Today I attended a three hour session at Microsoft on “Architecting for the User Experience“. It was geared towards architects and senior developers, so I thought I would check it out.
The first half of the session was a generic “What is UX” spiel. The take-home? “UX is a bloodbath and you need to fight for it, but it’s worth fighting for”.
There was a slide about how generally people felt UX = UI, and that the GUI was like icing on the cake; it could make it look good, but it couldn’t change any underlying problems. Having just attended a birthday party with three year olds last week, I wasn’t so sure this was a great analogy - put on enough icing and kids won’t even get to the cake!
A few links were tossed around:
“Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable.
The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all.”
– Douglas Martin (designer)
- Functionality: “works great”
- Aesthetic: “looks great”
- Interaction: “relates to you” (example was espresso machine that makes two cups)
- Process: emotional experience. Every moment you spend with something you dislike, you could be spending time better
I was bothered by the fact that the next slide said “business principals”. I will admit I was so caught up in the grammatical error that the point the speaker was making was lost on me… Hey, attention to detail….
The speaker (Josh Holmes) used some great examples of products that had great and poor user experiences. I had never seen the innovative pill bottles used at target, but I’ll admit they are of great design. He shared with us many interesting tidbits - did you know Harley davidson forecasts their next year’s sales based on the number of Harley Davidson tattoos being {what do you do with tattoos? create them? make them? commissioned, perhaps…} in a given year. Naturally I started thinking about brand and marketing, but I know that wasn’t on the formal agenda for the day…
Three questions to ask (and answer!):
- What is desirable to users
- What is viable
- What is possible
- Silverlight 1.0: this summer
- Silverlight 1.1: (with or after orcas – dependent on CLR, late fall, early spring)
- All apps run in the sandbox
- Conceptually similar to HTML DOM sandbox
- Apps run like HTML pages – click a URL
- No elevation of privileges request
- No way to get out of sandbox
- Includes some additional functionality
- Safe isolated storage
- Client based file upload controls
- Cross domain support in-work
- Expression web: xhtml, css, xml, xslt “arguably one of the best css editors available”
- Expression design: pro graphic designer tool (photoshop).
- Expression blend: Visual studio for designers. Integration of art, images, text, video, 3d content
- Expression media: supports over 100 file formats, version control, folder watching..
The second half of the session was the sales demo. Josh mentioned the continuum of experience, from the web (ubiquitous) through to platform-optimized, with an intermediary of “richness” between them. In MS terms, it was “asp.net/ajax” to “silverlight” to “wpf”. I had heard of silverlight, but didn’t know much about it.
I’m generally a bit skeptical of MS offerings, but I’ll admit, this stuff was slick. Earlier in the session we had talked about travel applications, and he brought up a silverlight demo of one. Now this thing is slick! An entirely different experience than that we’ve become used to when booking flights. Heck, it was fun. Is that the technology, or simply the vision? I’m not sure: flash/flex may be able to handle the same thing.
I would link to a working demo, but I just tried installing silverlight, to no avail.. so here’s a blog post with some screenshots. *sigh… no comment*
Josh pulled everything up on vista without any real explicit mention of it… and my initial impression was “wow, that looks like a mac!”
Some general notes: MS is looking at 3 - 9 month release cycles, rather than years and years between releases. They released the 1.0 beta the same day as the 1.1 alpha.
So what was the big sell? “So as .NET developers, what can this do for you?” (whoops, I’m not a .NET dev)
The resounding answer was “No HTML!” Evidently “HTML is the COBOL of the web”
Currently, designers design, and developers add business logic. XAML enables them to speak the same language.
We got to see the entire suite:
No special hosting requirements (*.dll, *.xaml, *.js, *.html), cross platform client side functionality you can host anywhere.
The speaker mentioned that he foresees a “technical director” role coming into the field in future years.
Overall, I was pretty impressed with what I saw. I’m not generally a huge MS fan, but I’d be interested to see where this all goes…
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