all the details to me, behind the scenes (but with their knowledge). This would greatly increase my ability to find out which parts of my software they like, & which they do not.

re: Usability Redux

jensenh — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 11:06:20 GMT

TC:

You should give it a try maybe. I wrote the tool I mentioned in the article ("Ebert") in a weekend with a simple UI and capability to automatically capture a screenshot and some text and send it to us via SMTP.

People are more willing to give their opinion when it costs them less time. (And the opinions are better, Schrödinger's Cat and all that...)

re: Usability Redux

Roland — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 16:58:54 GMT

Jensen,
First, your blog is phantastic!
Can't wait to get Office 12.

One question:
Do you use personas as defined by Alan Cooper during the design of Office 12? I know that MSN and the Windows group do use them now, but how about the Office group?

Thank you!
Roland

PS: For those not familiar with the Personas concept, see: http://www.cooper.com/content/insights/newsletters/2003_08/Origin_of_Personas.asp

re: Usability Redux

jensenh — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 20:03:26 GMT

Roland:

I'm meaning to write about that in a future post. Thanks for the reminder, it kind of slipped off my radar.

re: Usability Redux

PatriotB — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 21:35:54 GMT

Please, PLEASE tell me the final "skin" for Office 12 will fit in with the OS that it is running on.

Office has always done its own thing, UI-wise. But it's at least looked *somewhat* like the OS it's running on. What we've seen so far is that someone spent a lot of time developing a skin for Office 12 that looks nothing like XP and nothing like Vista.

There is no reason for the most-used, most-prominent Windows app to use skinning. It should use Windows APIs and follow Windows guidelines. Leave skins for Media Players, IMs, and other taky consumer products.

Please take a look at the comments in this blog entry of Raymond Chen's: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/07/28/199589.aspx

There's a lot of feedback in there about consistency between Office and Windows. There is ONE plausible argument given for Office having its own UI: Michael Grier wrote "Office ships out of band with the operating system and the support and user education costs associated with Office having a different UI on different operating systems is excessive. It's the whole economy-of-scale thing."

I think there are a lot less (at least an order of magnitude) Office users using the same version of Office on two versions of Windows, than there are users using Office along with Windows-standards-compliant apps on a single version of Windows. What about the cost of using an office suite that looks nothing like the rest of the apps on your system?

This is an issue which many people (including myself) feel quite strongly about. Personally, I've left comments on several blogs (including this one) and several Channel9 video forums, where I bring up this subject, and every time it gets silently ignored.

Can we please get some kind of comment for why Office always has to fly in the face of Windows UI guidelines, and whether Office 12 will follow XP and Vista guidelines?

(Quick example: from the page "Top Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience", which is part of the Vista User Experience Guidelines available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/uxguide/: "Use the standard window frame." Why oh why does Office 12 NOT?!)

re: Usability Redux

Richard — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 14:04:16 GMT

How about linking into the MSDN product feedback system?

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/

(Or something equivalent.)

It is always useful to know you have a repeat issue and can just add to the existing issue, rather than creating one of your own.

re: Usability Redux

Tim Briggs — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 16:10:25 GMT

Hi everyone, I'm Tim...usability researcher and proud author of the research list which Jensen posted earlier. I'm back from visits in the field and thought I would chime in with some more context on some topics above.

Eye Tracker - like any method or tool, the data you get out is only as good as the questions you go in with. We're using it to answer some very specific questions about where, when, and how people pay attention to various controls. I agree, the heatmaps are cool but given our research questions, the movies showing realtime fixation points are most interesting. (This dates me, but I think it is like watching someone play Missile Command.)

Send a Smile - super cool, in-the-moment feedback. It's yet another technology we use to connect with users. One of many we use to triangulate our understanding with other types of data.

On that note, it's no coincidence that a new Office experience comes at the same time as a huge explosion of new data collection tools and technologies. Each has driven the other. One of our favorite sayings is 'When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.' We've been building up our toolbox and I'll comment on some as Jensen discusses the issues and ideas they've informed.

Most important among them: instrumented data.

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