Welcome to my first blog posting not related to the setup and configuration of WordPress. While I really want to concentrate on getting WordPress up and running the way I like it, I don’t want to avoid those events that are part of the purpose of setting up a blog.
Side note: There will be some forthcoming ground rules about what I will/will not blog about. Most anything that happens at work that isn’t publicly in the news won’t be posted; however, since there’s no confidential information here, I believe it falls in the exception category.
With that out of the way, I got an interesting e-mail at work on Friday. I asked a co-worker who was not in my immediate team if we could set some time aside to discuss some results from a past usability study. Her reply was brief, consisting of 3 sentences. The third sentence was:
Go ahead and send me an s+.
An s+? Well, looking in the “New” pane of Outlook, I see I can send a Mail, an Appointment, a Meeting Request, a Task, etc. Nothing beginning with s. Searching in Outlook Help for s+ doesn’t give me anything useful. While my first inclination is to use Google, I figure I’ll give my employer the benefit of the doubt and use Live Search with the query “s+ outlook”. After looking at the first three pages of results, I decide to go back to my trusted search engine. Not surprisingly, the results give me the link to something useful on the first page (which, coincidentally, is another blog talking about the use of s+).
The thing that gets me is that s+, which is shorthand for Schedule+, is a product that ceased development in 1997. Um, hello, 10 years ago? And people are still propagating the use of this abbreviation? Seriously, how much harder is it to write “send me a meeting request” instead of “send me an s+”? Meeting request: clear and understandable. And I just wrote it twice in this paragraph. As an added benefit, you don’t have to reach your pinky finger over to the = key while holding down the shift key. Less effort for your pinky finger, and less cognitive effort for my brain. Win win situation.
So, what did we learn? Or, in corporate lingo, what are our “key takeaways”?
- If there’s any possibility that people in your intended audience aren’t familiar with your abbreviation, it will inevitably cause more effort on the part of those users to figure out what those abbreviations mean.
- Stop using abbreviations based on products which have gone the way of the dodo. You don’t see me referring to multitasking by saying “Shh, I’m DESQviewing.”
- Live Search has a long way to go if it can’t even figure out a query that has a key piece of MicroSpeak.
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I know, Live Search is totally retarded =]
This blog is going to be very interesting to watch. I agree that live search is lame, and it has a long way to go. a very long way.
It seems that Microsoft’s pattern is to release products that they know aren’t that good, but that they claim will get better over time. Live Search and the Zune are prime examples of this. While this method isn’t entirely bad, I don’t see the point in releasing products that aren’t the very best you can possibly do, especially when you’re chasing an 800lb gorilla (either Google Search or Apple’s iPod).
Rather, why not come out with the best motherf—-ng product you can, and when people start using it, then you make changes from that point forward. Why play catch-up in the marketplace while giving people the opportunity to form opinions about the product (most likely casting the product in disfavor versus the market leader), when you can play the same game on the sidelines, then enter the game when you really have something special.
Other than Microsofties, how many people do you think are going to come back to Live Search after they use it once or twice and it’s not as good as Google?
Microsift always gets a lot of press when they enter a market because they’re a huge company with (nearly) endless resources, so people always assume (at first) that it spells doom for the other players, because they believe nobody can compete. Remember however, that although Windows has a 90+ market share, it’s not because Windows was the most innovative, easy to use product out there. The longevity of Windows can be attributed to cost-of-change and sheer saturation, which is similar to what happened to our friend BetaMax.
Increasingly what’s important in the software industry is not resources or market share, but innovation and ease of use. Theses are traits that I think (dare I say it) are somewhat lacking in Microsoft’s current (and past) practices. With the execption of the XBox, it’s difficult to point to a real home-run product…
Wow that was way more than I expected to write. And I probably offended everyone reading this. Oops.
It’s tricky that Josh points to X-Box as being the only successful Microsoft product, when in fact the Entertainment & Devices division has yet to turn a profit. Is it successful because you enjoy playing games on the X-Box? Are there potentially other products that might be enjoyable to their users? Not every developer uses Visual Studio, but I’ve met a fair few developers who will swear that VS is the only way to program.
But that’s a bit of a rathole… acronyms, yes! Since Microsoft is the corporate behemoth that it is, my concern is that the acronyms it instantiates then become standard for the industry. This is rampant in the Developer Division. More code names and buzzwords than I can shake a stick at. On the one hand, it saves the people time who are saying the acronym 5 times a day… but to this day I still think JSON refers to the author of this blog (not JavaScript Object Notation), SOAP is something you use in the shower, and GUI is what I use to describe Jell-O.
Ok, that last one was silly. Any usability professional worth his stripes knows GUI. But you know what I mean.