Island Web Works

As Charles alluded to in his last post, MIGTurbo 2.0 is coming on apace, with no lack of focus on maintaining its high levels of usability. We’ve been thrashing a number of ideas around in various forms to try and come up with a system for Securing data with the flexibility required by regulatory and legislative requirements but without losing usability and comprehension. We hope to post more on how this is going in the next few days, including some of the first screenshots from our new product.

The “other” big product announcement you may have heard about is the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) of Windows 7 by Microsoft. Windows 7 is what many see as what Vista should have been and has been widely accepted and praised as being an outstanding improvement not only on Windows XP, but also Windows Vista. Microsoft really seem to have pulled it out of the bag this time, with one user claiming to have installed it on a 266MHz Pentium II with 96Mb of RAM. If you’re already using Windows 7 in its Release Candidate or if you’re lucky enough to have a copy of the RTM, try these Keyboard Shortcuts which really open up usability when working with windows on your desktop. Some of them will also work in Vista. Try them out, you’ll be surprised what you didn’t know. Our favourite? Windows+Shift+Left/Right to move windows between monitors.

Staying with Microsoft, there’s been a widely publicised outpouring of grief resentment over the continued use of their old Internet Explorer 6 browser. Twitter and various other sources have mounted a number of campaigns to try and encourage users to ditch the IE6 browser in favour of more modern versions such as IE 7 or 8. IE 6 has been the bane of web developer’s lives, with its quirky rendering mechanism and requirements for bad practices in order to force web pages to work as the designer intended. We’d all like to see it pass on, but reality will see that there are many reasons why the browser will hang around for a few more years yet, not least of which is Microsoft’s commitment to support the operating system it shipped with till 2014. Persuading users who are visiting YouTube, Orkut or other sites which are now actively eschewing the IE6 browser is one thing, but persuading corporate IT departments to move away from IE6 is quite another. Coupled with the requirements of IE7 being Windows XP or later, existing Windows 2000 users don’t even have the choice. As such, IE6 continues to represent a sizeable chunk of browser traffic.

In the office, the debate continues about the benefits or otherwise of Office 2007’s new ribbon interface, an interface that has been extended to the rest of the Office suite of products in the 2010 Technical Preview. The detractors have a very valid point in that it significantly reduces usability for users who just want to “get the job done” as they have been trained. My own discussions on Twitter this week highlighted the other side of the argument, which is that maintaining legacy user-interfaces is detrimental to innovation.

Twitter conversation with @alexdegroot

It would be nice to achieve a happy medium, much like the Lotus 1-2-3 emulation mode previously in Excel to try and entice old-school Lotus 1-2-3 users over to the product. I guess when it comes to migrating users who have already “bought in” to your product it becomes a less viable feature proposition. Two of the guys on the Office development team at Microsoft have built a site dedicated to soliciting user feedback, cunningly titled “Make Office Better“. As most users in businesses spend most of their time in Microsoft Office, it’s perhaps an opportunity to drive the future of the product from the “grass-roots”. (It’s also got a great logo.)

Nathan Friday Feeling Internet Explorer 6, MIGTurbo 2.0, Office 2007, Office 2010, Windows 7

Whilst I should not be surprised, I am! Who drives ‘innovation’ in today’s software products! To me, the latest version of Microsoft Office is unrecogniseable compared to 2003, everything I want from the menu system has moved or worse, simply does not exist any more. How does a company become so arrogant or out of touch with its users! Functions that I have used everyday for years no longer exist.  My latest realisation is that I cannot save documents to my C:\ drive, apparently it is a security threat. I can copy the file to my desktop and then to my c:\ drive but not to my c:\ drive directly. It’s a bit like saying you cannot buy cigarettes because you are too young, however we will sell you tobacco and cigarette paper separately.

I must be getting old, I used to revel in technology, eagerly awaiting each new release and often feeling let down because the raft of new functions were superficial and of no real significance. Now I feel let down because each function is wrapped in so much ‘cotton wool’ by the time I have managed to get to the function, I have forgotten what I wanted to do in the first place.

Charles Uncategorized Office 2007, Office 2010

While we’re already busy testing our Outlook toolbar for MIGTurbo CRM out on the new Windows 7 operating system, the bods at Microsoft are also busy … building pretentious marketing videos for Office 2010.

Have a look at their work so far at http://www.office2010themovie.com/.

While I’m sure you’re just as concerned as me about the “No Return, No Undo” captions, one question remains: Will they backtrack on their ribbon user-interface? They now have two sections of their users that prefer the “classic” menus and toolbars and those that prefer the new ribbon interface (which includes me).

Nathan Response Graphical User Interface (GUI), MIGTurbo Outlook Toolbar, Office 2007, Office 2010, Windows 7

Microsoft have released their latest service pack for Microsoft Office, which includes Microsoft Outlook. The service pack comes with a number of improvements and fixes, including some interesting improvements to Outlook itself including improving start-up and shutdown speeds.

We’ve put our own MIGTurbo CRM Outlook Add-on toolbar through its paces under the new Office 2007 Service Pack 2 and are pleased to say it passes with flying colours!

If you run MIGTurbo from a managed corporate network, your systems administration team will no doubt update your software for you in due course.

For more information about Office 2007 Service Pack 2, visit Microsoft’s Support site:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953195

If you don’t have your installation of Microsoft Office downloading updates using Windows update, you can download the service pack using the link below:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968170

Nathan MIGTurbo MIGTurbo Outlook Toolbar, Office 2007, Outlook

Charles recently blogged about the challenges around making improvements to established products and designs. MIGTurbo is a successful CRM package and is evangelised and valued by its users. One of the reasons behind this, we believe, is the supremely simple and quick user interface. We are currently internally testing the next version, MIGTurbo 1.9, and this has a number of exciting new features which will further enhance the user experience - or ‘UX‘ to its friends.

So when moving towards the next major milestone in the MIGTurbo roadmap, MIGTurbo 2.0, it presents a challenge to us. While we are looking forward to being able to provide more features and better performance with a contemporary design, we must balance that with what we know has made the product such a success up until now … and that is the simplicity of the user-experience.

One thing I have really appreciated since joining Island Web Works is the opportunity for frank discussions about everything from the fundamentals of the Microsoft SQL Server Paging mechanism to the finer details of Natural Selection. These discussions have allowed me to come into the business as a new member of the team and also as a new and fresh user of the MIGTurbo application while still being able to contribute my opinions and outlandish statements without fear of tarnishing any egos. So when looking at what form the user experience of the 2.0 release should take, a full and frank discussion could be had. 

We quickly identified and agreed that we did not want to repeat Microsoft’s mistake with the Office 2007 user interface. Previous users of Office 2003 were able to use their years of experience using the world’s most popular office suite to create and manage their documents, spreadsheets and presentations with relative ease. Ever since Word 6.0, the user interface has been more or less consistent even as new features were added. Then, in 2007, Microsoft redesigned the entire user interface of the Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint products to use ‘Ribbons’. Sure, the Ribbons are beautiful, and I happen to prefer them, but most users just want to get the job done and when functions not only move but appear to disappear altogether, user unrest is sure to follow. So despite extensive usability testing and user experience workflow modelling when coming up with the Ribbon Experience, users are still rejecting the user interface due to requirements of loss of productivity and requirement of re-training staff. While we need to maintain a consistent experience with previous versions, one of the key components of the MIGTurbo 2.0 roadmap is extensibility, so we equally didn’t want to restrict any opportunities in the future. We need to be able to provide extra functionality, in new places, but not disturb the central usage workflow.

Our challenge is how to maintain a consistent user experience for those users who have used the product for years, while providing visible opportunities to help them get more out of their usage of the product - but at the user’s own pace. We are working on an experience which will mirror our existing UI design and associated benefits, but will also hint at opportunities to help users focus on the job in hand. One key example I use is a month-end procedure. We want to be able to facilitate everyday use whilst accommodating specialised use, so provide the regular “everyday view” but give enough cues to help the user realise that they can extend their view on the system to perform specialised procedures even easier than before. This did not happen with Office 2007.

After the discussions we have had both today and previously, I believe we have come up with a sensible compromise. We will be maintaining the experience as much as possible for users who are already used to the system by ensuring functions and data are where they always were. There won’t be any disappearing or moved functions, but there will be additional opportunities to get more from the user experience. We will achieve this by mirroring established design patterns that have proved to work. By adopting patterns such as the Task Bar, Breadcrumbs and Menu patterns along with Web 2.0 practices, we can benefit from existing user experience. When a new user uses the new MIGTurbo for the first time, they will already know how to use the menus, how to navigate between screens and why the application feels the way it does because they will have already used the techniques in other applications. When an existing user uses MIGTurbo 2.0, they’ll have a strong degree of familiarity based on their previous experience.

It’s too early to show screenshots as the UI framework that will hold the functionality, data and plug-ins together is still very much in flux. However, we are looking forward to involving users in the latter stages of the development of the user experience to further build on our impressions and experience using MIGTurbo and seeing other users use it, both the user and the seasoned expert. This will provide us with a valuable opportunity to see user reactions at first hand and give users a valuable opportunity to further influence the design of a product many users spend all of their office day with.

Nathan MIGTurbo MIGTurbo 1.9, MIGTurbo 2.0, Office 2007, User Experience (UX)