Microsoft and User Experience
by davidI attended Microsoft’s Expression Session yesterday, the launch event for their new Expression suite of products. I came away hopeful and frustrated in equal parts. Microsoft has jumped with both feet onto the User Experience bandwagon. It’s just not clear that they understand what User Experience means.
The first red flag was this quote: “Design is form + function + flair” followed up with the Mont Blanc Diamond pen as an example. Just picture a Mont Blanc pen literally encrusted with diamonds. Admittedly I’m not the target audience for such a thing but it does highlight the fact that ‘design’ is not equal to ‘good design’, nor is it something that is lathered onto a product.
More telling was this snippet. After stating “the experience is the product” (I heard that exact phrase several times), they stated “platform+tools+craft = UX” As with the design quote, they conflated user experience with good user experience. Craft was defined as “that thing that designers do”, which wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t combined with “designers work in Photoshop and produce tiffs”. There was no sense of design strategy, or even design on a deeper level than visual design. There is also something that seems disconnected about discussing user experience and user centered design by discussing tools and platform rather than talking about the user and their interactions with your product.
And finally, there was a graphic at the end that showed a spectrum from web applications to desktops applications, with the former labeled ‘basic user experience’ and the latter labeled ‘best user experience’. Microsoft still thinks more bells and whistles means richer experience and richer experience means better experience. Good user experiences can be affected by visual design or richer interfaces but its foundation needs to be the appropriate interface to what the user is trying to accomplish.
That being said, there were positive notes:
Expression web actually seems like a pretty nice front end developer tool, head and shoulders above previous efforts and it appears to generate clean, standards compliant code.
They understand that developers and designers need to work more closely together. They are starting to understand the importance of ‘knowing the user’ though it still seems they often confuse after the fact usability tests with user centered design.
Even if they don’t understand it, they are definitely on the User Experience bandwagon and with their tremendous audience of developers I’m happy to have another voice pushing things in the right direction. I spoke to the Director of Product Management for the Expression suite and he not only gets but is articulate about UX, the importance of the user, user centered design, the spectrum of design tasks and their role during product development.
It’s clear from the Xbox 360 and from how well Media Center does with the 10ft experience, that Microsoft can do good work. It’s clear that there are pockets of excellence and a growing number of people within Microsoft who get User Experience. Yet, as a company, it’s also clear that there are some fundamental flaws in Microsoft’s understanding of design and it’s role in building good user experiences. I remain hopeful that those pockets of excellence will continue to grow in reach and influence inside Microsoft.
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January 19th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Nice post, David. I blogged my bad experience artifact here. To slightly clarify, I didn’t have a bad experience, but the experience of the artifact was not a good one.
Microsoft is obviously trying, but all cylinders are not firing, or firing in the right sequence.
I also think their event was targeting different types of folks. I was trying not to claw my eyes out while they went through lines of HTML code (and something called XAML? Zamil? ZAML?) on big screens in front of 300 people. Not exactly exciting.
The thing I noticed that struck closest to your observations was their idea of good, better, and best user experiences. The example of the best user experience was a “what-if” site for Burton with flying logos, a big picture, a running movie, and ads tied to the film’s content. There was no experience design, there was technology that enabled richer media experiences to be designed. Tail, meet dog.
But hey, Chris Bernard did cite Dan Saffer on seams in one his presentations, so there ya go!
January 21st, 2007 at 12:39 am
I enjoyed your post very much…but weren’t you cold…no one is mentioning the artic temperature in the hall. Are things so bad at Microsoft that cutbacks start with heat?
Presenters used good humor to overcome glitches and the suite seems to have been well received. Being a neophyte, I have to say the experience was daunting and Expressions reminds me a bit of dreamweaver. Will I miss Front Page? Or will I be using it in five years?
January 26th, 2007 at 4:12 am
I realise this probably isn’t intended to be a hugely analytical post, but you say Microsoft “… understand that developers and designers need to work more closely together. ” I would say that it’s more than just an “understanding.” Any analysis of Expression without taking into account XAML is doomed to miss the point. Put simply, XAML may allow UI designers to export their designs for use by developers using Visual Studio, who can then put meat on those designs and then export their XAML back to the UI designer for further UI work. It would be hard to overstate the effect that will have on the UI design process. If anyone thinks Expression is the M$ Dreamweaver, or WPF is their answer to Flash, then they have utterly missed the point. The fact that MS can’t communicate this in any effective way is irrelevant.
January 28th, 2007 at 5:13 am
Microsoft and user experience
David Verba, director of technology at Adaptive Path, reflects - with some frustration - on how Microsoft interprets user experience.
According to Verba, “Microsoft still thinks more bells and whistles means richer experience and richer experi…
January 30th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Definitely and interesting post. I’ve been reading what I now consider to be the Design Bible recently (see URL below).
What is clear from a rigorous approach to design management is that the end user is constitutive of the entire product construction process. Perhaps the product manager understood that point well, but it is interesting why the presentation seemed to equate feature-itis with good UX.
Has Microsoft really changed its tune? To be determined. But I don’t see them as on the forefront of design sociology.
http://www.amazon.com/Design-Management-Using-Corporate-Innovation/dp/1581152833/sr=8-2/qid=1170173788/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/105-5055868-0784409?ie=UTF8&s=books