Futurecat - Michael Karek

Today is the day that the Windows Phone team has been driving towards, and we’re very excited to say that we’ve reached the biggest milestone for our internal team – the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Phone 7!  While the final integration of Windows Phone 7 with our partners’ hardware, software, and networks is underway, the work of our internal engineering team is largely complete. 

Windows Phone 7 is the most thoroughly tested mobile platform Microsoft has ever released.  We had nearly ten thousand devices running automated tests daily, over a half million hours of active self-hosting use, over three and a half million hours of stress test passes, and eight and a half million hours of fully automated test passes.  We’ve had thousands of independent software vendors and early adopters testing our software and giving us great feedback. We are ready.

I last posted on this blog when we reached the Technical Preview milestone, and we’ve received some great feedback since then which we’ve been able to respond to and improve the smart design throughout the OS. For example, folks loved the Facebook integration in the People Hub, but they also wanted ways to filter their contacts so only the Facebook friends they really know will show up in their contact list  – we’ve added support for that.  We’ve also made it easy to “like” a post right from the People Hub, or quickly post a message to someone’s Facebook wall directly.

This has been one of the most incredible product development efforts I’ve ever been a part of. Today’s milestone is exciting not just because of what we’ll deliver to customers later this year, but how it sets us up for success over the long term in the mobile space… we’re really just getting started.

We reached today’s milestone because of the tremendous efforts of the entire team including our partners, early adopters, and independent software developers providing feedback.  I want to send a huge THANK YOU to this extended team– we couldn’t have done it without you!

Terry

Hotmail is making it easier for you to stay up-to-date and be productive on your phone. Starting today, you can get your email, calendar, and contacts pushed automatically to your phone using Exchange ActiveSync (EAS). EAS keeps everything in sync between your phone and Hotmail, so whatever you do on your phone, like delete an email, add an appointment, or update one of your contacts with a new number, will also be reflected on the web, and vice-versa. If you use an email client on your PC that already syncs with Hotmail, like Outlook with the Outlook Connector or Windows Live Mail, what you do on your phone will show up there as well, delivering a seamless experience for managing your stuff between your PC email client, your browser, and your phone. 

Today, EAS is supported by over 300 million mobile devices worldwide, including some of the most popular Windows, Nokia, and Palm smartphones, as well as the iPhone and iPad. For a full list of supported devices, click here.

Setup details: I encourage you to take a look at the phone-specific setup instructions and known issues at the Windows Live Solution Center page on Active Sync setup.

In the coming months, we will continue to bring out new features and capabilities based on feedback from our users, so please, stay tuned for more.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager
Windows Live Hotmail

In June, we announced that as part of Windows Live Essentials beta, we brought together two programs, Windows Live Sync and the Live Mesh beta, into one: Windows Live Sync beta. We focused on four things with our beta release:

• Making it easy to access the PCs you use from anywhere
• Getting your files and folders on the PCs you use regularly
• Giving you enough space to sync your most important files and folders to the cloud
• Providing simple document collaboration over the web using SkyDrive

Since the release of the Windows Live Sync beta in June, over 240,000 people have tried Windows Live Sync on hundreds of thousands of devices, and have provided a lot of feedback. The average customer syncs over 675 files with an average file size of 1.8 MB, and uses 240 MB of cloud storage. We received an incredible amount of forum posts and comments as well as informal communication through our feedback site. We have been listening and have made updates based on your feedback.

Renaming Windows Live Sync to Windows Live Mesh

In our beta release, we brought the best of Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh together. With the addition of remote access and cloud storage, we understand that the new program does more than sync files.  So following the beta period, we’ll be using the name Windows Live Mesh going forward, which we feel best reflects our broader goal of allowing you to access your stuff across your devices.

Giving you more information

A number of our customers noted the inability to sync hidden files, so we added this support. Another point of feedback was that customers wanted a list of which files were missing in a synced folder. Now when Windows Live Mesh detects missing files, you can easily see the file name and when and where it was last modified.

More cloud storage

We continue to see that the primary way customers are syncing files is between their different PCs (or Macs). And we will continue to make it easy to sync virtually unlimited amounts of data between your PCs. When syncing files to the cloud, beta participants get 2 GB of synced cloud storage. Only 2% of these participants are using more than 1.5 GB. However, Live Mesh offers 5 GB, and while only a small number of Live Mesh customers use all their space, we want to ease migration and increase the online storage limit from 2 GB to 5 GB.

A number of customers have asked why we don’t allow you to sync up to 25 GB, given that 25 GB is the SkyDrive limit. While we merged Sync and Live Mesh in this release, we did not merge the online storage system used for Live Mesh with the one used for Office or Photos on SkyDrive. This means that each system has different storage limits and is optimized for different scenarios.

SkyDrive offers enough storage for you to share documents and photos with friends, family, and co-workers. Hotmail offers enough storage for you to store your email, calendar, and contacts. Windows Live Mesh lets you sync all your files and folders across your PCs and devices, and provides enough cloud storage for your most important files. Over time, we’ll be considering ways to do even more to share information across these systems.

Performance and quality improvements

We’ve made several performance updates to Windows Live Mesh in response to your requests that will provide noticeable improvements to your experience. We worked on cutting the application load time in half and made syncing large numbers of folders and adding multiple devices to a sync folder faster. We’ve optimized both memory and CPU usage during sync activity as well as decreased CPU consumption by as much as 30% when Windows Live Mesh is idle.

We hope you enjoy these changes and take the time to install the new Windows Live Mesh along with the rest of Windows Live Essentials 2011 once it is released from the beta. In the meantime, please keep using the beta programs and keep the comments coming. Thank you for using Windows Live!

Allison O’Mahony
Principal Program Manager Lead, Devices & Roaming

15 years ago today, Microsoft launched Windows 95. In 1995 I was 11 years old and in the 5th grade. At that time, I never thought that today I’d be working at Microsoft – let alone helping to tell the story of Windows. So this is a really fun and personal topic for me to recall my memories of Windows 95 – today has been a neat day.

Windows 95 was the first operating system that I ever beta tested. My dad, who worked for a technology company at the time, brought home an unbranded package of disks labeled “Chicago” from Microsoft (“Chicago” was the codename for Windows 95) a few months prior. When he brought these disks home, I desperately wanted to see “the new Windows”. My dad tried to explain to me what beta software was. I didn’t care – I wanted to see the new Windows! Eventually he caved in to my excitement and decided to install the “new” version of Windows on our family’s (translation: my dad’s) HP Vectra PC. Windows 95 introduced the Start Menu in Windows for the first time and presented a different way of using Windows over previous versions. I had grown used to Windows 3.11 at the time. I was literally stunned with excitement when I saw all the “new” Windows. My dad and I share a common interest in Windows and the PC and this was what I consider the biggest defining moment in a bond with my dad that would continue to grow as I also grew older and with each new Windows release. I also still remember seeing the Windows 95 “Start Me Up” commercials on TV and all the news segments about the people lining up to pick up their copy in stores!

Snap to (pun intended) Windows 7 today. Looking back at the launch of Windows 7 and actually being part of it myself, it is clear to me that much of the excitement seen back with Windows 95 is still alive today with Windows 7. I’ve said this numerous times before here: Windows 7 is the fastest selling version of Windows to date, and it’s also the fastest selling OS in history. And aside from people buying it, people seem to love it – our customer satisfaction is at an all-time high.

In combination with all the great PCs our OEM partners are coming out with, and of course the awesomeness that is Windows 7 – there has never been a better time to “be a PC”.

The Office Web Apps have been refreshed on SkyDrive and in Hotmail with several new features, including:

• Word printing. Now, the Word Web App offers the print command in the Word Web App editor.

• Excel charts and the auto fill handle. With the Excel Web App, you can easily insert charts and manipulate data in much the same way you can in Excel 2010. Also, you can now use the auto fill handle.

• PowerPoint clip art and more themes. With the PowerPoint Web App, you can now add high quality photos and illustrations to your presentation, as well as select a theme.

For more details on this update, check out the Office Web Apps updates blog post on the Office developer blog.

Calling all Windows fans!  This Saturday, August 21st in Long Beach, CA a team of Microsoft Employees – many from Windows – are participating in Red Bull Flugtag, a competition where teams from all over the world build human-powered flying machines, push them off a 30’ high dock, and see who can fly the farthest.  We’re already getting some love from the press, but we need your support as we take on the competition!

Here’s the deal: each team’s human-powered flying machine can be built out of any material, as long as the wingspan is under 30’ and the weight is less than 450 lbs (including the weight of the pilot).  Only 1 person can fly the craft, and each team can enlist 4 pushers to get the craft up to speed.  And of course, everyone dresses silly and participates in a 30-second skit before you launch.  If that does NOT sound fun to you, please leave this blog immediately, turn off your computer and slowly back away.

Our Flugtag, the Phoenix.  More on how we built it below.

Obviously we’re excited, but we want you to be excited too!  You can join the Windows Project Phoenix team in a few ways:

• Like us on Facebook!  Tweet that you like us on Facebook!  Tell you friends to like us on Facebook!
• Come cheer us on in person in Long Beach
• Follow me on Twitter for up to the minute status of the craft, team and event.

And most importantly:

• Show your support from anywhere in the world by helping us with the Flugtag Popularity Contest! Just text Team15 to RBULL (72855) anytime after 11am on Saturday, August 21st Friday, August 20th. 

The team has been working their collective butts off building an amazing craft, putting in more than 1500 total hours in design, fabrication, construction, event planning, marketing and promotion.  More on the actual flaying machine in a second, but first I wanted to introduce you to the crew that made this whole thing happen:

THE ENGINEERING MASTERMINDS

Brian Lysak

• Real Job:  Senior Program Manager on the Windows Planning & Ecosystem Team
• Flugtag Role:  Engineering Lead, materials and fabrication expert.
• Solution to Everything:  Lay it up with carbon fiber!

Lucas Brodzinski

• Real Job: Program Manager on the Windows Graphics Team.
• Flugtag Role: Self-taught aerodynamics guru with $5.42 worth of library late fees to his name, CAD designer, and all around awesome guy.
• He’s an international man of mystery: Lucas was born in Poland, raised as Canadian, and is now working in the United States – an international triple threat.  He’s working towards his pilot’s license

Mike Arntzen

• Real Job:  Partner Engagement Manager on the Windows Ecosystem Team
• Flugtag Role:  Avionics  Aviation maestro
• High in the sky:  Mike has over 500 flying hours under his belt and served in the Royal Australian Airforce for 6 years.

Mike, Lucas & Brian, with the Phoenix’s wings just before packing them into the moving truck

THE DRAFT HORSES

Ryan Asdourian

• Real Job: PC Product Manager on the Windows Team
• Flugtag Role: Team Captain, Morale and Adrenaline Injection Specialist
• 20,000 screaming fans is a small crowd:  Ryan spends his weekends as Blitz, the Seattle Seahawk’s mascot

James DeBragga

• Real Job: GM, Windows Marketing
• Flugtag Role: Lead pusher (i.e., the biggest guy on the team)
• Fun Fact: James can leg press 850lbs.

Jay Paulus

• Real Job: Director of Product Management on the Windows Team
• Flugtag Role:  Cart pushing technician
• Go fly a kite:  Jay is an expert kitesurfer, so he’s used to high-flying insanity.

Ben Rudolph

• Real Job:  PC Guy on the Windows PR Team
• Flugtag Role:  Shameless promoter
• Cheer us on or die: I’m a certified Krav Maga instructor and holds a black-belt in jiu-jitsu. 

Remember that I’ll also be live-tweeting the event, so be sure to follow me to keep tabs on the action!

OUR FEARLESS PILOT

Ali Driesman

• Real Job: Student Audience Marketer, Education Strategy and Marketing
• Flugtag Role: Piloting the phoenix, resident crazy person
• Brave, or crazy?:  Ali has a severe disorder – FOMO (Fear ­Of Missing Out). The effects have been massive over-commitment issues, and a general dedication to participating in all things fun. Please pray for her.

Your brave & slightly crazy Flugtag flight crew:  Jay, Ryan, Ali & Ben.  James is up top.

(BTW, we built this photo from 5 different shots using Photo Fuse in the new Windows Live Photo Gallery)

THE PHOENIX

The real star of the show is our flying machine, the Phoenix.  I have to say that it’s a pretty impressive sight to behold when you see it completely assembled, and it’s lightness is truly amazing – the whole contraption weighs less than 75lbs, which is a whopping 375lbs under the legal weight limit! Here’s what Brian, Lucas and Mike have to say about its construction and how they made something so light, so strong, and so flyable:

With less than 2 months to design, plan and execute we had a serious challenge ahead of us, especially given that we were a team of opinionated engineers, each with our own ideas.  Our goal was to not only build an aircraft that we could build on time and toss off the dock…  We wanted this thing to fly and fly well.  Project Phoenix also needed to look the part with a simple, intuitive design that functions.

We wanted to have a safe aircraft which would glide far at best or act as a nice parachute at worst so we made it BIG… so we pushed the size limits of the Flugtag rules.  With a wingspan of about 28 feet, the Phoenix is just inches short of the limit.

We settled on a hang glider inspired aircraft due to its simplicity and light weight.  We also quickly opted for a simple straight wing design vs. a swept-back wing for ease of fabrication.  To provide better horizontal stability we decided to build in a 12 degree angle between the two wings.  This would enable one wing to even the other out if the craft started to roll.  Mike, our resident pilot, recommended this design addition so that a tail section would not be needed to laterally stabilize the craft.

Early sketches of the Phoenix.  Our goal was to build something aeronautically sound, safe, and super lightweight

Throughout the design process brainstorming parts, fabrication methods and steps to get “Phoenix” built and assembled was on the top of my mind to enable a clear vision and plan going forward for the team.  After some shopping around and discussion we hand-picked the most feasible ultra-lightweight, strong and reasonably priced materials to build our glider.    Most of the parts with the exception of the carbon fiber are off the shelf components used daily by many hobbyist and DIY’ers.  The keel and cradle, as well as the wing ribs, are made of Macrolux, and incredibly light weight & strong cellular polycarbonate. The wing spars (ie, the pieces that hold the ribs together are used windsurfing masts & kite posts, and we made heavy use of carbon fiber for the center section. We covered the wings with Monokote, a thin, heat-sensitive plastic that’s typically used for model airplanes.  Completed, the entire craft weighs about 65lbs – 385lbs under the weight limit!

The final piece of the puzzle was a launch, which we built out of ABS plastic pipe. The launcher is an impressive site to behold – it hoists the Phoenix about 20’ into the air!

 Ali strapped into the harness on the almost-completed launcher. 

We’ve poured our heart and soul into the Phoenix and hope that it performs well.  Given the time constraints we were not able to perform test flights and we’re excited to see it take flight and learn even more from the experience. For more information on how we built the Phoenix, hit the Facebook page…we’ll be posting more detailed design notes there!

The completed Phoenix!

Thanks again to everyone who chipped in and supported us – this has been a true cross-company effort and we’re really proud to be representing Microsoft and Windows.  Don’t forget to like us on Facebook, follow me on Twitter for the latest news, and text your hearts out on Friday!

Today we’re releasing an update to Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta. One of the main reasons we release betas is to allow early adopters to enjoy our products and provide feedback on their experience. First, we want to say thank you for your help. For Messenger alone, we had over 3 million unique users, 3.5 million updates to display pictures, 6.2 million video calls, and 7.6 million updates to status messages.

Your beta feedback and usage has helped shape the many improvements we’ve made and continue to make across Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Mail, and Family Safety. Today I’d like to summarize some of the more visible changes you’ll see in today’s update, and we’ll follow up with more details in later posts.

Performance and quality of service improvements

We’re always working to improve the performance and quality of our services and we’ve made significant progress in this area in today’s beta update. This includes things like decreasing the time it takes to start each program or render each webpage, and improving the quality of your experiences. It often takes hundreds of small improvements and optimizations to better the final experience. Here are some of the many improvements you’ll see in this area:

• A quicker Messenger – The time it takes to sign in, and to refresh contacts and social feeds, as well as animation speed, are all faster than in previous versions of Messenger.
• More efficient video chat – Messenger video chat uses 30% fewer CPU resources by offloading work to the GPU.
• Better facial recognition – Photo Gallery facial recognition is improved significantly and works more quickly.
• Larger movie uploads – Movie Maker will upload higher resolution movies to SkyDrive (480×640 vs. the previous 320×480).
• Higher bit-rate movies – Movie Maker now supports higher quality (bit-rate) content.
• Better spell-checking – Writer has significantly improved the quality of its spell-checking.
• Better integration with Office – Writer is much better at retaining all formatting when you copy and paste from Word and other Microsoft Office programs.
• Better handling of Gmail – Mail now automatically handles Gmail’s spam and trash folders properly.
• Faster web filtering – Family Safety web filtering is 35% faster than in the previous version.

In addition, we’ve been able to improve the quality of the software and have fixed over 75% of reported crashes. We’re not always able to reproduce all of the reported crashes internally, but we do look at this on an ongoing basis.

Facebook chat in Messenger

Many of you have been asking for Facebook chat, and it’s finally here. More than half of all Messenger customers also use Facebook. With the previous beta, you got a rich social view that brought together all your updates (including those from Facebook) and gave you one place to see and comment on them. With the new Facebook chat integration, you now also have one place to chat with all your friends. And if you use Facebook but don’t use Messenger today, you now have an always-on “people app” on your PC that gives you instant access and notifications as people come online in Facebook or Messenger.

From a technical perspective, this is a significant task. We’re connecting Messenger’s ~300 million customers (who are already connected to Yahoo! Messenger and Office Communicator) to Facebook’s ~500 million customers. To make sure this happens smoothly while Windows Live and Facebook both build up the needed back-end infrastructure, we’ll start by releasing this chat capability in the US, UK, France, Brazil, Germany, and Russia today. We’ll continue to expand this offering to additional regions over time.

We know some of you want to connect Facebook to Windows Live, while others prefer to keep things separate. This is a major part of our design and you get to decide when to connect Facebook, and if you do what types of activities you want to allow, including chat. You can change your preferences at any time from your profile page.

Quick previews and improved tree view in Photo Gallery

One of the benefits of the new ribbon user interface in Windows Live Essentials is the ability it gives you to preview a change before you apply it simply by hovering over the option. With the beta update today, we’ve also added preview capabilities to the “Find” tab in the ribbon. So before you apply a filter (date, rating, people tags), you can hover over one of those filters and see the results instantly.

We’ve also added back date and keyword to the tree on the left hand side. While we know many customers will use the Find ribbon to sort through their pictures, we heard loud and clear that others found the tree more useful.

Flickr video publishing and Snapshot in Movie Maker

With the new Snapshot feature in Movie Maker, you can select a single frame from a video as it appears in the preview window and add it to your movie. This allows you to quickly grab an image that you want to keep or perhaps use for your movie’s intro or closing.

In addition, because we know many of you use Flickr for photo sharing and have enjoyed publishing to Flickr right from Photo Gallery, we’ve extended support to Movie Maker, so that you can now publish videos directly from Movie Maker or Photo Gallery to Flickr too.

We hope you’ll download today’s update of the Windows Live Essentials 2011 beta and try out the changes.  And today, in addition to English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, you can also now get the beta in Russian or German.  In this post I covered just a few of the things you’ll notice when you use the new beta update. In subsequent posts we’ll go into more detail on other improvements we’ve made, as well as feedback we’ve received on the new Hotmail.

- Chris Jones

Vice President, Windows Live Engineering

Starting today, a select group of VIP web developers, designers, bloggers and press begin receiving their invitations to an event we’re holding in San Francisco on September 15th to celebrate the Beauty of the Web and to mark the launch of the IE9 Beta.

Reception for IE9 has been very positive since MIX with over 2.5 million downloads of the platform previews. The most recent platform preview – our 4th – was released last week.

Since space is limited at the event and not many invites have been sent out, I captured what the invite process looks like so everyone could see. Invitees get an e-mail invitation with a link to a special HTML5 website. To RSVP, they have to complete a word puzzle by typing the letters shown on the screen :

Unlock the _ _ _ _ _ _ web

The letters they have to work with are V E A N T I and the solution is a single word.

Once the puzzle is complete, the RSVP button appears so they can RSVP for the event.

Developers are already working hard on some amazing new web experiences enabled by Internet Explorer 9. On September 15th we’ll be able to show you a more beautiful web that feels native on Windows.

This month is the 15^th anniversary of the release of Internet Explorer 1 and to celebrate, we’ve delivered an IE3 T-shirt one of our readers who has been waiting patiently for 14 years.

The Background:

When we started this blog back in June, we anxiously awaited our first comments. Would people find the blog? Would people care? And then the first comment popped up:

It was probably a tongue-in-cheek comment, but since “kpod” had made the time to ask, it felt like we should probably send him a shirt. Unfortunately, “swag” doesn’t live long around here and the Internet Explorer team had moved buildings many times so the IE3 shirts were long gone. We were getting ready to send out a more recent Internet Explorer 8 shirt. Then one of our senior managers saw the comment. He was an intern on the team in 1996 and still knew the guy who organized the promotion. Step forward Steve Jenkins! Not only did Steve have one last IE3 Midnight Madness shirt left, he also knew exactly where it was.

The Delivery:

T-shirt in hand, we sent Rachel Appel from our Developer and Platform Evangelism team to visit “kpod” (A.K.A Kim Podolnick) to deliver his long awaited Midnight Madness T-Shirt and to ask him about his recollection of the early days of the Internet and web browsers.

Rachel: How did you find the Exploring IE blog? What made you bring up the T-shirt?

Kim: I think the post about the IE blog appeared on the Windows Blog. Every time a new version of IE is released I remember "Midnight Madness."

Rachel: Did you think we’d take you seriously?

Kim: NO!

Rachel: This T-shirt has been a long time in coming. Why were you supposed to get the shirt?

Kim: I was one of the first 10,000 people to download IE3 after it was released at midnight on August 13^th 1996. I received an email from Microsoft congratulating me and letting me know I would be getting a T-shirt.

Rachel: Back in 1996, what connection did you have? How long did the download take?

Kim: I had a dial-up connection – very slow by today’s standards. I’m not sure how long it took. I started the download and went to sleep.

Rachel: Were you looking forward to the release of IE3 or did you just download it the T-shirt encourage you to download it?

Kim: I was excited about IE3. At the time most people used Netscape Navigator to access the web. IE3 was an alternative to Netscape!

Rachel: What do you remember about IE3 – what was so cool about it at the time?

Kim: Number one, it was free – you had to pay for Netscape Navigator. Two, it was technologically advanced. [Internet Explorer 3 was the first browser to support CSS and introduced support for ActiveX controls and inline multimedia – James]

Rachel: You’re obviously a long time web user, how has the web changed in the last 15 years? What sort of things were you doing then? What are you doing now that you wish you could do then?

Kim: The web changed everything….banking, shopping, communication . Everything! I started on the internet in 1993 before browsers were popular. The first service I used was a service called "Pipeline". They had a text-only browser. When Netscape started to become popular, Pipeline developed their own browser.

Rachel: Is there anything you miss from the web at that time?

Kim: Deja News [Deja News was a newsgroup archiving service that allowed you to search through a web interface. Cutting edge at the time! – James]

Rachel: Now you finally have your Midnight Madness T-Shirt, what are you going to do with it?

Kim: I’m going to show it off! After all this time it still glows!

What’s Next:

It was great to be able to do something to celebrate where we’ve come from. At PDC09 in November last year, we made some commitments to the developer community about our future with Internet Explorer 9:

• Internet Explorer 9 would help enable the same markup to work across browsers
• Internet Explorer 9 would be all-round fast
• Through Windows and modern hardware, Internet Explorer 9 would unlock the next class of experiences for the web

At MIX10 in March of this year, we released our first Internet Explorer Platform Preview and committed to updating it approximately every 8 weeks. Last week we released our 4th platform preview. Each release has supported more of the same markup that developers want to use to create the next generation of web experiences: HTML5, CSS3, ECMAScript 5 and more. Each release has been faster than the one before and as a result our score on popular micro-benchmarks like WebKit’s SunSpider have improved. With each release, through Windows and modern hardware we’ve showcased the possibilities for the next generation of web experiences through our Internet Explorer Test Drive site.

The developer and web community have certainly taken notice of the work we’ve done and the commitments we’ve kept. There’s palpable excitement building for the next milestone, Internet Explorer 9 Beta. Here’s a couple of the many tweets from enthusiastic developers :

johnallsopp: Huge day for the web with today’s IE update. Canvas, video, more css3. Great stuff. http://j.mp/daxVcA

pauldappleby: Just had a look at the IE9 fourth platform preview. It really is impressive stuff

Stay tuned. We’ll be sharing more about Internet Explorer 9 Beta soon!

In part one and part two of this series, I talked about the principles that guided our design for the new Hotmail and showed you how we’re helping you navigate your email and manage your inbox more quickly and easily. Today, in this last part, I wanted to show you a few features that we designed to help you share and collaborate more effectively and have more fun doing it. Let’s jump right in.

Improving the Quick Add experience

If you’ve been using Hotmail for a while, you may have noticed the Quick Add column when you’re writing a message.

Or maybe not. We think this is a great way to add info to your messages, but we found that a lot of people just didn’t discover it. We wanted to get this feature a little more attention and give you better ways to share photos and Office docs. We decided that we should design around the concept of one place to add content to your email, whether that’s a photo album, a home movie, or content from Bing.

Sending photos and Office docs

We also wanted to improve the experience of sharing photos and documents by increasing the number you can share and making the experience a lot more collaborative. To accomplish this, instead of sending these files as regular attachments, we added the ability to share via SkyDrive.

We knew we had a great new way of sharing photos and docs, but we found that people didn’t realize they were sending via SkyDrive rather than using regular attachments. Our design needed to provide a natural and simple way to add content, and it needed to provide a clear entry point for sharing with SkyDrive.

We started with this…

When we spoke with customers about the new approach, it became clear that they didn’t understand our intent. They thought they were simply doing what they’ve always done: attaching files to email. They thought of the documents and photos as literally “attached” to the email. This wasn’t actually the case. Instead, these items were being stored on the customer’s SkyDrive. Having people understand that nuance became our mission.

With that in mind, we tried this…

This approach sort of helped, but it wouldn’t really scale to accommodate all the Quick Add stuff (movies, maps, restaurants, etc.). So we developed the Insert bar:

We didn’t just stop there. We needed to make sure all the language in our design clearly communicated the important concepts. We spent time evaluating a series of language options for the items in the insert bar as well as the menus under each item. We had the approach we had been looking for with Office docs and items from Bing, but the more we talked with customers about these options, the more we realized that people really wanted to know where their files—particularly their photos— would be stored, and who would have access to them.

In essence, privacy and “where the photos live” were the critical concepts that needed to be addressed.

Ultimately, we landed on this…

We found that customers began to understand our intent. They would stop and ask “what does ‘Create album on SkyDrive’ mean?” If they weren’t comfortable with moving forward, they would find the thing that they were most comfortable with: Attachments, with the trusty paper clip.

If customers do use the trusty and familiar Attachments entry point and they upload a bunch of large images, we prompt them to “convert” the attachments to an album on SkyDrive.

Again, we wanted to make sure they understood where the photos would live.

What we ended up with is an intuitive and rich way to share the things you want to without filling up your inbox.

Active Views

Active Views were a bit tricky for us. If you’re not familiar with the feature, it’s essentially the way we make email a richer, more interactive experience. You can preview photos shared with you from a service like Flickr, play videos shared with you from YouTube, or see the status of a package in transit to you without having to go to the shipper’s site. When we first started exploring the concept, every execution we did was perceived by usability test participants as an ad.

In order to wrap our heads around the right way to present this new concept, we conducted concept testing in three countries: France, Brazil, and Japan. Our goal was to help frame the approach to Active Views.

Here’s one of the concepts we showed during that early testing.

At the close of these tests, we were scratching our heads—pretty much everyone who saw the concepts perceived these rich views of content from their email as advertisements. But we wanted users to understand that this was personalized info to make their lives easier—not us trying to sell them something. Overall, we knew that for this feature to be successful, we needed to overcome “ad blindness” and make the experience feel more personalized.

Ultimately, we decided the preview box should just feel like a part of the “normal” read experience. Once we made that decision and validated it through usability testing, we arrived at something more like this:

Through conversations with even more customers, we saw that the little signal “zzzz” and the dark background were in fact too distracting (again, our principles include reducing distractions), so we went to this:

And where we finally landed:

The Journey through the design process – keeping customers in focus

I’ve mentioned our longitudinal study a couple of times in this series of posts. It’s time I told you more about that effort. When going into Windows Live Wave 4, we wanted to make sure we kept our customers in the center of our process. We don’t have a formal “beta” set up for Windows Live, so what we decided to do was use our internal servers as a mini-beta. We recruited customers across the globe (the US, Brazil, Singapore, and Germany) to participate in a longitudinal research program—that means it was long term, not a one-day exercise like most user studies. Our goal was to have real life Hotmail customers give us feedback through every important design decision we were making.

This study was instrumental for our big bets, from which treatment of conversation threading made the most sense, to the “where are the photos” issue, to the most critical and fundamental aspects of reading/sending mail. We like to be part of a living and spirited dialog with our customers, and this study really helped us see what sort of long-term consequences our choices would have.

Thanks for reading

We care a great deal about how our customers use our products and what they’d like them to become. Our goal is to ensure that we make the right decisions. What you’ve seen here is the journey that we travelled for getting ideas, validating decisions, and bringing you change you will like. We hope enjoy using the new Hotmail.

Michael Kopcsak – Senior User Experience Lead, Windows Live