go ahead, mac my day

Office 2008 SP1 and VBA!

It's Release Tuesday here at Microsoft, and we've got a couple of things coming out of MacBU today:

• Office 2008 12.1 (download and release notes)
• and a little announcement about the future of VBA

I'm not versed enough in the dirty details to talk about VBA at any length, so I'll instead point you over to Schwieb's blog: Saying hello (again) to Visual Basic. He's got more details, and he's also asking questions of you, dear VBA users, about what parts of the VBA experience are the most important. Have your voice heard and tell us what's useful (and while you're responding to him, don't forget my post a couple of weeks ago about features vs scenarios -- give lots of details as to what would impact you the most).

Office 2008 has been treating us very well so far. Since our launch in January, we've sold nearly three times as many copies as we sold of Office 2004 after its launch. We've had a lot of incoming data about Office 2008 through the Office forums, the feedback submitted through the apps, the Customer Experience Improvement Program, and the Microsoft Error Reporting Protocol (MERP - because we loves us some acronyms). Through all of this feedback, we identified the highest-impact issues to fix, which include:

• compatibility fixes across the suite
• printing issues across the suite
• Excel's custom error bars get their formatting options back
• several Exchange improvements in Entourage
• improved AppleScript support in Entourage and PowerPoint (fixed by the guy in the office next to mine -- I heard his cheers)

Not to just point to Schwieb again, but he wrote a great post about Office 2008 SP1 too.

In our press release, our fearless leader notes that we're expanding our staff. We've got several positions open right now, and more coming in the next few months. If you think you might be interested in joining our team, you can check out the Microsoft Careers website. All of our positions are listed under "Mac Office". I just searched and saw that there were 10, across development, test, and program management. We're going to have some more user experience positions open (both research and design); drop me an email if you're interested in learning more.

(Edited at 11:10am PDT to add a couple of links and to fix a formatting issue.)

Nadyne @ Stanford MUG, Monday 02 June 2008

On Monday, 02 July 2008, I'll be at the Stanford MUG meeting in Palo Alto, California (although their website doesn't show it yet). Come by to learn more about Office 2008, watch me give a demo, ask lots of questions, and hope that you're successful in the traditional MUG raffle at the end. I'll have some Office 2008 goodies with me, including copies of Office 2008. The meeting starts at 6:30pm with the usual MUG Q&A, then some short presentations about shareware and other goodies. My presentation should start at 8pm. I'll talk for about an hour, and spend a half-hour or so on questions.

SMUG meetings are open only to paid members, but you're allowed to attend your first meeting for free. More info is on the website linked above.

achievements in Office

Grand Theft Auto IV hasn't left my Xbox 360 since it came out, and so I've learned about some of the achievements (warning: link contains game spoilers) that are available there. (Not me playing it, I should point out.) During a meeting today, the idea was floated for having game-style achievements in Office.

Thanks to the joy of Twitter, I've been sharing my ideas for such achievements in my twitter stream. Here are some ideas for unlocking achievements in our apps:

• create an invite in Entourage has has more than 10 invitees
• create a PowerPoint slide deck with more than 100 slides
• complete all of your Entourage tasks that are due today
• hit the limit of Excel's big grid (that's more than a million rows!)
• use Word's track changes to make more than 100 edits
• create 20 formulas using Excel's formula builder
• have an hour-long video chat in Messenger

Okay, so the Office achievements probably aren't as exciting as some of the GTA4 ones. Got any ideas of your own? Share 'em in the comments ...

Office 2008 podcasts forthcoming

Stephanie Krieger, a Word expert and one of the people who has given our big booth presentations at Macworld Expo, is going to provide some Office 2008 podcasts in June. The first one is about compatibility, the other is about making your documents look great. If you haven't seen one of her Office booth presentations, this woman can make your documents sing. She's got a great eye for design (in fact, you can thank her for many of the templates that you see in Office 2008), and she is a sorceress when it comes to working with our tools like SmartArt. I have to admit that I always try to watch one of her booth presentations because she's so great at making documents look fantastic. I'll definitely be downloading these podcasts when they're released!

the road to OOPSLA 2008

Today I'm in Nashville, attending the spring OOPSLA committee meeting. The early submissions (research papers, Onward! papers, essays, development papers, tutorial proposals, educators' symposium proposals, workshop proposals, panel proposals, and DesignFest proposals) have all been submitted. The decisions about acceptances are being made now, and the authors will be notified in the next few weeks. We're also making the final decisions about invited speakers.

The major task to be completed at this meeting is to have a first pass at our schedule. We want to ensure that we don't schedule two items concurrently that the same people will want to attend.

There's still opportunities for you to present your work at OOPSLA. The late deadline is 02 July 2008, which is for the following submissions:

• Onward! short papers
• Onward! films
• posters
• demonstrations
• lightning talks
• doctoral symposium participation
• student research competition posters
• student volunteer positions

If you're interested in submitting to one of these tracks and would like to learn more about them than what is available in their respective Calls for Participation, feel free to leave a comment here or contact me. As Development Chair, I'll be able to give in-depth answers about the posters, demos, lightning talks, and student research competition. I've been the student volunteer chair in the past as well, so I know that track very well (and I've written about it when I last held that chair.

After this deadline passes, there are still opportunities to be involved with OOPSLA. Each of the workshops will accept position papers, and you'll be able to submit to that. Lightning talks will accept submissions until there are no slots left -- which means that it's possible to get a slot for a lightning talk on the day that you would give it if there is space available. And, of course, you can simply come to OOPSLA and attend our tutorials and programme.

features vs scenarios, with a Clippy example

As a member of MacBU, one thing that I hear frequently from users are feature requests. They're usually phrased along the lines of, 'you guys should do [something that I think is cool]'. Sometimes, the user will append a statement along the lines of, 'and all of my friends think that this would be great too'.

Feature requests by themselves aren't really all that interesting, even if you think that lots of people will use it. What is really interesting to me is why you want that feature. What are you trying to accomplish with it? Since you don't have that feature today, how are you getting around it right now (if you are able to get around it)?

The reason that this information is more interesting to me than the plain vanilla feature request is that it gives me context for your request. It gives me a chance to think about the whole scenario. It means that I can take your scenario and combine it with other similar scenarios that I've heard from other users, and I can do some research about those scenarios. That research might lead me to a different feature (or set of features), or it might give me a better idea of how important this scenario is in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes it turns out that the feature that was requested was one that won't actually solve the real problem. Or sometimes it turns out that the feature requested will solve part of the problem, but not the whole thing -- without a full understanding of what you're trying to accomplish, we're not going to be able to solve the real problem.

In each of our apps, if you go to the Help menu and click on "Send Feedback", you'll be taken to a webpage to submit feedback. This is a great way for you to tell us what you want from us. When you enter your feedback, please be as complete as possible. If you tell us "I need different bibliography styles in Word", you've only given us part of the picture. If you're more complete in the feedback that you submit, we’re more likely to be able to act on it. In this example, tell us what different bibliography styles you need. Tell us what the impact is of not having the one you need. Tell us how often you need to use them. Tell us whether it's a commonly-used style or if it's a special one that's only used when you submit a paper to a specific conference. Tell us how you're working around it right now (using another app? typing everything in manually? something else?). Tell us how this impacts your productivity.

I noticed that someone submitted product feedback asking for the return of the much-maligned Clippy.  This is a request that I would have loved to have more detail about. Did this user think that they got good help from Clippy, and that they haven't been able to get as good of help since Clippy was excised from the apps? Did this user appreciate the assistance provided by Clippy when it noticed that you were trying to do something like write a letter? Did this user simply think that Clippy was cute and missed that little bit of whimsy while they were working on something? Or was this just a joke on the part of the submitter, because they knew that such a request would make me wonder if I was losing my mind?

We're in the early stages of working on the next release of Office. Right now is an excellent time for you to think about what Office could do to better meet your needs, and to tell us about it.  Yes, even if you do want Clippy back.

dreaming about WWDC

I've been trying not to spend too much time on the Apple Developer Connection website dreaming about WWDC, but it's hard. The list of sessions looks pretty complete, so I'm mentally composing my checklist of the sessions that I want to attend. I think that my biggest problem this year will be tearing myself away from the iPhone sessions to go to those plain ole vanilla Mac sessions.  

WWDC : Mac geeks :: Christmas : everyone else. And for all that I love MWSF, I love WWDC even more. I'm surprised that I haven't set up a countdown yet. Hmmm, maybe I'll do that later today ...

hangin' out with the MVPs

Before joining Microsoft, I hadn't heard of our MVP program. MVP stands for Most Valued Professional. They're people around the world who aren't Microsoft employees but who have become experts in our technologies. They share that expertise freely, and Microsoft recognises them for all that they do to share that expertise.

MacBU has several MVPs, with deep expertise in our products. I've been able to meet some of them at MWSF, and I got to meet many more of them this week. Microsoft sponsors a regular MVP Summit, where our MVPs have the opportunity to come to Redmond, learn more about what we're working on, and spend time with the product teams to do deep dives into our apps. I've spent the past two days in our sessions with our MacBU MVPs. It was hugely valuable. We shared with them some of our earliest thoughts about our future releases across the board, and got their feedback about it.

I also had a chance to present to them a wrap-up of the work that my user experience team did for Office 2008, and gave them more detail about how we do usability tests and recruit users for those usability tests. They asked what a usability test might look like, so I ran them through an on-the-spot example using My Day. I told them what task I would ask the user to complete, and what I'm looking for with that task.

Hmm, I've been on a My Day kick recently, so maybe I'll share that task list with you guys in a future post.

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.

your day is My Day

When we were defining our goals for Office 2008, one of them was to help you manage your time. Out of that came the idea for My Day.

One of my problems with managing my time is my email. I get something on the order of eleventy billion emails every day, and they come in at a steady trickle. One of my personal failings is that, when I see that I have new email, I am compelled to see what it is. It's an almost Pavlovian response: see icon, click to email, get rewarded with the treat of new email (which, of course, is not always a treat). Sometimes I just want to look at Entourage to see what meeting is next or what my to-do list looks like, but there's that pretty shiny new-mail indicator beckoning to me.

It turns out that I'm not the only person who has that problem. (Which is quite a relief!) You want to see what you should be working on right now, but the lure of email calls, and suddenly you realise that a half hour has passed and you haven’t been working on what you really should be working on. Solving that problem is one of the goals of My Day. My Day isn't intended to show you anything at all about your email. Instead, it's a quick heads-up display to show you what your calendar and your tasks list.

When I first started using the daily builds of Office 2008 more than a year ago, My Day wasn't one of the reasons that I was looking forward to trying out the latest and greatest. (The feature that I wanted the most was SmartArt in PowerPoint.) At first, I never really got into My Day. That changed over time. I've been using My Day extensively for the past few months, and it's really made a difference in how I manage my time.

I've always been a heavy calendar user, but now My Day means that I don't tend to look at my calendar for today's events. I look at My Day to see when my next meeting is and where I'm supposed to be for it. I look at my calendar for future events and to schedule new meetings. And I'm actually using the task list now. I've always had the best of intentions when it comes to keeping a task list, but I would try it for a few weeks and then never look at it again. With My Day always visible, I'm finding myself using it to enter new tasks and to check off ones that I've currently got. A year ago, you would've seen about four tasks on my list, all of which were overdue. I've currently got 17 of them right now (although four of them are overdue — but at least they're not the same four that were overdue a year ago!). The biggest change, though, is that I now can let that new mail icon in Entourage wait for ... well, at least 10 minutes before I click on it to see what new email has arrived. This is an improvement of at least 9.8 minutes. Maybe I can get up to 15 minutes one day! All of this means that I’m better focused on my work and better able to get things done.

Coming later: how My Day evolved as a result of user feedback (including the answer to the question "why isn't My Day a widget?").

Q&A: Why do you do this job?

I got a couple of questions from a Dear Reader recently, asking about working for MacBU in general and why I like my job in particular. I'm going to answer the latter first; look for the former coming in a few days.

Okay, so the off-the-cuff remark to that is 'because Microsoft pays me'. Catch me at the pub and that's the answer I'll give you. But it's not really an answer to the question. After all, Microsoft would pay me to have a whole host of other jobs, and there are a whole host of other companies out there that would pay me to have other jobs [1].

The reason that I have this job is that I think I've got the coolest job at Microsoft. First of all, I get paid to work on Mac applications, which is pretty cool by itself. Even better, I get paid to work on Mac applications that have a real daily impact on the lives of literally millions of people. And, I get paid to deeply understand what Mac users want out of our applications.

It's those things together that make me love my gig. The level of complexity is high, and the target is ever-moving. I like solving hard problems, and I like the satisfaction of achieving my goals. I spent some time last week meeting some early adopters of Office 2008. One user who sticks out in my mind was a hardcore Entourage user who found My Day (found it within a few minutes of first installing Entourage), and it really works for them. They've changed their whole workflow to optimise around My Day: flagging emails so that they show up in the to-do pane of My Day, stopped using the Task window (instead adding tasks almost exclusively either through the Project Centre or directly in My Day), etc. And they're happy about it. (Which reminds me, I should talk some more about how My Day came to be, so let's add that to my queue of upcoming messages.)

That's what gets me up in the mornings. There are problems out there to solve, and these problems are ones that I'm in a unique position to solve. And if it's right, we've done a great thing. We have a very real way to help people improve their productivity and thus get to spend their time on what they want to do instead of on managing their tools.

I really do love my job. And I'm glad you asked me that. I'd been getting bogged down in the minutia of my job, and was losing sight of why I decided to take this gig in the first place. So: thanks. :)

[1] Nadyne trivia: I was an Emergency Medical Technican for ten years, so I really do have skills that don't involve pontificating about Mac users.

the future of Entourage

I've been working on the next version of Office for quite awhile now. It's long past time that I've opened up a bit about some of the high-impact work that has taken up so much of my time.

Entourage is near and dear to my heart. It is, bar none, the single application that I use the most. Messenger is another app that I use frequently, to have quick conversations with my colleagues around Microsoft. As we looked at what we need to do to help our users communicate better, the answer became clear. Entourage and Messenger already have some integration, allowing me to see your Messenger status when I am viewing an email from you.

So we're taking our integration to the next level. Starting in the next version of Entourage, we're integrating some of the most essential features of Messenger. Specifically, I'm talking about winks and nudges. Directly from Entourage, you'll be able to send a wink or nudge to your Messenger contacts.

We haven't completed our focus group testing yet, so this is really early stuff here. Let me show you what we're thinking about right now. First, we've added a couple of entries to File -> New:

Now, when you choose Wink from the menu, this is what appears:

Then you just hit send, and voila! You've winked at someone.

We're expecting this to be a major feature in our next release. Focus group testing will give us better feedback about this. For example, is that wink really the right one? How many winks should we build into the app? How do users add their own winks? We want to make sure that we get this integration exactly right, which is why I've been working so hard on it for so long.

I'm on a foggy highway

Last night, I sat down and took a stab at my research schedule for the next few months. I'm on a foggy highway. I mostly know what questions I have to answer. I say 'mostly' here because I expect that some of my questions won't be the ones that really need answering (but I'll figure that out soon enough), and because I expect that additional questions will come to light as I answer the existing ones. But I really don't have an inkling of what the answers to those questions will look like yet.

We're in the early stages of defining the next version of Office, so the road ahead is almost entirely shrouded in fog. I'll be spending a lot of time in the next few months on the road and in my usability lab talking with users, answering my questions and learning where the road leads. The fog will lift, although perhaps by nothing more than sheer force of will.

This is my favourite part of the process. It's also the bit where I get the most nervous. If I deliver research that is flawed or incomplete ... ugh. The risk is huge. The better I do, the better Office will be in the next version (and the one after that, and the one after that, and ... ).

Consider this to be my usual plug that if you want to help define the next version of Office, you should sign up to participate in usability studies. If you're an Entourage user (especially in an Exchange environment) and in the Bay Area, you should sign up as fast as your little fingers can type. When you fill out the form, make sure that you fill in the apps you use (such as Entourage), because that's hugely helpful to me.

plan to throw away good designs

Last week at SxSW (which I have got to get to sometime!), Michael Lopp, one of the senior engineering managers at Apple, was part of a panel about design. During the panel, he was asked about the design process at Apple. The Tech Beat blog at Business week has the best description of his complete answer.

One of the points that he brought up was the need to plan to throw out good designs. He put it as "10 to 3 to 1". Start off with ten entirely different good designs. Good is the key word there -- they can't just be a couple of good designs and then a bunch of other junk to make the good ones look even better. You have to make ten really good designs, which is to say that you have to come up with ten different ways to reach the same goal. In doing so, you stretch yourself in thinking about the problem and your design. Then you whittle from ten designs down to three, iterate on those three designs, and finally end up with a single strong design.

Lopp isn't the only one singing this tune. Bill Buxton (whose latest book is currently top of my to-read pile) and Alan Cooper (his latest is also in my to-read pile, but a bit further down the queue) have both been talking about this in their own way. Buxton talked to Channel 9 about design and user experience last year, and gave a keynote at Interaction 08 earlier this year about the design ecosystem. Both are fantastic talks, I can't recommend them highly enough.

This is how you get design right. You have to really invest in it. Investing in it isn't about money, it's about time. Your designers need time to think about solving the problem, and they need to tinker with lots of ideas that get towards solving the problem. They need to invest time in coming up with ten good designs. This means that you have to be okay with throwing out good designs. You're throwing out good designs because good isn't good enough — you're looking for greatness. Greatness rarely springs fully-formed from your forehead (no matter how much you might wish it would). Greatness comes from a lot of work, and a commitment to the work that is necessary to achieve that greatness.

It's a huge commitment, but the payoff is also huge. In last month's interview with Fortune, Steve Jobs talked about 'push[ing] the reset button' on the design for the iPhone because he couldn't 'convince myself to fall in love with this'. Everyone talks about setting the bar. Setting the bar to something that you need to fall in love with? What a design goal! But look how many iPhones Apple has sold. Would they have sold so many if the design weren't something you fell in love with?

phishing in Mom terms

My mom called me earlier this week to wish me a happy birthday and to complain about spam. Mom, you see, has joined the digital age. She's got herself a laptop, she's got herself an email address. She doesn't have a blog and she's not on Twitter yet, but it could just be a matter of time. If you see the "Confessions of a Judge Judy Addict" blog in the future, you can take comfort in knowing that my mom has started blogging.

Mom is going through all of the stages of new email user that I've come to expect over the years. The first stage is the email forward. They're all new to her, so she religiously forwards them along as well. I haven't had the heart to tell her that all of those jokes have been around since the dawn of time, and no, they really aren't from George Carlin or Jeff Foxworthy.

The second stage is replying to spam. Spam is an easy thing to understand, since it's just the same as the junk mail that ends up in her physical mailbox at home. If you call the company sending the junk mail to say “please stop”, they will. So, she reasoned, if she hit the "unsubscribe" link in the spam, she'd stop getting so much junk mail. Sigh. She's learned the hard way that doesn't work.

Now that she's mostly understood the concept of spam, we're now working on the concept of phishing. She told me that she nearly got caught by a phishing scam. My parents have been talking about joining the AARP. So when she got an email last week that purported to be from the AARP, she followed the link in the email and began happily filling out the information. She only stopped when the site didn't give her an option for sending in a cheque instead of providing her credit card details.

Like spam, she's got the basic concept of phishing down, in that she understands that there are scammers out there who want her credit card details or her Social Security number. But she doesn't quite know how to identify phishing on sight, so it falls to me to explain it to her. It turns out that it's hard to do it in non-geek-speak.

So I spent most of the time on the phone explaining various ways to identify phishing websites, and trying to put it into Mom terms. Here's what I came up with:

• If the email refers to you as "valued customer", or gets your name wrong, ignore the email.
• If the first thing in the address bar is numbers, don't do it. It doesn't matter if the site that you want is later on in the address bar.
• If the website doesn't end in .com, .net, or .org, don't do it.
• Check the address bar closely, make sure it's spelled properly. There's a big difference between lvie.com and live.com. Also don't accept microsoft.somephishingsite.com for microsoft.com.

This isn't a perfect list of how to identify phish, but it's a reasonable start for my mom. Here's hoping that I don't have to get deeper into phishing identification with her ...