From Facebook’s Modular Innovation Initiative to the Evolution of an Interface

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Jeremy Horn

Every week I read thousands of blog posts. Here, for your weekend enjoyment, are some highlights from my recent reading, for you.

Have a great weekend!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

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The Product Guy’s Weekend Reading (August 21, 2009)

Posted on August 21, 2009 by Jeremy Horn

Every week I read thousands of blog posts. Here, for your weekend enjoyment, are some highlights from my recent reading, for you.

On Starting Up…

http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2009/08/doing-the-right-thing.html
Advice on VC <-> entrepreneur interactions.

On Design & Product Experience…

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/18/google-tweaks-adsense-fonts-for-better-performance
On Google tweaking fonts to improve performance and revenue.

On Modular Innovation…

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/08/17/the-future-of-facebook/
On the unimportance of destination at Facebook in a world of Modular Innovation.

Have a great weekend!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

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The Product Guy’s Weekend Reading (March 27, 2009)

Posted on March 27, 2009 by Jeremy Horn

Every week I read tens of thousands of blog posts. Here, for your weekend enjoyment, are some highlights from my recent reading, for you.

On Starting Up…

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/03/21/beyond-the-money-vcs-provide-startups-with-a-competitive-edge/
On the added value and competitive edge provided by VC’s.

On Design & Product Experience…

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=62368742130
Facebook’s learnings from consumer ~~outrage~~ feedback over the new site design.

On Modular Innovation…

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_implements_new_open_standard_for_friends_li.php
Portability, Interoperability, and how Google is furthering Modular Innovation through adoption of Portable Contacts.

Have a great weekend!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

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Facebook shows Focus

Posted on August 18, 2008 by Jeremy Horn

(Part 2 of 2) The new Facebook is coming. Facebook, the product that brought a whole new meaning to information and application overload, is about to release their new Facebook vision, one with focus.

After adjusting to (and it took a few days of frequent interaction) the re-worked and refined Facebook experience, 2 themes stood out above all others, namely…

Encouraging greater communications and sharing
Discouraging “excessive” application installation and usage

Last week we explored the Focus on Communication. This week we…

Focus on Applications

Right away you can see the first signs of de-emphasis of the applications on the Home page, by way of the movement of the application bookmarks from the left-most column to the right-most column.

On the Profile page, the typical primary residence of the Facebook apps, the applications have been moved to the periphery of the page. Some applications can be placed in the narrow left column (similar to the narrow column in today’s default implementation).

And, more installed applications are accessible via the introduction of the tabbed interface on the new Profile page.

A user’s applications can be installed, renamed and removed from the Tab bar directly from the tab interface. By clicking on the ‘plus,’ the applications that are available for inclusion within the Tab section are listed.

For those that don’t want to lose all of the clutter, wishing to maintain a “backroom” of disorder, and for those applications that can neither go in a Tab or Sidebar there is the Boxes tab (forth from the left).

All of the remaining applications are available via the bookmarks section of the contextual Applications drop-down. If you are within an application, the tab allows for the editing of all of the current application’s settings within an inline pop-up.

The rest of the time the following is accessible…

From here you can also access the application configuration section, where you can customize…

The Applications, themselves,
Bookmarks,
Privacy Settings,
News Feed and Wall Interaction,
Miscellaneous Access (e.g. publish, email, offline capabilities), and
3rd Party Interaction with Facebook.

The new Facebook experience has put a good deal of effort into aggregating the different Facebook application concepts and corralling them into distinct sections. As a result, the direct and visual aspects of Application interaction are streamlined, with chaos reduced. Where, in the old Facebook, users used 20, 30, or more installed Applications, these refinements are clearly intended to discourage such behaviors, and instead encourage the user to focus on an order of magnitude fewer applications, in the hopes of fostering better (smarter?) Application selections and achieving richer experiences with those selected Applications.

Those few lucky apps that get selected for inclusion within the Tab bar should also expect longer and more frequent interaction resulting from the newly enabled and present focus. The tabbed interface allows individuals to focus on each app, one at a time, isolated from the many other-app distractions. Furthermore, all of the other apps will not just fade, but remain in the background, out of view; muted will be the viral effects felt by those apps that don’t provide true value. Everyone should expect more apps to fade away, and the people of Facebook to congregate around a select few.

The new experience increases the difficulty involved in simply browsing one’s installed Applications. Today, all one’s installed Applications can be seen (e.g. current state, latest information) on the Profile page. Now, in the new Facebook, this is one or more degrees removed.

Also, as the chaos of primary interaction with the Applications has been reduced, the opposite can be said for the ability to configure the layout and settings of the apps. Where previously, all of the apps settings and the bookmarks could be configured from a single page, with layout being customizable directly from the Profile page, the pending new Facebook experience has broken all of these touchpoints into multiple and separate pages of configuration. In today’s Facebook, one can configure 90% of the applications, along with their look, feel, and accessibility, from a single web page; in the new Facebook, users have to search for and navigate through many, many more pages.

Focus on Facebook

The new experience, currently in beta testing, but soon to become the default Facebook experience, is cleaner and moves towards a more organized and social vision.

The purpose relating to the increased blurriness of layout and settings customization, becoming much more complex and difficult to manage, escapes me. However, it may, hopefully, be a mere side-effect of the other chaos reducing, refinements. If that is the case, I am certain many will welcome, when, in the near future, Facebook adjusts attention on and brings into focus this important area of user control and empowerment.

The changes, expectantly, have incited groups and petitions both in favor of, and against, the new Facebook. With these and many other changes everyone’s focus will be on Facebook, watching to see if these admirable goals prove successful or merely educational.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

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Facebook says Focus

Posted on August 13, 2008 by Jeremy Horn

(Part 1 of 2) The new Facebook is coming. Facebook, the product that brought a whole new meaning to information and application overload, is about to release their new Facebook vision, one with focus.

After adjusting to (and it took a few days of frequent interaction) the re-worked and refined Facebook experience, 2 themes stood out above all others, namely..

Encouraging greater communications and sharing
Discouraging “excessive” application installation and usage

In Part 1 let’s…

Focus on Communicating

The new user experience is evident from the very moment of logging-in. Perhaps the very first thing that all users will now notice, and are driven to notice, is the new action area on their homepage.

Whenever a user returns to Facebook, they are brought to the homepage and, immediately presented with quick actions for communicating and sharing. This is a concept that is altogether absent from today’s currently available experience.

Clicking on any of the options within this new action region jumps the user directly to their Profile page, with the prompt for the desired content automatically displayed. This is direct, quick & easy.

The Profile page, like the Home page, has also been revamped to encourage and facilitate communications and sharing of user generated content (UGC) – from status to links and photos, and more.

The user’s attention is focused on the main component of the page, the Wall; which has been improved with rapidly applicable filters (all posts, my posts, other people’s posts) and easy to use settings.

Facebook‘s next generation presents a revived and clear focus on communications. Much of this new functionality reverberates considerably with the capabilities inherent to newer services, most apparently, Twitter and Friendfeed. The new communications emphases will assuredly drive more people to the micro-exchanges of status and the like.

Interestingly, if this implementation had been Facebook‘s original implementation, maybe there would be no Twitter or Friendfeed. But this is not the case. This newer implementation, not yet the default for Facebook, did not come first. Twitter and Facebook (and other similar online products) fulfilled the need, filling the micro-communication and micro-sharing void that was present.

While the improvement in Facebook represents a very positive step forward, a very nice addition, Facebook is now following some well established alternatives. For these improved communications to maximize along the path of user experience, they will need to employ Modular Innovation. It will be a mistake if they choose to take the path of challenging the Twitters and Friendfeeds, instead of embracing them. Everyone will benefit from improved integration and 3rd-party data exchange capabilities. For example, allowing users and products 2-way integration and interaction, permitting the use of either Twitter (or Friendfeed) or Facebook to not just be able to import data, but also export and share data between the products, would provide a seamless online experience for the user, allowing the user to check for updates and post updates from either platform — benefiting both the fans and companies of Facebook and Twitter (and other products) while simultaneously strengthening the product-product and product-user relationships.

In Focus

More and more people, every day, are trying out the new Facebook, especially the new communications experience. Will the new product, the new Facebook, succeed in increasing user communication and interaction or will the result prove to be a blurry jumble of ideas?

Check back next week as we look further into the new Facebook, in the second part of this 2 part series about the new Facebook experience, and explore what these changes mean for the users, as well as everyone else, who use, experience and benefit from Facebook.

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

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The Product Guy’s Weekend Reading (July 25, 2008)

Posted on July 25, 2008 by Jeremy Horn

Every week I read tens of thousands of blog posts. Here, for your weekend enjoyment, are some highlights from my recent reading, for you.

On Starting Up…
http://gigaom.com/2008/07/20/fr-how-to-avoid-the-curse-of-vision-overload/
Tips on protecting against vision overload.

On Design & Product Experience…
http://www.allfacebook.com/2008/07/breaking-facebook-releases-new-homepage-design/
A look at the upcoming, and currently beta, face of Facebook.

On Modular Innovation…
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/beyond_the_api.php
A look at how Modular Innovation is increasingly empowering the user to control their online User eXperience (UX).

Have a great weekend!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

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Notches’ Niche – the Whole Universe

Posted on April 21, 2008 by Jeremy Horn

Corey Henderson, co-founder of Notches, identifies the long term goal of Notches as being “to give users the confidence that the reviews they find on a site powered by Notches present the whole universe of opinions on anything.” Recently, I met up with Corey Henderson and Tim Marman, co-founders of Notches, to learn more about their ideas and to discuss the company’s unique vision, as well as where they see themselves within the growing universe of next generation, Internet products.

More about Notches

Notches is a platform for reviews — with the grand goal of being to eventually encompass all reviews of everything. Notches is striving to aggregate all the reviews of everything out there, to make it easy for users to obtain and compare reviews for an item, as well as to be secure that they are looking at the entire, relevant, normalized universe of opinions for that particular product.

Unlike PowerReviews and BazaarVoice, Notches …

Brings all of the reviews for a given product together, into a centralized platform, to be analyzed, normalized, and summarized,
Further prunes the cross-site review set to prevent gaming of the results,
Eliminates (or de-emphasizes) reviews that have become old,

… while providing an API that allows any person, or company, to obtain and/or contribute to an open and accessible review platform.

Corey further explains,

“Ultimately this is about making sure online users get quality reviews on anything they are researching, from products, services, restaurants, movies, music, anything. By providing a single system for everyone to use, we can be confident that you’ll be getting as close to a complete picture of what thing is best…”

Challenging Notches

There are many challenges Notches is and will be facing as their platform evolves and matures, such as…

Assessing and maintaining reviewer reputation,
Eliminating “nonsense” reviews,
Squashing spammers,
And constantly evolving and improving the various platform algorithms (e.g. normalization).

One critical challenge that should not go unmentioned, central to all successful businesses, is the revenue model. Currently, Notches plans to drive revenue through “affiliate programs where companies like Expedia or Amazon pay (Notches) for referrals” along with “advertising, that will be included on some of (Notches’) mini-sites.”

More Notches

To help demonstrate many of the capabilities of the Notches platform, Corey and Tim have released two, fun mini-apps. Both of these demo products are built with the same Notches API that is available to today’s developers. So, if you are a developer, dive in, and please share what you create with Notches.

On Facebook, you will find Notches’ product that allows users to read and write reviews, as well as request reviews from other Facebook friends.

For Twitter, Notches has created another product that enables the obtaining and posting of reviews — especially handy when you are on the road and want some quick feedback for a particular restaurant.

The Twitter app, while not currently the best for consumer reviews via Twitter, again provides a simple introduction to both the Notches consumer features and developer API capabilities.

Expanding Universe

Notches is moving quickly in their “primary mission to work with a wide variety of partners, building tools, apps and communities around reviews” to further “showcase different aspects of (their) platform.”

Soon, from Notches, you can expect to see…

a widget to connect Notches to reviews on blogs,
new showcase applications within the vacation and travel market spaces,
various collaborations with microrevie.ws, hobby sites, and college portals,

… and much more.

Continuing Modular Innovation

The Modular Innovation trend seen within many of the cutting edge, next generation products, services, and platforms is often described via the instructive categories of…

Sharable,
Flexible,
Interoperable,
Portable, and
Utilizable (or Convenient).

As a matter of fact, in talking more about the origins of Notches, Corey is eager to point out…

“The original thinking, that has since become Notches, came way back when web services were first introduced as a concept. We saw that best of breed services, loosely coupled, would become the model of development in the future.”

… and “Notches is simply aspiring to be the best of breed review service” in the realm of Modular Innovation and the next major evolution of the Internet.

So, where in the spectrum of Modular Innovation does Notches currently reside?

Central to Notches is Interoperability, both with other technologies as well as empowering other individuals to connect to Notches via their API. Notches leverages best of breed services and standards, from the hReview microformat to Rapleaf‘s API.

Implicit to the Notches platform are the broader characteristics of Sharability and Portability. Due to the centralizing nature of the aggregation qualities of Notches, everyone has access to all of the normalized versions of the submitted reviews, from every Internet-capable device, courtesy of the Notches API.

The Flexibility of Notches is primarily at the Interoperability level of the product, accessible via the API. However, more Flexibility in terms of “making sure that users can control the reviews they write” (Portability and Sharability) are still being worked on and understood to be “fundamental” components.

For the reasons already outlined above, the showcase products and collaborations that Notches is producing, each in their own right, are a Modular Innovation simultaneously making Notches’ platform more Utilizable as well as Convenient to experience from various alternate services and products (including mobile devices).

Notches makes a very good showing within all of the core categories that make up Modular Innovation, especially Interoperability; which bodes well as Notches strives to build a successful, self-sustaining product with the supporting “community delivering incredible user-centered tools and reviews.”

Watching Notches

The origin of the company’s name comes from the basic premise that one item is always a notch above or below another — there is no tieing when it comes to Notches.

It is in this competitive spirit that Notches is attacking its market, its niche, potentially even paving the way for more business entrants within the microformat space, and creating a world within which “users should not have to look at multiple review sites anymore.”

Just as exciting as it is to observe a new company entering the growing wave of Modular Innovation, it will also be interesting to watch Notches as they grow and advance.

Go and try out Notches today (here and here) & enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Posted on March 17, 2008 by Jeremy Horn

…So echoed Darrell Silver, one of the four co-founders of CommandShift3, as he explained one of the guiding mantras of CommandShift3.com and with whom I had the great pleasure of being able to sit down and speak with recently at his cool downtown digs. We discussed a range of topics, from the ideas and processes that led to the CommandShift3 web site to what features its community of users can expect to see as the product evolves.

CommandShift3 had 1mm page views within the first month after launching. A large factor in achieving this number most definitely comes from their keen attention to the User eXperience.

How did CommandShift3 zero in on such a rockin’ User eXperience?

Darrell best described their product experience design process as…

“iterating through to simplicity”

When the CommandShift3 group approached designing the User eXperience, simplicity was always in the forefront of their thinking. Every decision revolved around this guiding rule, from the potential use of tabs to where and if to use AJAX.

The Screenshot

One of the early challenges faced, one that can almost be a metaphor for the iterate-to-simplicity process, was with respect to the display of the websites that participate in the voting.

How do you size the screenshots correctly?
How do you present the most necessary information at each stage? What is that necessary information?

Through iterating on this problem, they were able to zero in on the solution that you see today. You can observe that the screenshot starts at the largest allowable (and necessary) size, with minimal labeling. The first screenshot presented, has already been reduced slightly in size to accommodate space and address the need for simplicity — presenting just the information necessary to make a voting decision.

Occasionally, to make a voting decision more detail may be needed and is achievable by way of the zoom button.

As the screenshot progresses through the process, clearly less information is needed. The image goes from big to smaller to smaller.

Everything Simpler

Darrell is quick to point out that, while the iterate-to-simplicity process may be most evident in the screenshots, it was universally applied to every aspect of what they did. In this sense, you can see many of the creative influences of CommandShift3 on other sites that they feel epitomize a professional simplicity and/or found ways to present just the most necessary information, such as…

Darrell and the rest of CommandShift3 understood that they were designing for the design community — and this audience always notices every last detail.

Some more of those details…

URLs. They needed to be short, simple and bookmark-able.
Colors. They understood that the CommandShift3 audience would instantly spot if a color was slightly off or if there was some other mismatch.

“Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.” the philosophy expressed by Darrell Silver in my interview and shared by the other founders (Erin Sparling, Lee Semel, and Amit Gupta) that led them all down a path – of creating a cool product with an awesome (and, in some cases, addictive) User eXperience.

Quick Fact:
Do you know what was the initial inspiration for CommandShift3.com? (click here to find out)

On the Competition…

Another part of CommandShift3′s success was that they were able to identify a completely unserved need within the designer community and come up with a very fun and entirely unique product.

More recently, some competition has been emerging. The most notable competition comes from Technorati founder, David Sifry in the form of OKorKO.com. You can read more about it here.

Obviously, by just comparing the homepages of CommandShift3 and OKorKO, CommandShift3 remains in a league of its own.

Despite my attempts at getting Darrell to dive into a compare and contrast session or spark a more spirited debate about CommandShift3′s competition, Darrel, flattered, began and concluded his assessment of the competitive landscape when he, with a smile, said, “they have a great idea.”

Time for Making Money!

Nope, and not at all, explains Darrell. CommandShift3 never had any kind aspirations for the level of success that they are currently experiencing — their goal, their singular goal, was, and remains, to serve the under-served design community and provide them with an interactive, online product and community that is both fun and useful. Basically, all they currently appear to care about is not money, but staying focused on the near-term and building a “community that opens up communication channels and lowers the barrier to great design.”

Coming Soon…

Darrel points out that CommandShift3 is all about serving the community. They are a “small team doing something that the Internet allows. That is what gives them the ability to do what they want to do and what other people want them to do.” CommandShift3 won’t “win by locking people in,” but by “being focused and responding to the audience; and being the audience.”

As far as Modular Innovations and data portability, Darrell made it very clear that what mattered first and foremost was SERVING (his emphasis) a community. Evolving within an environment of Modular Innovation and allowing for all sorts of data portability are seen to be very much inline with their community “service.” It was made clear that, as aspects of the site are tweaked and CommandShift3 evolves, people can rest assured that they will be able to own and control the content that they create and contribute to the community at-large. And, as Darrell succinctly put it, “we will absolutely — how could you not be open to letting people keep their data and make it more modular — you are SERVING a community.”

Some of the new features (and tweaks) CommandShift3 will be serving and you can expect to see soon are…

Flagging and ranking favorite sites
Browsing your “battle” history
Looking at what other people like (or don’t like)
Observing how popularity of a website changes as the design of that site changes
Tweaking some of the language on the site details page to be less confusing. Don’t worry, they are on it.
…and a lot more cool stuff.

Printing Screens

CommandShift3, the team that has given new, and social, life to the Print-Screen ‘button’, has truly identified an, until now, unheeded call for a strong, interactive community for all designers and their fans. They have created a product that is fun to experience, interact with, and share through, as well as great for research or exploration, or even testing out new concepts on a large audience.

I had a great time speaking with Darrell Silver and (we all — the fans of CommandShift3) look forward to the many great things coming soon from CommandShift3.

Enjoy & if you haven’t already done so… go and check out CommandShift3.com! & Have Fun!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

Microsoft’s Mistakes. You too can learn from them.

Posted on October 23, 2007 by Jeremy Horn

(Part 2 of 2) The other day I briefly highlighted what I saw as the ‘Good parts’ and ‘Good starts’ within Windows Live Events to clearly distinguish where I feel the product has missed a golden opportunity; and highlight some broader takeaways that should be applied to the current and next generation of online web products and services.

Not so good parts…

Overall, I found the user experience pretty good, as long as I didn’t have to interact with the page and its components and features. In some cases I found the negatives to be in the simple user interaction and experience design, in others it was the sense of being mislead by the user interface to expect bigger and better functionality from my click.

Where’s the pop?

The User Interface didn’t POP. By pop, I am not referring to those annoying ads that everyone loves to hate, but to the responsiveness and feeling that goes along with the interaction of the user interface. Here, with Windows Live Events, I found the interface experience, my user experience, to be slow, sluggish, and, at times, sleep inducing.

When I log into my account and select an event that I want to update or invite people to… let me do it QUICKLY and painlessly. I want to login (pop), click (pop), invite (pop), and go (pop). The interface rendering times, the additional pages that were being loaded again and again, can all benefit from a major overhaul. Empower me, your potential user, to do what I want to do with my event…efficiently, productively.

Microsoft, did you ever hear of Ajax or dynamic page elements? My advice to you is to make the event overview and its management a single page, a page that loads the ‘dashboard’ view once and dynamically allows me to enter new information or be updated while I am looking at my event. Don’t force me to navigate back and forth, again and again, to manipulate my details and invite people. All those extra pages, all that extra loading, all that interruption in my workflow of planning and managing and ENJOYING my event just slows me down, ruins any potential happiness I may get from some of the features, and makes me want to look elsewhere for a UI that will be fast, responsive, and fun to interact with.

The sluggishness I found to be present within the UI goes beyond the unnecessary extra page loading that occurs, but is also found in the initial page downloading and rendering. I am not, as of the posting of this article, sure what is going on under the hood or what sort of processes at Microsoft are resulting in this bloated feeling that appears to be all too common to Microsoft products, that causes such a slow and sluggish feeling (I used IE , FF, and Opera browsers). The sluggish interface is not unique to Windows Live Events. I also experienced excessive sluggishness in Microsoft’s (now discontinued) Live Product Search — a product I thought was head and shoulders above the competition out there. With Live Product Search, a product that I truly enjoyed and recommended to people, as with Windows Live Events, its big negative was that it was slow in how it responded to user interaction . Back then, I stopped using Live Product Search, and most likely many other people did too, because it was just sooo slow.

The ‘fun potential’ of the user interface is present, but quickly dissipates when the actual interaction portion of the user experience equation is taken into account. Correcting this portion of Windows Live Events will go far towards user adoption, but is also the lesser of the ‘Not so good parts.’

The future is in Modular Innovation.

Within Windows Live Events It is nice that I can blog about my event; even though it is not readily obvious that I can do so at first glance at the event’s dashboard view. It is nice that I can share pictures and discuss the events with friends and other attendees. It is nice that it is an experience integrated with the Windows Live suite of web products.

Wouldn’t it be NICER (or great, or awesome) if I could blog, not just on Windows Live Spaces, but on WordPress (The Product Guy’s platform) or other blog formats? Wouldn’t it be NICER if I could share or integrate with my pictures on Flickr or other photo sharing platforms? Wouldn’t it be NICER if I could communicate with other people, in real-time, or via Twitter or receive updates when there are new bits of information being shared?

Answer: Yep.

While the layout of the page presents the promise of a sharp user experience and alludes to the potential of a great, integrated, centralizing event planning application through some obvious and some hard to find features, it falls far short. So far short, it only is integrated with Microsoft – a very limited web product audience.

Windows Live Events, what could have been a nice module that combined and brought together information from other web products (modules) online, instead is only a repackaging of a proprietary Microsoft-only event planner.

Those tougher to find features on the Event’s homepage are the ones that drew my greatest attention for which I also carefully chose my words when describing. I purposely described “the good” with words like “promising” and the “layout encourages.” While there are hints of good ideas, hints of implementing (a) Modular Innovation(s), Windows Live Events, in my opinion, missed a great opportunity. (Of course, I am not saying they cannot make a reattempt at this opportunity through a future release.)

The (missed?) opportunity…

Event planning is not unique to the Internet. What I did like seeing was their eye towards greater integration with other services. However, without allowing for integration with third-parties (Via an API? perhaps.), what could possibly be the incentive for people to sign-up and use Windows Live Events? For people that are not Windows Live-only users, there isn’t any.

Integration is the key to any chance of broad-based success for Live Events. Have I mentioned this a few times already? Hmmm… it must mean it is IMPORTANT! What is unique here? Microsoft Events does present a nice, simplified UI, but with so many other product options out there, there is nothing making this new service stand out. This is where the opportunity lies.

Windows Live Events would be more interesting to the public at large if events could just simply integrate with other blog platforms and social networks to invite friends from your social network to your created Live Events. Don’t limit the users to the Microsoft blogging platform and picture sharing — let me choose and customize my user experience by connecting it with other online products (that aren’t Microsoft, if I choose).

‘missed?’ well, one can hope that the Windows Live Events team will heed my advice and make many of these improvements.

Learning parts…

There are many constructive lessons that can be learned by poking at and experiencing Windows Live Events that, when applied to other web products, will result in broader acceptance and adoption, and an overall better experience that your users will come back for time and time again.

To build a larger base, secondarily, Microsoft will have to clean-up and make enjoyable (interactive, responsive, not slow) the user experience; but, primarily, at the very core, empower its users through modularity by…

Allowing integration. Enabling people to connect their Live Events to their other online experiences (Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger, IM, etc.). For example, let me invite people that are my close friends in MySpace to my party being planned via Live Events.
Allowing portability. Enabling people to download or move all of their event information for editing or manipulating on other event or related platforms. This will allow more people to try it out, without worrying about losing their information and experiment with different methods of interacting with and using and leveraging Windows Live Events. Also, how neat-o would it be to be able to download all of the plans, pictures, and discussions surrounding an event and burn them to a DVD to watch with your friends next time you meet up?
Allowing modules. Enable people to interact with Windows Live Events as a module. As a module, you can place features, actions, or other types of updates within any other service. Also, as a module, other services can transmit information to the Live Events module (e.g. friend X has accepted the invitation to your party).

In the end, some nice User Experience (UX) and integration (barely), but the 2 big problems that I have found to be all too familiar to the majority of Microsoft’s web products (not unlike their desktop products) are:

sluggish UI and UX really hurt any gains made by some of the good UI decisions, and
openness — connect to and give the people a way to connect complementary services and other platforms (social networks, IM, blog, flickr, twitter, etc.)

It will be interesting to watch Windows Live Events and see what of my advice is eventually adopted and the resulting consumer responses (and their corresponding UX gains).

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

On Starting Up…

On Design & Product Experience…

On Modular Innovation…

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On Starting Up…

On Design & Product Experience…

On Modular Innovation…

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On Starting Up…

On Design & Product Experience…

On Modular Innovation…

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Focus on Applications

Focus on Facebook

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Focus on Communicating

In Focus

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More about Notches

Challenging Notches

More Notches

Expanding Universe

Continuing Modular Innovation

Watching Notches

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How did CommandShift3 zero in on such a rockin’ User eXperience?

The Screenshot

Everything Simpler

On the Competition…

Time for Making Money!

Coming Soon…

Printing Screens

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Not so good parts…

The (missed?) opportunity…

Learning parts…

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