Month: May 2006

Is the Shared File Server Dead – Steve Responds

Grandad tries the fireman's pole

Steve has written a few responses to my post on the Shared File Server being dead:

There are some good comments there.

In response – my article was written about Shared File Servers specifically and much of what Steve has written relates to the File System as a much broader concept.

The one element I would challenge though is that ‘everyone knows how to navigate a file system’ recent experience has shown me how limited that statement is. People know how to post something to the place where their application has been configured to place it but actually thinking about it in terms of a structure to be navigated I’m becoming less convinced. I have recently seen directories with hundreds (and thousands) of files in a flat structure which would have been far more productive if they had been slit into directories. No-one was thinking about the file system as a structure, they were thinking it more like a set of buckets to put things into, and the buckets were defined by the applications.

Fundamentally, though, I agree with Steve in his conclusion that the alternatives have got a long, long way to go.

User Experience Thinking: Flickr Upgrade

Adventures in Teenbed-Ageroom: Jimmy scales the mighty obolisk called Guitar

Flickr has been upgraded.

Did they add in loads of new features to make me happy – not really.

Did they sit back and think about how people use the service and make me smile with the way they have thought about the user experience – oh yes .

FlickBlog has the details.

Loads of thing which I used to have to do through two pages I can now do through a drop down. It’s still two clicks of the mouse, but it’s only one page load. Much, much nicer .

“Your Photos” is now dramatically cleaner and shows more of what the service is really about – photos .

They have put the number of photos and the number of views near the top of the screen which is just catering to our megalomaniac tendencies – but I’m sure I’m not the only one that spends a lot of time looking at these numbers .

Moving the product away from being a ‘beta’ product also makes me feel happy. It was only a title, but it made me feel uncomfortable especially when I’m paying for it. Who buys a beta product?

Count Your Blessings #66 – Shades of Grey

Rocks

Grey – what picture does that word paint in your mind. Is the picture characterised by dull, drab or even dreary.

I thought I’d have a look on the Dulux Paints web site to see how they describe grey. I looked through their vast range of colours but couldn’t find anything called ‘grey’. The grey colours are called wonderful things like ‘Ebony Mists’, ‘Ice Storm’, ‘Clouded Slate’ and ‘Quartz Flint’.

Grey isn’t just a colour though it’s used to describe and symbolise all sorts of things. If you are grey haired then you are old. If you look grey you look ill.

So why is grey a blessing?

There are two types of grey that I regard as a blessing. The first is the grey you find in black & white photographs. The thing with black & white photographs is that they aren’t black & white, they are shades of grey. There is something about a picture that is made up of shades of grey that brings a depth and vitality that you just don’t get with pictures in full colour.

The other grey I find a blessing is the grey that exists in the answers to so many questions that we ask. These questions don’t have an answer that is yes or no, right or wrong, black or white. The answers to these questions are grey, they are more complicated than black or white. We have a choice with these questions. We can either regard the grey as something of a problem, or we can regard the grey a something to treasure, something to contemplate and something to chew over. Chewing over the question doesn’t change the question, but it does change us, it often leads into other questions. Treasuring these questions can help us to understand how other people see the same question.

Martyn Joseph wrote a song about this:

Treasure the Questions

Locked in my heart there’s a child
Knocking the door to get out
Asking the questions that hurt and
Sometimes there’s a question of doubt
I can’t pretend that it’s easy
I can’t pretend that I win
When your search in this life is over
That’s when the struggle begins

And if I don’t find out the search is not in vain
And if I don’t find out I
Treasure the questions as they rage in my mind
I treasure the questions some day I will find
I ran out of answers such a long time ago
And I treasure the questions wherever I go

Searching Sahara’s of sorrow
Trying to understand why
But the journey has brought me so much closer
I don’t have to stand here and lie
Over and over I cried in the darkness
Over and over to see
The crime is to sit and not wonder
Renewing my mind set me free

And if I don’t find out the search is not in vain
And if I don’t find out I
Treasure the questions as they rage in my mind
I treasure the questions some day I will find
I ran out of answers such a long time ago
And I treasure the questions wherever I go

The 10% Myth

Time to cut the grass Grandad

The is a myth that surrounds the technology arena. The latest time that I read it was in a Boston Globe article on Notes upgrades.

According to The Boston Globe:

Bisconti said admitted that the Lotus office software won’t have all the advanced features of Microsoft Office, but most people rarely use these tools, he added. ”Most customers tell us that 90 percent of my users use 10 percent of the functions,” Bisconti said.

I’d love to be able to say that I have managed to do the research and find out where this myth came from but I can’t. I used to know, but it’s one of those examples where search has a long way to go. If my memory serves me correctly it was some research done by the Microsoft User Interface team and started them down the road of hiding functions that people weren’t using so they could get to the ones they were using quicker.

My experience on the functions that people use is this. Users use a variable amount of the capabilities of large applications like Microsoft Word and most of them only use a small amount of the capabilities that are available to them. But the capabilities they use are different to the capabilities used by the person sat in the cubicle next to them. The way that they do something is different to the way I do it. Adding together all of the capabilities results in a set of capabilities that are all used by someone.

My other experience is that the 10% of users – the power users not in the 90% – use significantly more of the capabilities. It is these individuals who make the other 90% productive and keep encouraging them to increase their productivity.

The Microsoft Office 12/2007 team chose to change the user interface for all of the Office applications because a huge majority of the capabilities they were asked for in Office 12 already existed in Office 2003. It was just that people didn’t know where to find them.

User Experience Thinking: Office Capabilities in Notes

Think the slide might be a bit big

Ed Brill points to a document in The Boston Globe which is reporting on the inclusion of Office capabilities and ODF into Notes.

How is this improving the experience of the user of the system?

Well I’m not sure exactly, and that’s my problem with the premise that it’s a good idea. If this is going to be a good idea it has to make the experience of the end-user better.

I don’t see anyone ditching Office altogether in favour of an ODF alternative at this point. The problem is the inter-connects between individuals and organisations. Microsoft Office is the standard, because Microsoft Office is the standard.

If anyone creates a Word document they can be confident that whoever they send it to will be able to read it, very few people only communicate within an organisation (where a change of standard is relatively simple). As soon as the communication leaves an organisation you need to go for the highest level of confidence which is Word, Excel, PowerPoint. The next level of confidence is achieved by using Acrobat, but that has certain restrictions that sometimes are a benefit and sometimes not (the ability to edit).

The highest level of confidence equates to the best user experience. using ODF may be free, but it probably gives the person receiving the communication a problem giving them a poor user experience.

Organisations could choose to dual-skill their staff in using two different editors but that’s not a great user experience either.

In the top 200,000

Feel like giving myself a little pat on the back today.

Today this little blog has moved up into the top 200,000 category on Technorati . Only just in, but that’s fine by me I’m not really doing it for the glory anyway.

User Experience Thinking: Outlook Web Access

DJ Schwend has written a piece over on the Exchange Team Blog about the changes in Outlook Web Access. They are nearly all User Experience improvements:

The user interface has been redesigned with a focus on productivity. We’ve reduced the number of clicks required to get tasks done. When possible, we’ve incorporated actions and responses in place; we call this “inline task completion” instead of opening multiple dialogs or property sheets. We’ve removed pop-up notifications to avoid those irritating pop-up blockers. We’ve enhanced drag and drop functionality, improved and expanded the right-click context menus, and integrated better error strings contextually so they don’t get in your way.

It’s those kind of changes that make people happy.

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User Experience Thinking: The File System and SharePoint

Where's Jimmy? Where's Grandad?

Mary Jo Foley is reporting on the ongoing SharePoint conference, and in summary highlights the user experience issues with moving to such a technology:

In spite of the wealth of features offered by SharePoint, not all customers are sold. Some said they are still confused over the SharePoint branding. Others said they don’t feel the integration between Windows and SharePoint is sufficient.

“SharePoint needs to have seamless integration (with Windows) and the ability to copy, move and map drives like a file share without the need for a Web front end,” said one user with a major Microsoft customer, who requested anonymity. “That would be ideal.”

But the biggest “brake” on SharePoint could end up being cultural, according to Directions on Microsoft’s Helm.

SharePoint “requires changing the way people work. We all know how to share files with Windows, while SharePoint and document management systems in general are still terra incognita. The experience of document management vendors like EMC/Documentum and FileNet suggests that you can’t make those kinds of changes overnight.”

Changing the way people work is a very difficult thing to do – enough said .

(For those not used to the term “terra incognita” it means “unknown territory”. It was new to me to )

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User Experience Thinking: Lotus Hannover

That view again

Ed Brill reports about how IBM have been doing their Hannover development:

The very last section of the keynote featured Mike Rhodin and Ron discussing and demonstrating Notes “Hannover”.  Announced last June at the DNUG/IBM event, Mike went into detail as to what has transpired since then.  Mike talked about “outside-in design” by focusing on the user experience first, and then making the architecture of the software match the design.  He also emphasised the open nature of the Notes “Hannover” platform.  Then came the big announcement — The Notes “Hannover” release will include spreadsheet/presentation/word processing productivity tools supporting the newly ratified Open Document Format .  “We are going to provide an open alternative”. 

For me the big news was that they are focusing on the ‘user experience first’.

Tags: IBM Lotus,,,

SkypeOut Goes Free (in the US Anyway)

Skype calls Out to traditional land-lines has become free – at least until the end of the year.

It had to happen sooner or later.

Office 2007 Partner Technical Readiness Training Presentations

Wondering what this Office 2007 thing is all about and you can’t be bothered to read then you need to download the Office 2007 Partner Technical Readiness Training Presentations.

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The World of Me

Watch out for those Nettles Jimmy

Matt Deacon (Microsoft Architect) has an interesting diagram that has come out of the meetings at WAX. It represents the user significant drivers and represents them as ‘The World of Me’. Unfortunately the web version of the post is a bit of a mess so you have to scroll down to find it.

Make sure you also read this article so that it all makes sense.