World changing products…

Often when watching a movie, particularly Sc-Fi you’ll see a piece of technology and dream of a day when it will become real. It’s normally something so different, so mind blowing and to put it bluntly, so damn cool that if you’re watching on DVD you have to hit the rewind button even though it ruins the flow of the movie.

This happened to me when I first watched Minority Report. The way Tom Cruise can manipulate data on the ‘data window’, a flick of the hand, a drag of the finger just blew me away.

Not for one second did I think that less than 5 years later I’d see that vision become a reality – yet – that’s what has happened today with the announcment of Microsoft Surface, a WPF and Vista based interactive… well, interactive surface!

Users can actually grab digitial content that is displayed on the surface,  moving and interacting with it using touch and gesture – I won’t waste any more words simply go along to the web site and take a look.

This really is the age of the Rich Interactive Application (RIA).

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Where do I get started with UX?

That’s the question that Will and Chris asked over at DesignThinkingDigest and to help out they’ve put together a great list of books that can be used for reference or instruction, check out the post here… Where do I get started with UX

Microsoft User Experience Summit

The next week I’ll be at the first Microsoft Experience Summit, an internal event aimed to bring together the new User Experience Evangelists, and various product teams working in this new area for Microsoft.

I’ll post my thoughts on the event next week – but with very limited connectivity this will be my only post this week.

User Experience, designer focus… at Microsoft?

You may have heard on the grapevine that Microsoft is getting serious about user experience of both traditional products and web applications as well as the designer market space in general. Just let that slowly sink in for a minute…

“Hang on a minute is this the same Microsoft that has always been about developers, developers, developers”, admit it, you we’re thinking something along those lines, well it is the same (quickly evolving) Microsoft.

So just how serious is serious?

Well in terms of enabling people to build great experiences three products have been announced to date under the Expression banner: Expression Web, Expression Interactive Designer and Expression Graphic Designer.

They can be downloaded as technical previews from here:

 http://www.microsoft.com/expression

Ok. So Microsoft is launching some products. That’s nice… but products are just products – sure they can be good or bad but releasing three products doesn’t necessarily show any intent that Microsoft wants to, or is going to be a serious playing in this market.

I’ll look at the products in detail over the coming weeks. Back to topic – that whole User Experience thing – that doesn’t really sound very Microsoft.

Well things change quickly nowadays… if you’ve been following the Vista and Office road to launch you may have noticed that a lot of the buzz around them is centred around the user experience. Vista is in fact a huge leap forward from the Fisher Price vision that was Windows XP, and to be honest, probably for the first time I personally have enjoyed using any version of Windows, which is relevation for me as a lifelong Mac user. I don’t think I could say that I ever ‘enjoyed’ using XP.  

Office 12. I can’t remember the last time a major company took it’s market leading product and totally changed the UI from the previous 10 versions, I mean literally rip it up and through it away. Office 12 is a totally different beast from all previous versions. The first few hours/days/weeks (depending on how much you use the product) may be a frustrating experience as you struggle to come to terms with the new way of working. But go through that change and once it starts to fall into place you start to realise how much more productive you are with the new version. It’s great feeling productive and even better not having to search for features buried in menus 4 clicks deep. So two major products both centred around experience.

The User Experience Evangelist role (UXE) is a brand new role in all the major geographies which is essentially looking to drive a couple of agendas.

The first area the UXE role involves is reaching out to the designer community with the new Expression products. The scope is broad and takes in everything from Web 2.0 applications (Still not sure about the term Web 2.0 – marketing strikes again), their usability, and just as importantly making the right technology choices, all the way through to a brand new prospect – designers being able to build richer Windows applications using Interactive Designer and utilising Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on both XP and Vista. I can’t wait until we can show some of applications that are cooking for the Vista launch 🙂

The second area, which of course is tightly coupled with the first is the user experience itself. How can an improved user experience positively impact businesses online. Is it just about richness of content or simply how people interact with that content. What different elements have to be present or considered to be able to build an improved user experience.

This is all totally new ground for Microsoft which for so long has been focused on the technology stack and helping developers leverage that stack.

I think what’s interesting is the range of people that are being employed into the roles. My background is tradional design, I trained as a graphic designer, before working at Macromedia for over six years, 4 years working with the traditional Macromedia web products, and the last 2 years concentrating around Flash on mobile. Other UXEs around the globe range from people who have been running their own companies with backgrounds in interactive design through to thought leaders that have been running user experience teams within Blue Chip corporates. The diversity of people is wide and is leading to great internal discussions!

In many ways it reminds me of the buzz we had internally at Macromedia back in the day 🙂

It’s very early days, but this is looks like it’s going to be one exciting ride.

Welcome aboard.