Kavitha Radhakrishnan's Blog

Design good user experiences

kavithar — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:54:00 GMT

In my 7 years at Microsoft, I've designed and built hundreds of features and many of these directly show up in the end user experience (also called UX). And this got me thinking - is there a "how to" on designing a great, not just good, user experience? I don't have the answer but given my experience, here is the methodology that I 'd like to share that has worked for me so far. I think Microsoft is getting much better at this through the years and is really pushing the right talent, time and structure around this area. When any of these steps are missed or hurried, the end-result speaks for itself so I take great care to ensure that I am following these steps for each feature.

Step 1: Understand the problem and the customer: Obvious, right? Wrong! Many times the features/user experiences we build solve the wrong problems unless we know exactly who we are building the product for. I've covered this in previous blog posts but let me give you an example: say I was building a knife. The design would change if I added additional parameters to it - knife for a 5 year old vs. knife for a professional chef vs.knife for a blind person. You get my drift, right?

Step 2: Build wireframes: Once you understand the problem, create user flows through a flowchart or using wireframes. Wireframes? What are those? Wireframes are the basic UX flows that allow us to visually walk through the design. For my work on the Office Live Add-in, I built numerous UX flows that walked the user through installing, to logging in, to using the Add-in. These wireframes that I usually build using PowerPoint, Paint, Visio and screenshots are invaluable in visually communicating my design. We have found huge issues/flaws that would have cost our dev team to lose a lot of time if we had skipped this step. We also are able to do a ton of iteration at this time without impacting the dev and test teams.

Step 3: Involve UX team in your feature crew: UX designers can provide great input when they understand the feature and are involved from Day 1. When you include UX designers as an afterthought, they are stuck with artifical constraints and arent able to truly exercise their skills. I've found that having UX designers attend my first couple of dev/test meetings has proven very useful. A good second option is to work on the wireframes with the designers.

Step 3: Iterate, Iterate, Iterate....and did I mention, Iterate?

Its crucial to build in time tinto the schedule to iterate through designs. Even the best designers and program managers need to iterate as each problem space is different and good designs require polishing. Good designs do not happen overnight and anyone who tells you otherwise is dead wrong! Designs that havent been through sufficient iteration are usually wrought with problems and make end users jump through hoops or confuse them, when they dont have to.

Step 5: Get it front of real users

One of my pet peeves is to hear someone say "if I were to use this, I would want to have the flow work this way", Guess what? You arent the target customer! The target customer has been identified and unless you can put yourself in their shoes, its really hard to get right. Even when we think we fully understand the customer, its hard to get it right. I'll write another post on usability testing and its importance on another day.

At the end of the day, you'll know when you've designed good UX - it will feel simple, will meet the "it just works" bar and will make you feel good! For me, my personal bar is when I can show it to my parents or my non-geeky friends and they understand it without a word from me :-)

Microsoft makes my life easier again...

kavithar — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 02:43:00 GMT

I got up this morning determined to get back to my exercise routine. Now I am someone who gets bored easily (as dear hubby will readily attest) and I need variety. So I turned to Netflix to rent out exercise videos. I loved Netflix's Instant Access as I had ready access to many videos and could choose as I felt like doing that day- Yoga, Pilates, Cardio as the case maybe. However, the part that was not as convenient was that I would have to view it on my laptop and crane my neck to see the transitions from my downward-facing dog pose. Not fun!

Now here is the fun part -XBOX introduced the ability to get to my Netflix account and my XBOX is hooked up to my TV. When I log into my XBOX, I have access to the same videos and I can now view it on my TV. Talk about "at your fingertips". I no longer have an excuse to not exercise when I watch TV and its so easy to do without hooking up anything!

Microsoft, you have done it again - made my life easier!

Life at Microsoft: Long-forgotten Office Live Workspace "meet the person" video

kavithar — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:34:00 GMT

I had completely forgotten about this video that we had made for the Office Live community site almost 2 years ago! A friend just forwarded it to me and while I cringe at how unprepared I was in the video, I thought this was a great idea to put a face to people behind the product and will continue to push others to participate in experiments such as this to increase awareness.

Best practices for telephone conversations

kavithar — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:15:00 GMT

As a program manager, I know communication is key and email has taken on a life of its own as the tool. However, we have all been in those phone conversations where statements are lost in translation and recently, as my team and I sat huddled around a phone with a team in Ireland, I realized that there were no set rules set in place for good telephone conversations. Yes, we can use video conferencing tools but for most of the time, we end up on a phone. More importantly, new relationships are set up over the phone and we end up working with people we have never met. So, how do we ensure we are all on the same page and continuing to communicate? Here are a few best practices we came up with and while some of these are obvious but its amazing how being conscious of it really helps the process.

1) Provide context about what you are talking about: Always, always send an agenda about what you are going to talk about and who will talk about it so that we dont have 3 people trying to talk at the same time. Over the phone, we miss the body language where somebody stops when they see the other is going to start and what we get is cacophony.

2) Describe the working relationship: Who are you, what do you own and what is the expectation? Why are we on this call?

3) Slow down, slow way down: People are usually a lot more visual and when you hear somebody on the phone, it takes a few seconds more than if the person was in front of you. Saying something really quickly and move on and you've lost the chance to really communicate your idea. So slow down and enunciate more than you would in person.

4) Repeat information: Like slide deck presentations, tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them and tell them what you have told them. When people listen to a phone, they dont get the nuances and sometimes hearing the same information twice or even thrice will cause them to hear it differently. This is more important in phone conversations because they arent seeing you saying it.

5) Ask questions/Rephrase: Ever heard the deafening silence on the phone after you have spent 20 mins walking through the plan? Its hard for people to keep up with something that you spent the last 2 days on and particularly, to do it over the phone. Ask the clarifying question e.g. "Do you realize that this means that we are not doing X?" and if the answer is yes, thats great but usually the answer is "ah! I was wondering about that because that is not what I thought we were doing".

6) Listen and pause: Listening is highly underrated and is something that I am learning to be better at every day. On the phone, its even more important because it encourages people to not fight over "air time" and many times, you will catch things you may not have caught in person because you are not distracted. On the other hand, cut chit-chat esp on tangential topics/side topics and ask folks to take it offline. Then, when they are done, state what you think you heard before answering so that the person knows you were really listening. Giving people the opportunity to speak is a lot harder on the phone than in person so this needs to be a priority.

7) Ensure that people feel heard and follow up: Send out notes/action items so that people can review and call out any discrepancies right away. This builds trust and ensures that people know that we are all on the same page.

These best practices combined with a friendly attitude has been great for us in ensuring cross-location communication. What have you tried?

Blink - how does it apply to me?

kavithar — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

I read the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell this weekend and just loved it! It was really easy to read and I really enjoyed it. I was also eager to apply it to my work when I design UX in my role as a PM.

1) The right and wrong way to ask people what they want: In the book, Malcolm talks about how Coke ran "sip tests" that placed Pepsi above Coke. Then when they ran a "home test" when people have the chance to drink Coke in the way they intend to i.e. at home, Coke comes back as a winner again. I've seen this in practice where we've shown our new UI to first time users and ask them for their initial opinion on the UX through a task. This is the "sip test" for us which is great to get a sense of whether the product is something that they would use. However, it misses out on the more complex usability pieces where we don't find the issues that arise from repeated use.

2) People don't always say what they feel: Pollsters ask folks who they will vote for and that is usually a quick answer. Ask them why and thats a different picture and people might end up changing their answers as the right side of the brain kicks in and makes you second guess. Its the importance of intuition and in user design, thats an important one to listen to. Thats why I always prefer to provide multiple design options and ask people to choose the one they want instead of showing them 1 design and then ask why they like it or don't like it. I've realized through experience that when we ask people to justify their choices by asking "why", they start to process what they are seeing before them rather than intuitively which is what they would do if we werent around.

3) "Thin-slicing"/More information is not always a good thing: This set off a lightbulb in my head. I've seen it happen around me and I call it "analysis paralysis". Ever seen the manager who is waiting and waiting for more information and is too scared to take a decision? Then you know what I am talking about. Nothing is more frustrating than being managed/led by someone who either takes a decision too early or needs a lot of information before making one. How do you know if you have enough to make a decision? I think its the training - a combination of experience/practice to know what usually works and the ability to distil down the information to what matters in the end.

Very interesting indeed - highly recommended reading!

Eat, Pray, Love - thats an interesting way to live life

kavithar — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 02:03:00 GMT

One of my best friends promised me that I would like the "Eat, Pray, Love" book so here I was on Saturday- book in hand in sunny Seattle (Huh??) lounging out in my backyard. Let me start off by saying I had very conflicting feelings about this book and I went from " Are you kidding me?" to " Aww! Thats so nicely written - I can actually "see" it ". Overall though, I think what one can take away from the book is a better understanding of what you are as a person - what moves you, how would you react to those circumstances, how you feel about religion and God and maybe. where would you be willing to travel to "find yourself".

Since I had been to Italy recently, Elizabeth's detailed description of food and the lifestyle in Rome made me really nostalgic. The pasta, the pizza, the people and the history - the parts of Rome that make it what it is. In fact, I can see myself doing exactly what Elizabeth does (eat, loll around, eat some more and then gape at the Pantheon) with the only difference being I couldnt do it alone and 4 months is a bit too much. I think I would go crazy with that much time on my hands (or is that the point?).

I didnt quite appreciate her reactions to the breakdown of her marriage (the long conversations with self and Loneliness and Depression or was it Sadness and Pain, I forget) partly coz I was too upbeat that day (did I mention sunny Seattle?) and partly coz I am a "dust yourself off and just move on" kind of person and thirdly, I didnt think it was fair to the other person that she got to write a book to present her side and he didnt :-) Coming from India, I do take spirituality for granted so I was a little surprised by how desperate some folks are to get in touch with their inner self. I do think traveling gives you the time and the insight for true reflection. Well for me, true reflection will have to wait till Seattle gets gloomy again :)

The book definitely sparked off a bunch of thoughts in my head - "If I had a year, where would I go?".

Here are my top 5:

· India: Only this time, I would really travel all over and see her through the eyes of someone who has recently realized just how beautiful she truly is.

· Egypt: Those pyramids just have this magical quality to them so I have to see them up close.

· Singapore: Exotic, clean and amazing – that’s what I have heard.

· Mexico: Anywhere with sandy beaches, that’s where I wanna be.

· Home Sweet Home: This surprised me too but really, this is where I truly find myself every day with the company of family and friends. Since this list is about spending time finding yourself if you had a year, it’s on the list.

Where would you go if you had a year?

Its June - Time for The Mango Season

kavithar — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:23:00 GMT

As I read the Mango Season by Amulya Malladi (thanks to a strong recommendation from my cousin), I realized there are some things that are just a part of you and I have to say it - Mango pickle is one of them. The book took me back to my childhood summers and Avakkai (Salted, spicy mango pieces) had a prominent place in them.

We had the luxury of mangoes in our backyard so I didnt identify as much with the book where the author spends her time in Monda market getting the mangoes. Come May and the mango trees behind our sprawling suburban home would be filled with raw mangoes. I remember how we protected these precious mangoes from the stone throwing little boys, who obviously had nothing better to do on hot summer days.

Then began the long process where we had someone pick all the mangoes, carefully chose the ones we would use, set aside some for the family friends, bought all the ingredients and then I watched as my mom carefully mixed them all in the right proportions. She would keep checking for days later to ensure that it was all good and then one fine day - it would be ready! That night at dinner, we would all be treated to the first serving of Avakkai, mango pickle. I miss the process now but still get the end-product once or twice a year.

Surprisingly, I also related to a lot in the book -

The crazed search for panipuri or the sugarcane juice and the new appreciation for the simple foods.
The questioning thoughts in our mind as I, who have been raised in India, now go back and see India through a different point of view now that I have been here in the US for so long (I need to think about this one a little more)
The discomfort of a career woman with the traditional expectations of your role in the family.
Strong, family ties that never wane

When I finished the book, I gave it 5 stars for what I think a good book in my opinion should be able to do - put a smile on your face.

Office Live Workspace spreads its wings...

kavithar — Thu, 22 May 2008 00:26:00 GMT

Wow, May was a really hectic month! We shipped our second minor release since our launch and this time around, OLW beta went international by launching it in Spanish, French, German and Japanese. We also listened really hard to our customers on the forums, Support, anecdotal feeback and family and friends, used the workspace internally to do our work and you bet we learned a lot! We heard something loud and clear - we needed to cater to our international customers quickly and our current Office integration experience had a few hiccups that needed to get ironed out. This was an interesting release for me coz I wore two hats for this release - the PM for the Office Live Add-in and Office integration and also, the PM release driver to ensure that the entire team worked together with a clear vision, with quality and on time.

The Office integration from OLW had some unique challenges:

1) The product we integrate with has shipped: Shipping client bits is a different ballgame than the service. Office 2003, XP and 2007 have shipped already so we have to work with whatever is available and use the constraints to our advantage. Since we do not have the luxury of changing Office (and we don't want to), we had to figure out how we would provide our functionality in a way that worked for you, our customer. That includes being very, very creative about what is available (e.g. adding Web Views in the File Dialog). In the few instances where we really wanted to change Office behavior, we were careful about requesting hotfixes that we now ship as part of the Office Live Update 1.1 (that includes the Office Live Add-in). We didnt want users having to get the Add-in and then be redirected elsewhere to get the fixes.

2) Customer configurations: Now add the various OS that we wanted to support - Vista and XP and the service packs that have shipped for both the OS and the Office versions and the test matrix just blows my mind. We run lots and lots of tests to ensure that a change we make in one configuration

3) Live ID as Authentication: On the client, Live ID auth is a different ballgame than domain auth. Since we use Live ID to authenticate the user, we wanted to make sure that the client and server were able to "talk" in a way where the user didn't care about which he was using and could access their documents easily. This was far tougher than we thought and it took us nearly 5 teams working across the company to get a solution that covered all the scenarios. Add to this the complication of the OS and Office versions and that these scenarios didnt even exist when they shipped and I can tell you, we all learned a lot about the network stacks and how they are used.

I am extremely proud to say that we have now released the Office Live Update 1.1, with a version of the Add-in that resolves a lot of the issues above and is a step in the direction of better client integration. We already have a bunch of feature improvements for future versions but would love to hear from you too!

Enjoy! More on what it means to drive a release within OLW later this month,

Kavitha

Office Live Workspace

kavithar — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:27:00 GMT

Wow! Its been a while since I wrote on this blog but I have been really busy working on some really fun stuff that I wanted to share with you!

As you already know, Office Live Workspace Beta was launched this year and its been crazy, hectic and quite a rush to release a product that I have helped build from the start! Yes, we are still in Beta but I just wanted to share my "insights" along this process so far:

1) Really know your core customer: Easy, right? Well, its easy to think you know the customer but to really understand who your core customer is hard. Identifying your core customer really helps with identifying the balance of features, the UX for the features and what features make sense for them. A good way to think about this is say, you build a cool pen that writes under water. Now, if you thought your customer was anyone who used a pen, you would be right but only partly so. So, if a feature request came up to say, add a light source at the end of the pen, it sounds like a good feature request to take right? So you agree to spend about 30 hours of work on it. Now, if your core customers are identified as divers, not just anyone who swims but just divers, would you still do that feature? Do divers need a light on the pen if they already wear a mask that would provide the light? Now, the feature doesnt seem P0* anymore, does it? (*MS-speak for the highest priority going from high to low i.e. P0-P4). Fine, I just pulled that example out my head but you get the idea!

As the team sat around brainstorming and prioritizing our features, some features would stand out as just a "great idea" or "isnt that cool?" but with the help of a product planning and marketing team, we closed in on our customer. However, we had to constantly remind ourselves that this wasn't just for one customer but a class of core customers and we needed to build something that would truly close a gap and make them giddy with joy at this product!. So, who is our core customer?

Office Live Workspace is for anyone who uses Microsoft Office for work (professionals), for school (students) and for home with a simple value prop - the ability to upload, share your Office document and access it anywhere.

Ah! Clarity - Knowing the customer helped define exactly which features we would build on (E.g. Activity notifications) and which ones we would wait to hear more customer feedback.

2) Interact with your customers,especially the early adopters: We have community forums (http://officeliveworkspacecommunity.com) and those are just abuzz with customers providing us with direct access to their opinions. With our first public beta, we have had a flurry of feedback and activity and we have taken that feedback and are already heads down making existing functionality better, building new features and fixing customer reported problems. Our solid support team is engaged with our customers and you probably see a few team postings (including mine) whenever we get a chance to. Having a public beta has helped create a connection with customers who want to play with cutting edge products and this connection makes us look smarter as we now look at our product through the eyes of the customer. We know we need to do a better job engaging even more here but I just wanted to say "Thank you" to our early adopters for taking the time to read this blog as well as participating in our online forums.

3) Time goes quickly so plan well: Planning is critical to any product launch, especially an online service. When we started months ago, we had churned out a bunch of ideas but going from the idea, to scenarios, to designs, scoping to a single design, coding, testing, dogfooding, incorporating initial feedback, propping to servers and then going live (whew!) takes time. You do have some freedom in that its an online service and not a packaged product but really, time is limited so planning in advance helps a ton in ensuring that UX makes sense and is a solid design. When I look back at last year, I cannot believe how far we have come and how far we still want to go...

4) Allow time for "synergy" in your teams: We all know that any team goes 3 stages - forming, storming and then performing. Pretty self-evident but what it means is that trying to rush the, what I call "synergistic" group, will just result in failure. Allow for and then account for teams to create their dynamics so that what you get in the end is not a hotch-potch but a truly cohesive product built by a team that performs well together. Office Live Workspace team was formed by folks from all around Microsoft and outside Microsoft and its been truly a pleasure to work with some of the best minds here. However, we still needed time to get to know each other's strengths and skills so that we could make the best use of what each of us brought to the table. One exercise that was really useful is our Insights training we had last year where each of us filled our questionaires and ended up with a booklet that described what motivated us, what our communication styles were, what our preferred way is to learn ...extremely interesting and also helped us understand each other better.

5) Iterate on design again and again....and again: If you don't, it will be too easy to stagnate on designs and not innovate on something that really not just meets but exceeds customer needs. Even for the most basic features, we went through a bunch of iterations on each of our features before we even shipped it and you can bet, we will continue to do so as we continue to identify issues with the design ( E.g. we are working on improving our current Office integration story). Our design process has also evolved and we now have an agile set of UX designers, usability engineers, product planners, program managers and developers in the same room hashing over designs and bringing their perspective to the design before a single piece of code is written. Very cool!

6) Stretch the comfort zone and be willing to build cool features: Lets face it - any product needs to stand out in some way to help create customers who are "promoters". A promoter is the equivalent of your friend urging you to try something coz its so cool! Its the factor that makes you reach out for the red Zune past the other "ordinary" colors. We focused on building the basics for our initial release but we just added activity notifications and are planning a lot more - just watch this space if you see the cool features we have planned for the future.

That's it for now but I will be sure to add more insights and ideas as we continue to move through our cycles going forward. A month ago, I got back in touch with an undergrad friend of mine and was pleasantly surprised that she had read my blog even though we hadnt been in touch for 8 years!! Now that I know that I have at least one reader, I promise to be more diligent going forward :)

Kavitha

Women in Program Management

kavithar — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 22:23:00 GMT

Recently, I interviewed a woman who asked me an interesting question - "How do you feel as a non-American woman to work for Microsoft?". I realized that I had stopped thinking of myself as something that is not the norm - a woman in a technical career.

Every year, the Engineering Excellence Group organizes an excellence day for all engineering disciplines. Its a day where folks from all disciplines have a chance to learn new skills, learn from others and network. This time around, they decided to try an interesting experiment for the Program Management discipline. The gist was - Get 25 PM speakers to speak on any topic of their choice for 99 seconds and strictly, 99 seconds.

I was one of the 25 speakers and the topic I chose was Tips for Women in Program Management. Why? For starters, I am a woman and have been in Program Management for over 5 years. Secondly, I am from India so I had a perspective of a culture thats not American. Thirdly, over the years, I have mentored and been mentored by women at the company and finally, I have an opinion :). I believed that over the years, I had learned something about working here that could help other women who were entering the field of computer science.

But this was a complex topic - Could I represent women across the company and simultaneously not generalize them? For each point I wanted to raise, I could think of at many women who didnt match that generalization and so, I asked myself a number of questions - "would I be able to present something that resonated with every woman?", and "Did I truly think it made a difference whether I was a man or woman at Microsoft?

Days of soul searching later, I arrived at this conclusion - this was my perspective, and yes, I am a woman and I do think that women are different from men. Not all women are the same and their dreams, backgrounds, cultures, personalities priorities, prejudices and expectations are different but there is something we all have in common - we are all women in a traditionally male world and we can help each other like no one else can. Just like we find our friends based on common likes and dislikes and yet different from us, we are women who share a bond but are still different. Yes, not all the tips apply to everyone but its good to be aware of how other women are coping and learn from it.

Tips for Women in Program Management:

1) Be yourself: Yeah, easy enough to say, you think but I cannot stress how important this is. If your style isn’t to be aggressive, please don’t try it. You are going to be uncomfortable and it will show. OTH, if you are more outgoing, don’t try to stifle it. You will hate being stuffed up and not being yourself. The reason you were hired is that you don’t fit the mould. So, why change?

2) Find your passion: The best PMs are the ones who are designing features in areas they care about. I know someone who is really passionate about end user UI but was instead designing APIs for a biz dev product. She felt out of her depth, didnt feel excited about coming into work and didnt know which questions to ask. When she moved to a team here where she was designing UI, she gushed about her work, came up with new ideas every day and really enjoyed it.

3) Be relevant: Don’t’ say something at each meeting because you feel like you have to. You will be far more credible if when you speak, you make sense.

4) Don’t just work hard, work smart: Create awareness on your work style with your managers and peers and just work hard. Ask around for help. Network so you know someone who does know.

5) Prioritize better: One of the biggest mistakes in my career was not to prioritize. Women are such good multi-taskers that we end up juggling a lot of tasks and feel terrible when we dont finish something.

6) Beat the imposter syndrome: Newer PMs particularly feel like they are going to get caught for not knowing what to do. Don’t be afraid to back up your ideas or ask questions. I know it’s easier said than done but I cannot count the number of times my "stupid" question has caused teams to change tactics.

Let me know what you think!

Life at Microsoft - employee conferences

kavithar — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 06:07:00 GMT

This is what is so great about Microsoft - when employees get together and make a good case for a cause, the company rallies behind the employees. I witnessed this first hand last year as part of the core team behind APLDC - the 1st Asian Pacific Leadership Development Conference, a conference geared towards creating a forum for Asian Pacific employees at Microsoft. Now here's another example - the 1st One India Women's conference in Hyderabad, India.

Recently, I had the chance to go behind-the-scenes with one of the organizers, Haritha Kandalla. Here's some excerpts from the conversation:

How did it all begin?

The initiative we now call WAW India (Women at work) started as a thought seeded into the minds of the women at the India Development Center (Hyderabad, India) by S Somasegar (CVP, Developer Division). A few of us decided to get together and decided to start WAW Hyderabad, a forum that we wanted to start off small with holding small events. During one of our meetings, we realized that we were working on policies without knowing what the women professional population actually wants, and decided to go ahead and hold a conference and find out what the real areas of work are. All our energies since have centered around organizing and holding the inaugural One India Women’s Conference (held on 8-9 March, 2007), where we invited and got participation from all six MS businesses in India.

As part of organizing these conferences, especially when its the first time, employees find themselves really stretching themselves developing their leadership and management skills. The logistics and communication skills required to get everything lined up, speakers, food or content, takes a ton of effort and hard work.

The One Women's India had excellent speakers including Ms. Vinita Bali (MD, Britannia Industries), Ms. Rekha Menon (Lead Exec, Accenture Geographic Services) and Ms. Sangita Reddy (MD, Apollo Hospitals Group) Anna Collins (GM, client Services), Neelam Dhawan (MD, MS India), and Dr. Anna Rowley.

Challenges:

- Working with a diverse set of project leaders, each with a strong set of opinions, most of them right to arrive at a consensus!

- Working with the leaders, ensuring that the schedules matched their free time, ensuring that the agenda items they were keen to include did get addressed during the conference.

- Working with budget constraints – we had enough money to run the conference, but we didn’t have enough to do something that would definitely stay with people as an event. We therefore had to ensure that we had content that was powerful, that the gifts we would give the participants would be extremely useful even though not costing us too much etc.

- Working with time crunches – it was required on my occasions for me to step in when we were losing time during the run up to the conference to spend extra hours to get some work done that a particular project leader was simply unable to do due to lack of time and professional commitments.

What makes it worth it all is the impact on the audience - e.g. all the 120 participants came up to the organizers and told them that they had done a great job and that they really gained something significant by attending the conference. We had the same experience after APLDC - folks coming up asking why we hadnt done this before!

Now, months and months of work culminating in an impact like that – that’s truly priceless!

Is the world really coming to an end?

kavithar — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 02:58:00 GMT

In the past few weeks, I have found myself watching a number of "documentaries" - documentaries that cover a number of theories, some well-founded and others hmm,....not so well-founded but interesting anyway. I started with "The Inconvenient Truth" and it got me to think (an amazing achievement for a movie by any standards).

While I had some idea about 50% of the havoc caused to the earth and have started using paper bags at the local supermarket, seeing chunks of Antartica dropping to the ocean was not comfortable. I would have preferred if Al Gore didnt interject with pieces of his losing the presidentship but it was a good watch.

In fact, it prompted me to pick up the critically acclaimed "Who killed the electric car?". Conspiracy theories abound and its always interesting to view a point of view that seems so justified but here again, was global warming right in your face. I would have loved to pick up an electric car myself and zip around it while charging it at the local Shell station. We dont travel more than 60 miles in a day in any case so it wouldn't be a problem! Its odd how the problem goes from being "out there" to "right here, right now" when you watch two back to back movies on the same problem - global warming. I do want to be able to take a deep breath (can bet you are taking one right now :)) in the years to come and it would be a shame to leave the earth far dirtier than it was when I came into it.

For now, I intend to do my bit while still keeping convenience in mind (not that extreme or that disciplined yet) by carpooling to work and walking down to the meeting room in the other building instead of taking my car. Hopefully, the world is not coming to an end just yet.....

What "Stumbling on Happiness" did for me...

kavithar — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 03:07:00 GMT

In the past, each time after I have ordered the Thai Kitchen Cashew (w/o tofu) and my husband has ordered the veggie fried rice with eggs, we launch into this discussion on how we don't experiment with our food and how
"next time, we should try something else". This then degenerates quickly into a discussion on how vegetarian food options are so limited and stops as soon as the food arrives. That is, until now....

After I read this book, I determined that we would not have that conversation any more and that we would order exactly the same thing at the Thai restaurant every time and be perfectly happy about it. If you want to learn why, check out Chapter 7 "Time Bombs" in the book "Stumbling on Happiness" or I guess, you could just as easily continue reading :)

As Daniel Gilbert expertly explains, if offered a choice, people usually prefer their favorite food interspersed with their less favorite foods spread over a year rather than have their favorite once a month every year. But we forget time as a factor in our prediction of our happiness. If we accounted for it, we would know that each month that first morsel of our favorite would always taste better than our second favorite ever would! We make the fundamental mistake of assuming that since we wouldn't want to eat the same food over and over again in the same session we would not want to do it spread over a year either!

The brain is a remarkable piece of evolution and its ability to imagine as he rightly puts it, differentiates the human race from all other on the planet but thats where it can be wrong. While I did hone in on the food examples, Daniel has some great examples spread out through out the book and I couldn't help smiling at them as I identified with some of them. How people often value things more than after they own them, often imagine that the pain of losing somthing is greater than the pleasure of getting it, often hurt more by small losses than large ones and many more - that kept me thinking long after I finished the book.

Have you read the book and did you arrive at your own insights? If so, share them!

P.S- Thanks to Ned Friend, my team lead for pointing me to this book and for the enjoyable hours of reading! Now, on to the next...

New PM role at Office Live, still at Microsoft

kavithar — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 04:36:00 GMT

So, I decided after 4+ years at Developer Division, that I was ready for a change. Microsoft is an awesome company to work for in the sense that one can gain the experience of a completely different company with a completely different set of customers and user scenarios by just moving within Divisions. In fact, a former Dev Lead I worked with said "What?You are leaving DevDiv. How will I ever see you again??" and this was with me moving across the street <dramatic eye roll>. But jokes aside, Microsoft is unique in that it offers totally different experience while essentially being the same company.

The soul searching led me to the Office Live team, which is doing a bunch of interesting things in the web space and lured me with the possibility of impacting millions and millions of users! Now, thats a rush! And so here I am - a Program Manager still learning my way around here.

Watch this space for more info on Office Live, what we have learned so far and the new features that I am going to work on! Wish me luck!

Cheers,
Kavitha

Where can I find the version of Visual Studio I need?

kavithar — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:48:00 GMT

It came to my attention today that some customers are finding it hard to find the released version of Visual Studio that supports the just-released .NET Framework 3.0. Therefore, I figured it might be useful to walk through the various versions available today in chronological order and provide links to the download pages that I helped create and publish.

1) Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey):

Dev Tools (available for download):

· Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition 90-day Trial

· Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite 180-Day Trial

· Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Trial Edition

· Visual Studio Express Editions

Framework:

· .NET Framework 2.0

2) Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (codenamed “Fidalgo) : These tools are provided as an early preview of technology being considered for the Orcas release of Visual Studio. These tools are not supported by Microsoft but provided as is to enable early adoption of the .NET Framework 3.0 platform. Users will be expected to upgrade to the Visual Studio Orcas release when that becomes commercially available.

Dev Tools (available for download):

· Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for .NET Framework 3.0, November 2006 CTP

Framework:

· .NET Framework 3.0 Bootstrapper

3) Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas”:

· September 2006 CTP: first VPC image release of our September CTP. Watch for more posts on how we created it and what the feedback has been so far.

· October 2006 CTP: differencing disk released with more features that were checked in since the September release.

Maybe this clarifies things a little and folks can find the Visual Studio bits that they are looking to continue development.