Microsoft's Open XML is now a Standard

This just off the press. And no April Fool's joke, it got slashdotted to me.

The ISO approved Microsoft's Open XML as a standard putting it in the same league as PDF, HTML and ODF. For those who haven't been following the debate, Microsoft has been lobbying for this for more than a year now ("over 14 months of intense review", according to MSFT) and fighting opposition from IBM and Sun.

The implications:

• This gives Office 2007 a big boost, marketing wise. With competition coming in from online office tools by the likes of Google and Zoho, having control over a standard is a big deal. (Zoho supports OOXML currently, btw.)
• Apple, Novell, and even IBM now are writing apps that support OOXML.
• It will setback the adoption of Open source Office tools in the mainstream; national bodies of countries vote for these ISO standards.
  

Why should you care about this? If you have anything to do with writing applications for document management, content management, office business applications, interoperability, this is a format you need to understand. More work for us to do.

Problem is, OOXML is still buggy. From Rob's article

Among the defects are some rather serious ones such as:

• storage of plain text passwords in database connection strings
• Undefined mappings between CSS and DrawingML
• Errors in XML Schema definitions
• Dependencies of proprietary Microsoft Internet Explorer features
• Spreadsheet functions that break with non-Latin characters
• Dependencies on Microsoft OLE method calls
• Numerous undefined terms and features

The April fool's joke on this has to be from Linux fans.

How far would you go for help ?

 

 

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Junk folder

Just realized why my junk filter was being ineffective!

With four potential options, the mind somehow imagines two options for blocking, and two for marking safe. (Is it just that or is there a muscle memory  where an older version of Outlook had a "add Sender's domain to blocked list?)

 

Simple grouping would make this UX more usable. Just a seperator line between the first and the second option.

Better still, the option label starting with the actual action. For example "Block Sender...", "Block sender's domain", "Allow Sender..." etc. In the current form, you need to read to the third or fourth word to know the difference...

Mix ups

Continuing on from my previous post about the non apparent UX improvements in Vista...

 

Noticed a little hyperlink called Mixer at the bottom of the volume control (..access it with a single click on the volume icon in systray)

Gives you access to this fabulous dialog box.

It shows you all open applications that are capable of making a sound. It allows you to use the left most control (Speaker/head) phone to decide the over all volume. And then allows you to control the relative volume of the rest of the applications)

Watching a cricket match on an illegal site :) without commentary yet want to hear a speaker on live meeting without the new mail to ring a bell while allowing MSN messenger to ping you?

Beautifully done...

 

BTW. Post number 100. Many many thanks to everyone who has participated with bricks and bouquets, blogs and comments.

Thanks

Hilarious Windows (Vista) Error

via Gizmodo



So let me lay it out for you: Windows Problem Reporting has encountered a problem. Because of this problem, Windows needs to shutdown the service. Ok so far.

But it will also notify you if a solution is available. How can you do that when you are shutting down your notification service?

Reminds me of those movies where a dying man reveals only half the secret he's being killed for.

Left is not right, back is not wrong

Continuing on from my previous post about the non apparent UX improvements in Vista, here is one simple, curious little left pointing arrow...



All those years ago, a few days before I was to leave for US, I was teaching my mom how to send emails. I sat many a hour being as patient as she has been with me through all my idiosyncrasies. What I remember the most is her being a deer-in-headlight every time she came to a new screen. She was so afraid to do anything lest it disappeared and she did not know how to bring it back again.

Now it comes together to me.

Discovering is not enough without knowing predictably how to get there again. ("Your highness," said Vasco Da Gama, " Went to India I did, though I know not how to again").

This insanely simple button on the dialog box is a revolution. It sews together the structure of a wizard with the well understood browser back button allowing you the permutation-ally logical option to go one screen back without breaking the workflow!

Wow.

I for detail...

Beating down Microsoft products is fashionable. And products like Waste-ah makes it so much more simpler (and justifiable) to do so.

In the next few week, I am going to blog about usability improvements in Vista. While the overall operating system still has a lot of work on the implementation, I think the product and program managers have done a stellar job.

For example: Do you remember this age old dialog box?

You could hit F2 in the file explorer to in place edit the name of a file. The entire filename along with its file extension would be highlighted, and when you started typing, the file extension, more often than not, was lost. That was not the only problem though. If you selected No in the dialog box, file explorer would revert back to the old filename instead of allowing you to start where you left and rectify.

Very nicely taken care of in Vista. Hitting F2 automatically highlights only the name of the file, preventing an inadvertent change of extension.

Photo Printing Wizard

I wanted to take a printout of one picture from a folder containing six pictures. So I right clicked on a picture, selected print from the menu and photo printing wizard launched. All the pictures of the folder were shown and that particular picture was checked as selected (as shown in the figure). It’s a good idea to show all the pictures of the folder in the photo printing wizard as a user has the option from the wizard to print other pictures of the folder. But I think the only thing missing was the filename below the thumbnail view of each picture. This would be great help so that a user could easily locate the exact file.The next time I tried to print multiple pictures; I saw the print wizard window with the selected pictures rather than all the pictures of that folder.
Hmmm…now that’s what I call “Inconsistency”!!

XAML: The language for the Program Manager

or, The Three Little Pigs: Then and Now.

Chapter 1: Then

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away lived 3 little pigs in a wood. One pig was a graphics designer, the other was a program manager (business analyst, if you like) and the third was a developer. They all lived in harmony until new features came along. When that happened, it was usually the program manager (PGM) pig who started all the fuss.

The PGM pig took his primitive toy, or worse still - paper - and squiggled some lines and boxes and wrote up some lines, aligned them all and gave it to the graphics designer (UI) pig.

The UI pig dressed it up nice and fine - added the right colors, hue, gradient, font. He created a lovely looking picture out of it and sent it to the developer. And he would throw the squiggly paper thingy away.

The third (DEV) pig looked at the picture and set to work. His job was to bring the picture to life, and get it to do something. Working on a blank canvas, he painstakingly tried to recreate the picture - each color and image and box and words. Days turned into nights, and then, finally the pig was done.

When the PGM pig saw it, he was huffing and puffing (and blowing the house down!) The buttons should be a little lower! There's too much whitespace on the right! I want all this in the same window! And other things that left the DEV pig scratching his chinny-chin chin.

Some more printouts.
Some more squiggles.
Some more hue, alignment.
Lots of throwing away. Paper, Beautiful old pictures. LoC*.
Some more vigorous hacking.
More scratching the hair on their chinny chin chins.

Vicious Cycle.

The next day, they were confronted by the Big Bad Wolf (the Project Manager) asking them to present their work on time or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house away!

More huffing and puffing.
More days turning into nights.
More throwing away.
More wishing this was all over.

Little did they know that their lives were about to change.

Chapter 2: Now

One day, the King of Far, Far Away decided "enough is enough. Lets put an end to the pigs' misery!" And so he did.

He created a new way for the designer and developer pigs to talk to each other. Now, these two pigs each use their own toys (for the developer, for the designer) and each toy could talk to the other. No more pretty pictures thrown away. No more starting off from a blank canvas. You could change things completely before you said "Oink!".

And the two little pigs lived happily ever after.

"No, no! Wait for me!" cried the little PGM pig.

Huh?! And the two little pigs lived happily ever after.

"But you don't know this language. All you know is English. Very good English, but its - just English!" Said the DEV pig. Take a look:

<Button>Control.Background PE
<Control.Background>
 <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0,0" EndPoint="1,1">
   <GradientStop Color="Yellow" Offset="0.0" />
   <GradientStop Color="LimeGreen" Offset="1.0" />
 LinearGradientBrush>
 Control.Background>
Button>   

"C'mon, its almost English**!" said the PGM pig. "We could all finish up before the Big Bad Wolf came, and go home."

"I hate it when you are right - it usually means more work for me!" conceded the UI pig. "You really needn't know all of it, you know. Just the essentials."

"Sure, anything that means less work" said the PGM pig.

So the PGM learnt to use the new language -XAML - just the essentials. Soon he could make his own tweaks,** and use the designer's tool for all his squiggles.

And so, the three little pigs lived happily ever after.

The End.


*Lines of Code.
** Must read link.

p.s.:
XAML is a MS specific technology, used when the UI is written using WPF or Silverlight.
Wanted from MS now: A tool that functional analysts can use to capture business requirements and draw up screens.

Round up of “Expression around the clock”

The Expression around the clock event happened yesterday in Bangalore at Fuga, a cool venue for an even cooler event. This was a global designer conference(taking place simultaneously in 10 venues around the globe) aptly themed “Design is back!”

The event started with out with registration, Microsoft had a very strict registration and confirmation process for this event and inspite of that the place was packed with people. There were about 200 people and seating was available only for about 70 people.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Shelly Armstrong of the Microsoft Design team. Shelly has been involved in various projects in Microsoft, including the interaction design for the XBox and the Zune. Her talk was totally targeted towards designers and tips on improving UX, design, importance of keeping up with latest trends, networking etc.

After this there was a break, with the bar being opened up [:)]. There was more action ahead though. The next session was by Supreet Singh, an UX designer and Pandurang, a dev. They started out with a desinger dev duel and demostrated how Expression Studio supported the designer-dev collaboration with ease. This was pretty interesting, with Surpreet putting in a video on to his canvas and then Pandurang writing a bit of code for the play and pause functionality.

The dev, (as they put it, didn’t have much idea about UX) and hence he puts up text messages for play and pause. Surpreet then takes this XAML and immediately ports this message into a cool button.

The next part was demos - impressive stuff overall, though I had seen most of them before. The demo which impressed me the most, was the one of a Silverlight video player being able to play 10 high definition videos simultaneously with ease, and the ability for the user to seamless switch between them with no system overload.

Post this was the usual networking session (with more beers though!). Met a couple of interesting people and managed to market our UX blog. People seemed to be very interested by this, especially because we are not a design only firm.(Thanks Ram ! for mentioning our blog in your post.)

At the end, Microsoft gave away a goodie bag to each participant. It had a 60-day trial of the Expression Studio, a design magazine and a Reebok t-shirt!.

Excel tech writer, where art thou?

Spot the file name!!

When I installed Microsoft Office on my machine, it set Microsoft Picture Manager as my default viewer to open images. I wanted to take a look at the picture’s filename and after a whole lot of looking around, I figured out it was at the bottom left corner. The application title bar just shows “Microsoft Office Picture Manager” and not the filename as if it is the name of every file which was being opened. :)

Inconsistent Outlook Message Dialogs

I wonder if you have noticed this in Outlook. If you try to send a mail without a recipient, it shows this dialog,

whereas, if you do the same thing with a meeting request, this dialog shows up.
I'd expect the same message dialog to show up, not only because it is consistent, but also efficient. No extra program management, developer and QA effort.

I see this more as problem with the Org structure in the Engineering team rather than oversight by the Program Manager. There probably had different Project Managers :)

p.s. click on the image for a clearer view.

Holy macaroni!

Always wanted to use that term, thanks Microsoft and Outlook team for giving me the opportunity :)

These "sixes" are not thrilling...

On the day, Punjad da puttar hit six sixes in six balls, here are six screens you have to bear before finally connecting to a wireless.

Irritating, no?

Butt-ons

Compare the IE6 navigation button group

with the ones in IE7

Ha Ha Ha.

Did you get it?

No?

Ahem

The IE6 developer said, a user will want to navigate back and forth and may want to select a url in either direction. That makes four scenarios. Hence two buttons each with a drop down menu.

The IE7 program manager says, wait a minute. There are only three scenarios. The user can go back, forward, or pick a website from the history to navigate to. Ergo, Two buttons and one drop down.

Follow the mental model, not mathematical

Eureka

Digg this!

Remember those Attachments?

coffee.fetchNow();
post.History(initial, followUp);

User Scenario (for the Problem Statement)

Dave Burton has just finished working the sales forecast for the quarter. His boss, Lee Hunt, asked for the document by the end of the day. Dave switches to his Outlook window, and creates a new email. He types:

Lee,

I’ve attached the sales forecast you requested for. Please review and comment.

Dave.

Dave clicks the “Send” button, and goes out for his well deserved coffee break. When he’s back, he sees the following reply from Lee.

Dave:

I didn’t receive any document in your email. Please check and revert asap.

Lee.

“Whoa!” thinks Dave. He forgot to attach the document. This time, doubly careful, attaches the document in reply to Lee’s mail. His email body reads:

Lee,

I guess I forgot to attach the document the last time. Please find it attached here.

Dave.

The Solution

User Scenario

Dave Burton has just finished working the sales forecast for the quarter. His boss, Lee Hunt, asked for the document by the end of the day. Dave switches to his Outlook window, and creates a new email. He types:

Lee,

I’ve attached the sales forecast you requested for. Please review and comment.

Dave.

Dave clicks the “Send” button, thinking about going for a well deserved coffee break, when he sees a message pop-up.

Dave clicks on “Yes”, thinking “phew, thank you for reminding me!”

Feature Specification

Outlook should be able to automatically detect the user’s intention to send an attachment with an email by unobtrusively looking in the email body for words, which we shall call “attachment-indicating” words or phrases.

Following is the set of attachment indication words & phrases [Note: this list will be revised after the usability tests.]

• Attachment
• Attach
• Here you go

Normal Flow

The user is in the Compose Mode. The Compose mode includes New Message, Editing a Draft Message, Reply, Reply All & Forward email options.

The attachment auto-detect feature is turned on. This could be implemented as a separate thread, process or program. The spec will use “thread” as a metaphor to describe its functionality.

The thread checks whether there is an attachment to the mail already. If there is, it stops.

If there is no attachment, then the thread periodically scans the new content in the email body for any attachment indicating words or phrases. As soon as it finds one, it sets off a flag.

If the any of the email content is deleted, the thread runs its checks again, and updates the flag accordingly (if any word/phrase still exists, then keep the flag on, else turn it off).

When the user clicks on the Send button, check for the status of the flag before sending email. If the flag is on, then prompt the user with the following message.

If the user clicks

• Yes: Close the message dialog, and focus the cursor on the “Attached” field of the email. Display the “Attached” field if it wasn’t displayed earlier.
• No: Close the message dialog, and send the email.
• Cancel: Close the message box, and place the cursor in its last position in the email body.

Alternate Flows

The user decides to save the email to send later

Behavior: The flag status is stored as well, and the checks resume when the user opens up the message in the drafts folder.

The user cancels the message

Behavior: The flag status for that message is also deleted.

The user has multiple windows open in the Compose Mode

Behavior: Each message has its own flag, and each flag status is maintained even if the user switches windows.

Also Applies to:

New Appointment, New Meeting Request

p.s.: This is the first post I've written with some commercial interest. At last I'm making money by blogging.

The other "traveling salesman" problem

This dialog box - in it's current state - works just fine if you use it for that once a year vacation... For users on the move, people who are OO 3-4 times a month, ability to "schedule" OO is a must.

Here is a recommendation. (Thanks, Sid, for the screen design)

It takes one thing off the checklist before one shuts the laptop before heading out of office.

Ux without a UI

I had posed a problem in one of my older thought units welcoming suggestions to help users remember to attach a file in a mail (when intended).

Good user expereinces make things happen - the way you wanted them to - without you having to. By being a natural extension of the thought process. Compensating for dicipline or memory or structure.

Better user experiences are not noticed. Just enjoyed at a subconsious level. Like a walk on a quite beach at sunrise.

Hence the suggestions around "aditional check box", creating a new message of type attachment, do not cut it.

Sowmya's idea stands out. It works the way auto-spell check in MS Word does. (Parsing between keystrokes. Dictionary looks up by multi-threading. Correcting without interrupting.)

User expereince without a user interface.

She gets a nod and tip of my hat. She knows what she needs to do to earn the $10 Barnes and Nobles card.

Right Sowmya? :)

Implicit rating

Unwittingly, we as a user are rating media content everytime we

- increase volume of the iPod as a favourite song comes along

- consistently skip a song

- leave a clip half way on youtube (to go watch another one)

- navigate away from a page under 5 seconds especially off a search result

Is it being captured and used ?

Should it not be?