- Posted by sondreb on November 5, 2008
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As of late Microsoft have started a new path in their design and user experiences (UX). This is starting to become evident in their Windows Live Essentials package, Windows 7 and their websites. Why is this so important that I’m writing a blog post on the subject? Let me start with some background on my history.
Growing up I was fortunate to have a dad that worked in printing as a typographer. He was one of the first individuals in Norway to purchase an Apple Macintosh and lucky me, I was able to play around with his computers. One of my hobbies as a youngster was to design and write newspapers that I walked around and sold in the neighborhood. During this time I spent a lot of time with my farther who teaches me how to design well formed flow in the layout. Fast forward some years and I received my own Macintosh on which I formed a passion for graphical design and web sites. That’s how I got my first job, as a web designer back before the DotCom Bobble. My career as designer didn’t live for long as I quickly moved into coding and built web sites for a living. With my background I’ve always had an interested in the esthetics of just about everything from building architecture, to car design and computer software.
My vision of great software is 50% design and 50% functionality/quality. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, if it doesn’t have a usable (and good looking) interface, you’ll have a hard time selling it to your customers. Design is very important in our lives, we see it every day in advertisements, newspapers and magazines. First impressions is important and in designer clothes people takes notice of you. But having a good design (aka. expensive clothes) doesn’t mean your successful, intelligent or any better than everyone else.
Which brings me on to the battle of operating systems: Microsoft have for many years had a benefit from their standardized UI guidelines. Third party developers on the Windows platform have thrived and most ISVs have followed the established guidelines. It made it easier to sell (for third parties) and easier to teach and learn by those who’s required to use the software.
Things are about to change…
With the advent of Mac OS X, we saw a new direction at which the desktop is becoming a visual design statement in it’s own right. Good design has been catching on with computers and devices for some years now (luckily we’re not all using gray dull boxes any longer), starting with Apple’s excellent hardware design on their Macs and lately their iPods and iPhones. Apple released the desktop version of OS X in march 2001 and have had great success with their sales since then (My days with Mac OS ended at version 8).
Microsoft seems to take notice on what has happened… lots of people have complained about Windows Vista and called it a failure, as much as Microsoft representatives (like Steve Ballmer) even admits they had some problems. Personally I’ve used Windows Vista since some of the early betas and I’ve never looked back. I could never use a computer with Windows XP, not as long as the hardware is capable of running the OS. It’s a known fact that Microsoft under-delivered massively when it comes to the initial visions of Vista – some ideas which won’t even make it to Windows 7. I love Windows Vista and I’m sure most users will enjoy it if they give it a try – it’s been the target of a general misconception and misunderstanding for a long while, something that Microsoft tried to show with their Mojave Experiment.
Windows Vista was a nice breath of air coming from Windows XP, but it did not represent any dramatic change in the UI (User Interface) and there was some minor changes to the UX (User Experience).
Starting from recently Microsoft have moved into a new direction that has a more dramatic impact on our computer desktops and applications. There are four big driving forces (platforms) for this change and that’s Windows 7, Windows Live Essentials, Microsoft hardware, and Microsoft Web Sites. I’m excited to see what will happen in the space of Microsoft hardware, they’ve recently rolled out some very hot products like LifeCam Show, LifeCam VX-5500 and Arc mouse as you can see below.
Another driving force is the websites. Web is very important and it’s the primary channel for information distribution and sales for many corporations and retails. We have come far from the early days of NCSA Mosaic web browser when it was all about static HTML pages with blue underlined links and animated gif files.
If you navigate around on Microsoft.com today, you’ll quickly understand how things are changing. The new Windows site has no indication on what is actually a link or what’s just static text. Site looks nice, but what about usability? I have to move my mouse all over the site to get a grip on what’s going on and what’s available.
Digging deeper you’ll find the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor page. I think this is a good example on something gone very wrong. The top part of the page is conformed of four (4) menu structures. Not only that, I’m informed that I’m currently looking at “Windows Vista Upgrade” advisor from the page title, the page headline, the fourth menu link and the sub title of the actual content…
Esthetics is all about how your emotions react to the sensory inputs. That something has good esthetics is founded in our physical bodies, although it’s a highly subjective experience, we are all bound to some of the same basic principles. Just because an artist makes something and calls it art, doesn’t make it art. At least not in my opinion. I won’t go any further on the web space, just add a comment that I’ve always thought Microsoft does great design on the web, they still have something to learn when it comes to the concept of less is more. Apple’s website have not changed much in recent years, but it’s still extremely useable. It’s a more unified as well.
Update 9th November: Recently Microsoft upgraded the UI on Windows Live Hotmail to go with the new guidelines and if you ask me I prefer the old design. Most positive feature of this new design is that it actually respects the browser text size and it scales very beautifully according to my settings. The bad thing though, is how IE7 added support for “zooming” on web sites. If you zoom in and out in the browser (this is not only an IE problem, same behavior in FireFox) you’ll see how poorly thought out the feature of zooming is in today's modern browsers. I don’t understand why we need two different concepts of increasing the size of a webpage. Text-size was enough…
Windows Live Essentials is the name of the package software applications that extends Windows functionality. Windows Vista had some of these applications built into the OS, this has been a big mistake from Microsoft. They never released any updates for them, but instead they started distributing a “clone” of the included applications under the brand of Windows Live. Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail … and the list goes on. I’m happy to hear that Microsoft is correcting this mistake with Windows 7, where they are stripping the OS down to the basics.
The following screenshot shows how the toolbar in Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Writer (all beta versions) now have close to none icons. While this obviously does turn my focus more into the content of the applications, I’m highly distracted by the toolbar when I’m about to perform an action. I think they need to consider a new concept of separators (as we’ve grown used to for years now) that puts actions within the same context together. Having “Add to calendar” and “Delete” right next to each other is asking for trouble. Windows Movie Maker is getting a total makeover and it’s receiving the Office 2007 toolbar. Which I think is a good idea and it should be explored as a possibility for all of the Windows Live Essential applications. Windows 7 applications will have the new toolbar, Word Pad, Paint and others already have the toolbar redone for Windows 7.
In the beginning, Windows Live Essentials carried the design and theme of Windows Vista but in the recent beta they redid a lot of the UI, removing almost every icon that has for many years worked as visual clues and hints. This seem to be a new guideline from Microsoft, their message is that applications should allow you to focus on what matters – your content within the applications. I was initially very skeptical to this and I’ve aired my concern to Microsoft and I’m still not sure if it’s a good way forward. Sure, the toolbars doesn’t look very obtrusive, but they are getting much harder to adapt too. The good thing of getting an early look at these applications, is our ability to give Microsoft feedback and be part of changing the future.
Have a look at how Paint is changing into a very usable application with the Office 2007 toolbar.
Let me step back a bit: Some years back my cousin had some computer problems and called me for some assistance. Upon arrival, I realized that her desktop was neither in Norwegian nor English. It was actually Dutch, as her boyfriend is from the Netherlands. Without a hitch, I was able to fix her computer without knowing a single word of Dutch. How was that possible? Thanks to a consistent UI and icons I was able to navigate through her Windows XP machine like child’s play. Will I be able to do the same feat after Windows 7? I’m not sure…
At Microsoft PDC 2008 I received an early copy of Windows 7 and I’m already running it, there are some good improvements in the UX that I welcome. It’s also quite clear that Microsoft is taking lessons from somewhere in regards to the new task bar. Icons and running applications are treated in a similar manner, with small visual clues to whether the application is running or not.
Do you think your grandmother cares if Windows Media Player is currently running or not? She just knows to click the correct icon (hey, did I mention that icons are good visual clues and that humans are more visual than textual?) and play her music. Some people predict that we’re moving into the final years of the written language and that the future will be fully vocalized. We can today record everything we say thanks to immense storage capacity and voice recognition is getting better. Which reminds me, I’m looking forward to improvements in that area for Windows 7, have not heard much yet. I’m rambling on, but I’m just trying to prove a point that having textual actions for everything will diminish the usability of the computer desktop.
Less is more is said a lot by many – it has never been followed by Microsoft. They have continued to add requested features to their products, to a degree where Office required a total UX redo with the 2007 release. We will see some of the same (reduction of clutter) happening in Windows 7. Apple has followed this recipe for years with great success – which is one of the reasons I prefer Microsoft products. They (Microsoft products) are so feature and functionality rich that I can do just about anything I want, and most of them are extensible by third party ISVs. Apple products has success with giving the minimal set of functionality that 90% of users require, but there’s always the 10% that is not comfortable with less. I’m hoping that Microsoft can do both, have a rich feature set with good design.
There is a lot of great innovations at Microsoft that is driving this new design initiative and it makes me happy as I love good design and think it’s important. Still, they will do things both good and bad. Nobody ever gets everything right or perfect the first time, but it’s much better than status quo. Some innovations from Microsoft that is driving this innovation is technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, which are foundation for Microsoft Surface and Zune.
One digression: My biggest feature request for Microsoft is “View” mode named “Full” in both Windows Explorer and Windows Live Photo Gallery that displays photos at their actual size! There is nothing I hate more than having to double-click photos in Explorer or Gallery and having to wait for the photo to load. I want to scroll through all my photos in both applications without having to open every individual photo. I want to use scroll mouse and page up/page down to scan through my photos. What do you think? Leave a comment!
It’s exciting times as a developer AND a consumer and I hope you share some of my enthusiasm for what’s coming!