the evolution of My Day
As I've discussed earlier on Mac Mojo, software evolves. My Day is no different in that respect. We went through a few design iterations before we got to the version that ships with Office 2008. Let's talk about how we evolved My Day as a result of feedback from our users.
In some of our early designs, we looked at making My Day a widget. The feedback from users was instant and overwhelming: no widget! Users told us that the value of My Day to them is being able to see it all the time so that it helps you keep on task. As a widget, it was too easy to forget that it was there, and so never look at it.
One early design of My Day showed a fixed number of 3 calendar events and 3 tasks, and had a fixed size to match. In our usability studies, users told us that this was too rigid. Some users said that they don't have a lot of meetings, so they wanted to be able to see only their tasks tasks. Other users said that they keep their to-dos in their head or on paper instead of in Entourage, so they only wanted to see calendar events. Our design evolved to default to three of each, but to allow you to change the size of the window and change the size of the individual panes within the window to show you exactly what you need.
Another change made was how we handle the end of the day. Originally, our design had you change the day in My Day to another date if you wanted to see the information there. In usability studies, our users told us that they wanted some idea of what was coming their way tomorrow so that they could plan the next day. So we added a new design: we show you the first calendar event that you have tomorrow so that you know that you need to get in early for that 8am conference call.
We've made a lot of tweaks to My Day to get to what we finally shipped in Office 2008. We've seen some great feedback about it so far, and I'm really excited to see how people are using it in the real world. It's been pretty nifty.
