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Mar

31

Designing tools you’ll use

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

Personal upfront investment vs. usage in Hotmail

We spend a lot of time studying how people manage their email. We know that people use a variety of tools to find messages, file messages, and navigate through all their mail. But some tools are used more commonly than others.

Of course, every tool has a certain learning curve that each person needs to go through to understand how it works. Some tools are simple, and might even feel as though you’ve used them a thousand times before (like sorting), and some tools are pretty complex to understand and configure (like rules, or custom keyboard shortcuts).

We’ve found that tools that require more time and effort to learn upfront tend to get used by fewer people. A tool that only a few people adopt might still be super handy for some folks – not to mention creative, clever, and cool. It’s just that there’s a converse correlation over time between the personal upfront time investment required to use any particular inbox management mechanism and the prevalence of its usage.

Chart showing usage of different inbox management and navigation tools

We tend to geek out on technology here at the Mountain View, CA, facility where we build and manage Windows Live Hotmail. But as much as we like using ourselves as our own little focus group, we know that not everyone has the time or interest to invest in tinkering with complex features—no matter how handy or creative we think they are. Many people – maybe even most people – just want to get in and out of their email quickly and get done what they need to do.

That’s why minimizing the upfront personal investment for our customers is one of the central engineering principles guiding our current work on Hotmail. Our goal is to make any new tool as discoverable as possible, as intuitive as possible, and as efficient as possible. We don’t always nail it right out of the gate for every new feature, but we try – and we iterate based on the feedback we get from you until we’ve gotten the job done.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager
Windows Live Hotmail

Mar

30

Forrester: Windows 7 Early Adopters Were Satisfied Upgraders

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

Yesterday, Forrester’s JP Gownder published a blog post highlighting some data from two new reports on Windows 7 adoption and satisfaction. The reports show that by the end of 2009, a strong majority of US consumers were aware of Windows 7. Windows 7 hit the market at the end of October so it’s pretty great to see that within just 2 months after launch a large portion of US consumers knew about Windows 7. Forrester also found that consumers who adopted Windows 7 in Q4 were generally very satisfied with their Windows 7 PCs.

And finally, another interesting finding was around upgrades. People move to a new OS one of two ways: either by buying a new PC or upgrading an existing PC. In the past, most people simply purchased a new PC to get a new version of Windows. With Windows 7, the data in the reports show that upgrading existing PCs was a much stronger trend with Windows 7. In the end, the reports show that early adopters who upgraded to Windows 7 were quite satisfied. Exciting to see the progress!

Mar

30

Demo Apps from MIX10 on Windows Phone 7

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

Some of you may have seen the Windows Phone 7 Series demo apps that were shown during the MIX10 keynote. If you missed them, here are videos of the demos that were shown during the keynote.

XNA demo

Microsoft originally created “Goo Splat” for Zune HD with XNA Game Studio and ported it to Windows Phone 7 Series. “Goo Splat” is a casual game that challenges the player to keep the goo from falling to the bottom and prevent the screen from filling up.

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Seesmic

Loïc Le Meur from Seesmic shows the cross-platform capabilities of Silverlight. Seesmic is a BizSpark One startup.

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Major League Soccer

Major League Soccer’s application for Windows Phone 7 Series lets fans track their favorite teams in real time, with notifications of game events, game stats and the ability to watch highlight clips via Silverlight and Internet Information Services Smooth Streaming.

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Foursquare

Foursquare is a mobile application that lets you share your current location with your friends. Microsoft demonstrated an application that highlighted the location and mapping capabilities of Windows Phone 7 Series using the Foursquare APIs.

You can download the source code that was used to build this demo over on Codeplex: http://4square.codeplex.com

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Graphic.ly

Using the Deep Zoom capability in Silverlight, Graphic.ly offers an immersive comic book reading experience on Windows Phone 7 Series that incorporates social interaction, with access to the subtleties of artwork and inking. Graphic.ly is a Microsoft BizSpark One startup partner.

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Netflix

This Netflix app for Windows Phone 7 Series will include a list of new releases as well as a list of recommended stuff under the heading "Movies You’ll Love." After watching the video, it’ll also show up in the recently viewed menu of the Music and Videos hub on Windows Phone 7.

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Associated Press

Associated Press (AP) worked with Microsoft on a rich news reading experience to serve as a launching point for AP Mobile on Windows Phone 7 Series. A panoramic user experience incorporates news, social networks and photos as a way for people to select the newsmakers that interest them.

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Shazam

Shazam is an amazing music discovery engine that allows you to find, buy and share the song that is playing right now.

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To get the tools required to build apps like these, head over to http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7-series/

Have you been developing for Windows Phone 7 Series? Share what you have been working on at http://wp7dev.reddit.com

We’re looking forward to seeing all the exciting apps that you have been building!

@ai

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