Weekend support - friends and family

I spent an interesting weekend giving support to my friends with Windows. It is not for the love of it you understand, but one of the boat anchors I carry around having worked for Microsoft years ago is that some people think that I am an authority on Windows. It caused me to come to an Occams Razor conclusion in two parts.

Firstly, Windows continues to be *way* too complex for people at home. It does not meet the use cases and capabilities of the end users concerned. For exmple many people refuse to acceptany need to know anything whatsoever about their systems and therefore blunder along until the inevitable data loss disaster. At the very least they run often run systems that are woefully poorly installed by the originak equipment manufacturers (OEMS) and poorly updated, optimised, and protected.

Secondly, the world has changed. Windows 7 computers from OEM’s at the ‘Tesco’ level now have 4GB of memory and 64 bit Windows preloaded. In a stroke this move to 64bit Windows 7 obsoletes the Vista and XP 32bit world. Soon everyone will put their old laptops out to landfill and go all sparkly x64. Why? It is always the same reason - device drivers. As we move forward it is a short matter of time before x64 only starts to be the norm.

What does this all mean?

Well I suppose we should buy Microsoft stock. The last lot of woefully bad home laptops and desktops which shipped with 32 bit Vista but weren’t really up to the job are fast approaching oblivion. The early adopters of XP in the home are running creaky crapola that is for the scrapheap. The nuclear option is easiest for home users. Buy a new one rather than figure out what could be optimised.

A case study of many Windows computers and complex options

My friend has four PC’s at home. A work based desktop running XP Pro. He is under pressure to get his personal iTunes and stuff off it. So the family also have three laptops. The three laptops are all different. One is an XP model bought for the student doing his GCSE’s the Christmas Vista came out. It struggles with graphics, and a smallish slow 30GB disk. The second is a Toshiba running Windows Vista, but it was not really designed for Windows Vista. The Vista capable program was rather re-engineered to make it compatible at the sticker level. It has 2GB of RAM but it really is slow in everything it tries to achieve. So slow as to be almost unusable in my opinion.

My friend announced that they he had learned the secrets of Windows and defragmented the disk - as if this was the magic cure all of all known issues with Windows Vista.

The trouble with this laptop is as follows:

• It has a 5400 rpm drive which is a slug
• It has insufficient FSB and IO for Vista
• It has insufficient memory for Windows Vista and all the loaded apps
• It has insufficient graphics capability for speed in Vista.
• It runs Windows Vista pre SP1 which is slow, annoying, and difficult to use.

The third laptop my friend announced proudly was dual core - so it he assumed it had two drives. I explained it was a Core2 Duo with two processor cores on one piece of Silicon. It is a good computer though - it is a newish Toshiba model with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB drive. It has snappy if not great performance and is pre-loaded with Windows 7 64bit. They had bought it to take over from the Vista one - which was only 14 months old.

Do you see a pattern here. More computers arrive, but the old ones do not go, they hang around. Now they have 4 computers each with different operating systems (The desktop runs Windows XP Pro, Laptops run Windows XP Home, Vista and 7)

And herein lies the problem.

My friend runs a business on ebay using the Vista computer. The computer has a 180GB drive which has 90GB free on a second partition, and 90GB used on the boot partition. I explained that Windows was pre-installed poorly or because of some hardware necessity onto two partitions and talked over the options.

Note. First we backed up the computer. It had two years data on it, and had never been backed up. We did this using the Windows Vista backup tool. I dont like backups that do not back up *everything* including apps, system state and structure, but it was the only tool we had avaliable.

Here were the options as I saw them.

1. Go into Control Panel, Switch to Classic View, Choose Administrative Tools, Choose Computer Management, Access the Disk Management tool, Delete the second partition, extend the first partition to the whole disk. My friend should not need to understand all this - and does not. Anyway we tried this and it failed. Windows Vista was not playing ball. I recreated the second partition.
2. Back up the partitions on the hard disk to an external disk using a tool like Acronis True Image 2010, then rebuild the computer with a hard disk partition that spanned the whole disk. Perhaps not surpisingly my friend did not understand why this was so complicated, and did not know why it was potentially so invasive and risky.
3. Move iTunes data to the empty drive. Far from ideal, this freed up just 20GB of space on the boot drive which means the problem goes away until another day when the ebay data and photogtraphs fill up the disk again. We settled for this.

My solution, if it were me, would be to use the replacement laptop - blow the disk data onto an external disk, and restore it to the new Windows 7 laptop and toss the Vista one away. Failing that reinstall it from scratch with Windows 7 (or perhaps even Windows XP SP3) across one volume that spanned the whole disk.

My friends cant see the point of this, and instead opt to keep the laptops as they are on XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Then they asked me to help them sort out why only some of their computers could print properly to their HP network printer. I explained that they needed potentially quite different drivers for each computer. But they are all Windows they cried. Yes, but XP Home, Pro, Vista 32bit and Windows 7 64bit no doubt have large differences.

My solution if it were me, would be to have only one operating system. I know through years of experience that this is a better place to be. I would not like to think of the number of hours wasted messing about with this stuff or all the aspects of their computing environment that could be so much better were they to take a little more time to think about their home network and computing environment.

This is why I have a Mac based home network at home. We all run the same OS, because I have a family pack which means it is easy for us all to stay on the same release. We all use the same Mac OS X Server, where we all back up using Time Machine and I keep periodic clones of our operating systems and all our data is mirrored for safety. If a mac needs replacing to it can be used in target disk mode which means that copying, fixing, updating and cloning it to a new Mac is easy.

But of course Macs are more expensive, as my brother in law told me yesterday afternoon when he popped by, explaining that he has bought a Toshiba with 64bit Windows 7 installed on it. He was wondering whether any of his applications would work on it - particularly Office XP or whether he should ‘downgrade’ to 32 bit windows which was also in the box. My answer which more or less equated to “who cares - if you didn’t know this why did you buy it” but which I sort of grumpily modified to “leave it on x64 as it has the longest shelf life” - did not go down all that well, but then he hadn’t had my experience on Saturday with my friends mishmash of computing.

Given that my friend has bought a new laptop every 12-14 months for the last four years while we have kept the same my Apple Macbook and Macbook Pro for home it seems to me that my friend and my brother in law better watch their total cost of ownership.

Mac OS X is not perfect, but it is certainly easier to manage, especially in a default family setting with a Time Capsule backup / wireless router. I never ever have to think about whether anything works or deal with the complex partition issues. Of course Mac OS X has complexity especially on the Server variant and it can get to a whole stratospheric level of UNIX difficultness and geekery.

Send the old junk to the landfill.

Out of the box, Mac OS X is better suited to family life than Windows because it is designed at heart to be easier for end users without a computing background to keep on the latest release because it is simpler to clone copy and update. All of which may change now Windows 7 x64 has arrived. But not until all the old laptops and desktops go to the landfill. And they won't - that is the problem.

The past

Think back to Windows ‘At Work’ and Windows CE. Perhaps they are finally dead. Microsoft learns. Sometimes it takes a very long time but it learns. And it acts. The company never talks negatively about existing products, but never let that lull you into the false sense of security that underestimates the power to compete that they have.

We have seen this before with a litany of products. And now it is the turn of Windows Mobile which preposterously grew into two different operating systems one for one handed use and the other for PDA class devices. Guess what - this was the worlds biggest kludge. But it continues. 'Windows Phone 7 Series' leaves room for 'Windows PDA 7 Series' and 'Windows Tablet 7 Series' rotten nomenclature for sure. But at least we now have something new - Windows Phone 7 Series. Mobile wouldn’t be complete without the word ‘series’ in it now would it Nokia?

The future

Windows Mobile has been rethought into a new mobile experience that brings your people, photos, music, and video together. Microsoft make a virtue of the idea that bringing together web content, applications and services into a single view is a good idea, without any sense of irony or indication that this might have been a good idea ten years ago.

Windows Phone 7 Series Start Screen

The home screen, or Start, on Windows Phone 7 Series can be customised with “live tiles” that show the latest updates from the Web. They promise real time updates of the stuff that is important to you right on this Start Screen. And in a not towards the importance of phones at the centre of social media, allow you to post your status once and update all. The post form looked a bit clunky too. But the Live friend updates from social media sites like Facebook and Windows Live looked interesting. No mention of micro blogging sites like Twitter.

There is a slick intro demo on the web here: -

In a nod to the past the features promise your most recent contacts at your fingertips. (Information at your fingertips was once Microsoft’s strapline). It certainly looked iPhone quick to find the people you are looking for, and et integration of people at the centre of the system in what Microsoft call the ‘People Hub’ is welcome. This means calls, messages and status updates are all equals - actions you do to people of groups. People at the centre means recent, all, and what’s new are about people. This people centred focus, if it permeates the entire device, is a step ahead of the iPhone in ease of use.

The photo gallery and album is nice enough. All in one place. Everything in its place and easy to instantly share with your favourite people and social networks. (Notice the technology blur - no mention of MMS or any such nasty term).

In music terms Windows Phone amalgamates radio, web and personal (Zune) music. I guess that means that Zune will finally come to Europe after languishing only in North America for years.

WiFi sync is back - after working then not working in previous releases of Windows Mobile.

Xbox LIVE goes mobile too. Why play with yourself when you can play with your friends? Remains to be seen how far this integration goes.

Search is Bing obviously. One button to get information, maps and directions from the web.

A phone designed to keep your life in motion say Microsoft - so many visual cues from others here and this I guess a reference to Research In Motion makers of the Blackberry.

Watch the more detailed but still slick demo here:-

Demo points

1. Start Screen, Live, active, vibrant
2. Music, Zune, Video, Podcast, Radio
3. Visual history mixed radio station and music and video
4. New items, again visual
5. Visual recent list
6. All list with compact view
7. What’s new view
8. Visual cue when you select a person from the list, opens the profile, and allows interaction by calling, texting
9. What’s new again, tiled UI with disclosure of text message
10. Quick float through Xbox LIVE status, but no details

I spend a lot of time talking about user experience in software applications with my clients and their customers. It is becoming more and more the case that an engaging user experience that really is a critical success factor for any software publisher. Today, software applications have to work on multiple platforms with the same sense of purpose and achieving the same kinds of tasks, or at least the variation of the task that is appropriate for the device being used. It is just is not as simple anymore as writing a Windows Forms application and delivering it to a desktop. The world Todays most effective applications are built for cross platform deployment, be it by the web as simple web applications, or using a framework to allow their deployment on a variety of platforms. Examples of such frameworks are Adobe Air, and to a lesser extent Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and to a narrower extent WPF, and then there is always Java. Some platforms like Mac OS X have unique idiosyncrasies like WebKit to deal with, and indeed different rules for different classes of devices. Yet other platforms have proprietary and unique requirements which may have to be dealt with. One thing that consistently comes up in these discussions is prototyping. People like to see and touch the application you have in mind for them. Getting early feedback can only help with end-user adoption of the software because you are able to iron out and address any wrinkles in the software workflow that you might have reasonably thought were fine but on real use turn out to be inappropriate. Consequently, it is a great idea to test your proposed user experience and workflows even before a line of code is written. Catch-22? No, not really. There are a number of tools that you might choose to help. In this article I am going to compare two of them - Microsoft Expression 3 and EaSynth ForeUI 2.

System Requirements

These are very different requirements. They imply a very different design point. Not surprisingly you get very different results.

Expression Blend 3 has a tough learning curve. You have to watch the tutorials to make any sense of it. The tool is very technical and has powerful options, but it is overwhelming at first. Once you get into it however, you can build nice wireframe applications using a theme like design called a Sketchflow. The advantage of Sketchflow according to Microsoft is that they can avoid the production look of the application without the feeling that it is too late to change it - resulting in better workflows and better applications. The guiding principle is that you should be showing user experiences early and getting feedback before bolting in the application logic. An advantage of Expression Blend is that you can save and open your projects right in Visual Studio to add the application logic. In theory it is possible to round trip from Expression to Visual Studio and back so that user experience designers can change look and feel without breaking code. In practise I found this hard to achieve without a lot of time spend making sure I had exactly the right components of Microsoft’s Application Lifecycle Management toolset installed and working in perfect harmony. This is not as easy as it should be.

ForeUI is easy to start with, but actually it too has a learning curve and I found myself watching tutorials for it before I could get productive. It is less complex initially. Lets compare Expression’s top ten features according to Microsoft with Fore UI.

Comparing Expression Blend 3 with ForeUI 2

Yes, these tools are different. Expression Blend is designed to be used in a development environment in a corporation with designers and developers working on projects. Fore UI is designed to be used by designers building simulations and writing documentation of requirements for developers. Fore UI however, is easy to use, and get great results with. It is certainly worth checking it out especially if you, like me, outsource your development and need to give your development team good mock up screens and working models which can serve as the design for your software.

Sketchflow versus Fore UI theme switching.

Expression Blend Sketchflow

Sketchflow is undoubtedly powerful. An application drawn using Sketchflow can be directly loaded into Visual Studio and have code added. Ostensibly this saves time and ensures the designers wishes are implemented in code.

Reviewing applications with end users using Sketchflow provides the opportunity for feedback unconstrained by the feeling that the application user interface is etched in stone.

To be honest I found it to be over complex. I dont really honestly care enough about the round tripping to make it worthwhile. Instead I found this to be overhead that got in the way of me producing great results.

Each time I wanted to do something complex in Expression Blend my skill with the software was not sufficient to make it happen. It took me a long long time to build a prototype.

Fore UI themes

Fore UI themes are easy to use. You simply choose a theme from the status bar and the objects you have used are redrawn using that theme. This simplicity hides a lot of power. I like being able to see what my app would look like on Windows 7, XP, Mac OS X and hand drawn for my documentation. These three screen shots were taken of the same application with just a theme change. I liked this a lot!

It took me seconds to build a screen mockup of what I wanted from the built in library of objects. I then set about adding functionality to show the application workflow and found that it was very easy from the properties editor to access and adjust everything. For me, this was much easier than the Visual Studio like properties editor in Expression Blend - I was just more productive because I was comprehending more.

Interactive Prototyping

Both Expression and ForeUI help you build interactive prototypes. Expression is harder to use here because you have to get into it as far as understanding the relationships between pages and the commands for navigation via the outline. ForeUI is easier here - the master page model is easy to understand, and the hierarchy of pages is more straightforward. Expression is more powerful but I think for me it misses the point. I need a lower learning curve and quick productivity - Fore UI gives that to me.

Export

ForeUI export to DHTML is its best kept secret. You can then load the resulting code into your favourite tool and edit it. All the workflows became JavaSCRIPT and the exported DHTML can be run in your browser. This is pretty neat. So far I have not used ForeUI right through to building a product but this is the obvious next step and the product is evolving quickly so I hope the export part gets better and better in future releases.

Expression, because it produces projects that are compatible with Visual Studio, has great capabilities for the use of the code in real projects. For Visual Studio users is may be a better choice.

Conclusion

For me, a product manager who needs to quickly mock up screens for documentation, and to test out ideas for software products Fore UI is the almost perfect entry level tool. I like that it runs most everywhere - even in your browser as a Java applet. It means I can share my concepts with Mac and PC and Linux users alike and nobody is out of the loop. It also means I can show a Mac audience a Mac UI and a Windows Audience a Windows UI - these things sometimes matter and it is nice to avoid the issue. I will continue to use Fore UI and let you know how it goes.

Spinvox is an example of a killer app

"Hi I thought I'd test out Spinvox for you and see if it could decipher fxxx, sxxx, wxxx, kxxx you cxxxxxxxxx son of a bxxxx .."

For me delivering spoken messages to your email was the killer app.

Emotionally scarred by voicemail at Microsoft Limited

"Hi this is <your name> from Microsoft and this <time of day> I am <what you are doing> and I will be checking my voicemail at <time you are checking it> and will get back to you no later than <time you will call>"

Not only that, but you had to change your voicemail greeting twice a day because then your manager and your callers will know you are working. And finally you had to have voicemail notifications switched on so that your phone got them immediately after you turned it on.

"Im having a number of meetings this morning and afternoon and will be checking my voicemail periodically during the working day"

He wasn't pleased. My manager and I didnt really get on but thats another story.

Anyway, what I particularly hated about it was that as I got into my car my car kit would immediately, before I even left the drive to go to work, call me with a zillion messages, usually from people I didnt like, usually making my life a misery by getting me to do things I didn't want to do or reminding me of things I hadn't done. The final straw was the voicemail distribution list where team agendas for the week would be spoken by the management for what seemed like hours early on Monday morning. I was convinced they taped it on Friday and delayed its delivery to 6am Monday to make everyone more productive. The only way to deal with the actions was to sit and transcribe the voicemail into text.

I lost count of the number of times, that as an email die hard product manager and collaboration specialist, I would say,

"Cant you just email this to me"

One queue of work - my email inbox

Im a big user of twitter these days (@nuxnix), but email is my work queue, and having a separate work queue thats voicemail just means I dont get the voice based things done.

So thats why when I saw the printed swear word text of my friends voicemail on Spinvox I thought - this is a killer app. They dont come along often but it is.

How does Spinvox work? I asked, although at the time I didnt really care about how it worked, only that it did

Fine, I said to him – getting most of them is good enough. I bet him it was a giant call centre with people sitting round polycom speakerphones transcribing everything and getting prizes for whoever gets the most difficult words. He said no that new technology was the key to scaling the solution and that they had world leading figures, mentioning names of some of whom I knew from my previous jobs including at Openwave System.

I couldnt disagree but I didnt review anything about the technology.

Months later - Spinvox transformed my workflow and responsiveness

Guess what. Im still using it.

Spinvox was a revelation for me. All my voicemails now in my email. And quickly too. With few errors, mostly names or technical jargon. It was well marketed, professionally set up, and just workd. I emailed them back in to tell them:-

"Thanks very much for the SpinVox account. I love it as it puts all my work items in the same place - my email inbox! That means I can deal with them in my own time. Im an emailer at heart and hate voicemail. My colleagues who love voicemail diatribes are grumbling but I dont care! - Im sure its thousands of people in a call centre with headphones typing :-)"

Can you see from the tone of this exact quote direct from my email in June 2008 that I thought and presumed humans were involved but I realy didnt care about the details, just that the service worked. I stil dont care. And the service still works.

I know they must escalate difficult words through some kind of workflow, and I assumed that their software just picked out the difficult phrase and sent that to a review process ultimately ending up with a person. I also knew that it must be computerised in many areas because otherwise it would simply fail to scale. In reality I could care less how thats done. I assume if somethings secret you dont put it in a voicemail anyway, just like you dont send secret things in unencrypted emails.

I prefer security by being the needle in the haystack. Who on earth is interested in my messages about what time Im going to be off the train anyway? Of course I'll show up in a search potentially made by the government, but they routinely do that today on all the Internet traffic in the UK, or at least thats what I assume. Presumably they are looking for more importnt things. Perhaps like the characters of 60's eavesdropping movies we should all say 'bomb' or 'explosion' in every voice mail just to make the GCHQ's own speech to voice technology service grind to a halt.

I really never thought anything of the privacy or data concerns. I just like the service and that it works.

Its analagous to the captcha system thats reading unreadable text by analysing readable and unreadable responses in the same captcha and brute forcing the meaning of the unreadable. Nobody there gets more than one word of unreadable text, and they also get a known word which helps give a weighting to offset the accuracy of the unknown word against the persons score. I dont know if Spinvox use this kind of approach, but it would be what I would do if I were its product manager.

Disclosure: I have a free account courtesy of Spinvox as they think Im a mover and shaker in mobile - clearly they havent seen me dance