Experience Matters

For an industry creating a storm with only a handful of players,
it is not difficult for any of the players to realize when they need to
re-strategize. This time around, trying its hands at something known to be Adobes,
Apples, and Googles forte, just to name a few, is Microsoft. The
weathermen of the IT industry, and especially those in the designing and
developing business, had predicted long back that user experience was going to
be difficult to ignore, and that it is the next big thing. With that, Microsofts
focus on user experience is no surprise.

Microsofts Windows Vista, Office 2007, Expression Suite, and
Silverlight are all high on the UX (user experience) quotient. Lined up are
products like Virtual Earth 3D, Photosynth, and Seadragon. Entirely rewritten on
the WPF, or Windows Presentation Foundation, the Expression Suite is a design
and media application directed to the developer and designer community. More
recently, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft at an event in November last year,
announced the availability of Silverlight 1.0a cross browser, cross-platform
plug-in, capable of delivering powerful media experiences through the Webin
India. The Indian Cricket League and HDFC are one the earliest in India to use
Silverlight.

Take Two

Once soured by unintuitive designs and bad user interface, users have
welcomed Microsofts complete makeover to overcome these shortcomings. Quite
conclusive is that Microsoft is shifting gears, and if critics are to be
believed, the second time around after it changed course to go the Internet way
in the mid-90s, it is paying attention to design and the designer community like
it never did before. Summarizing the whole UX phenomenon is the formula Platform+Tools+Craft=UX
and spreading the word are sixteen user experience evangelists across the world.
However, Microsoft is not rated as highly as Apple, Google or Oracle when it
comes to user experience, and that is where the challenge lies for this software
giant.

Apart from the fact that other software giants are already
taking user experience very seriously and have been able to translate that into
good business, the growing reach of the Internet and the changing consumption
patterns were difficult to avoid for Microsoft. Conducting a significant part of
the business online or the entire trading over the net has not only become a
smart business decision for multinationals but is an essential, ultimately
blurring the line between online and retail sales. However, this convergence of
sorts is not without business problems arising out of using Web portalspoor
design user interface, information architecture resultant inaccuracies, slow or
unresponsive HTML pages, and even un-navigable pages due to unfriendly design.
And, keeping this in mind, Microsoft has realized the importance of ensuring or
working toward good user-experience and is working closely with design groups,
mixing usability, engineering, and a rich interface design.

Adobe, through a range of its products, has been successful in
delivering good user experience. It believes that companies today understand
that great experiences build great businesses, which drives usability and
eventually success. "The best way to understand the value delivered by rich
Internet applications is to try to put in context the two main characteristics,
Rich and Reach. Rich is the ability to incorporate client side interactivity and
intuitive user interfaces. Reach is the ability to make your application
available to almost anyone, anywhere. After years of suffering with
non-intuitive experiences, organizations are realizing that combining the reach
of the Internet with a rich user interface is the best of both worlds,"
says Sandeep Mehrotra, Country Sales Manager, Adobe India.

Microsoft, in its attempt, has been aggressively targeting the
designer and developer community in not just media and entertainment, but
financial services as well. The theme for the Microsoft Financial Services
Developer Conference, 2007 for developers and architects in financial services
was user experience and security, where Microsoft reinstated its belief and
commitment to UX. "User experience isnt simply about credibility; it
also demonstrates how well you operate. If it takes too many clicks for users to
get their bank balance, thats inefficient and impacts the bottomline,"
says Asli Bilgin, .Net Developer Evangelist, Microsoft in an interview available
on Microsoft site.

Impact so Far

On ground, the reaction of developers and designers, who are either aware of
or have used Microsofts Expression Suite or Silverlight has been encouraging.
The reactions range from liking the product and willing to switch over to it to
still needs work, citing Microsofts apparent confusion on what they really
mean by user experience. Sonica Singh, a designer working with the US-based
interactive and consulting firm Sapients India office, thinks that people are
slowly getting excited about Microsofts UX. "Microsoft does not have a
history of tools and software that are very user friendly. Take SharePoint. The
software is not intuitive. Though Microsoft has realized that user experience is
the way to go, they still think that a rich application is the best user
experience, which is not necessarily true." But she also goes on to explain
that a designers job demands that he/she works coherently with the developer,
to an extent, Microsoft UX platform is rightly trying to bridge the gap.

Supreet Singh, User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft, says,
"Over the years, the hardware has gotten better and better. So as more
individuals have good hardware, we are putting in a deep level of user
experience design in our tools to develop, design, and consume."

However, certain characteristics of the designer community in
India such as slow adoption of technology and disconnect between the developers,
can sour user experience. Singh reassures that the products will bridge the gap
between the designer and developer community, and allow them to work
simultaneously. "Designers in India are technology phobic. They can
visualize but not produce at the same pace as their thoughts because they are
clouded by technology. If anything gives them the freedom to think and create
together, they are good with it. With Microsoft UX -based products, putting
ideas on paper to the screen will be the least possible effort for them,"
says Singh.

As designing and developing takes on a more complex role,
incorporating rich multimedia, graphics and animation, and the Internet becomes
the point of sale for businesses, user experience has a bright future. As it
matures, it will be more commonly understood and accepted by designers and
developer in India. For Microsoft, they were expected to care about usability
and a user experience strategy was a must if they wanted to be even considered
in the race for delivering a good user experience. Now, the challenge before
Microsoft is to make its product known among the targeted community. If it
claims to be following its formula, and delivering it at the said price (as low
as Rs 30,000), than it shouldnt be too long before we see Microsoft engulfing
a sizable market share in the designing and publishing space.

Shikha Das


shikhad@cybermedia.co.in