Futurecat - Michael Karek

Well folks, it’s over. Drop us a comment and let us know which sweeps you thought was the most interesting. One lucky winner will get the final prize package (you can find full Terms & Conditions here).

If you’re just finding us, here’s what you missed:

We introduced you to some new music, showed you how to save power and took you on a tour of our ever-changing logo. Then we built our own airplane, went to San Francisco for a night of electronic music, got schooled and rediscovered Hotmail.

So, that’s a wrap. I hope you’ve discovered a few new things about Windows. I’ve certainly had a blast writing about them. There will be more to come, so be sure to follow me on Twitter for all the latest news.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering who I am—this is me and thanks for reading!

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

After taking a little time off to enjoy my birthday, I am pleased to bring back the next installment of the Windows Recession Sweepstakes.

We’ve done seven sweeps so far and I realized this weekend that I’ve never talked about Hotmail. Windows Live Hotmail recently got a refresh and it’s more powerful than ever at helping you save time and sweep away inbox clutter.

Now, you can work with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files right from your email – even if you don’t have Microsoft Office installed on your PC. You’re also protected from junk mail by Microsoft SmartScreen, which governments and businesses use to protect their email, and you can now send up to 10GB in attachments.

So, go give the new Hotmail a try. In the meantime, drop us a comment and tell us what you love about Windows Live. In honor of my birthday, I’ll draw two names from entries this round to win. You have 24 hours to enter rounds 8 & 9. You can always read the full Terms & Conditions here.

Please Tweet this post, and don’t forget to follow me for all the inside track on all the latest news.

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.

In the first part of this series on the design process for the new Hotmail, I mentioned the very important role that user feedback plays and highlighted the principles we use to make decisions that lead to meaningful, discoverable improvements for our users. Now that the new Hotmail has been released to the whole world, I wanted to provide a closer look at it and share our thoughts on the iterations that went into creating some of the new features.

Helping users clean out the clutter and find important mail quickly

In the new Hotmail, we wanted to make it easy to do email “triage.” That’s what we call the process of managing email – deleting the stuff you don’t want, junking the stuff that slipped through spam filters, and filing away important stuff you want to keep.

A couple of requirements we kept in mind:

• One-click access to find important messages (e.g., "from contacts," “from social networks,” etc.)
• Quick ways for busy people to remove clutter from their inbox

We worked with multiple concepts before defining exactly what we wanted to do. Here are some of the ones we tried out.

Early Concept 1: Making a fun interaction by putting the filters as buttons on top of the message list

In this concept, the big buttons would be the way you would “show” or “hide” email in the various categories. How’d it do? Well, in user testing, people felt it took up too much space and required too much interaction. It was kind of fun to use, but we heard comments like “awkward” and “cumbersome,” which clearly didn’t fit with what we were trying to do.

Early Concept 2: Doing something more expected by putting the filters as links in the message list

In this concept, simple links in the message list would allow one-click filtering. We ended up throwing this concept out because it was virtually impossible to get a multi-filtered view using this model (not super helpful for triage mode). Not only that, but adding these links to each line item in the message list would further reduce the available space for more important stuff like the sender’s name and the message subject. Not good.

Mid-Process Concept 3: Narrowing it down with split dropdowns for the filters

The approach here shows where we were mid-way through our design and research process. “Split dropdowns” are what we call something that has two behaviors—you could click “Contacts” and filter by contacts, or you could click the arrow and see a dropdown menu with other options. To take up less space, the filters were grouped into two categories: “concepts” (e.g. “from contacts”, “from social networks” etc.) and “status” (read, unread, flagged, etc.). However, this design just didn’t allow for one-click access. Back to the drawing board…

Mid-Process Concept 4: Dumping dropdowns and making the filters into simple text links on top of the message list

Another option we explored was just surfacing all of the filters as text links by default. We tested this pretty extensively in usability sessions (as well as in a longitudinal study over several months) and found that since the filter links were aligned right, they were pretty much invisible. That didn’t fit the bill either.

Final: Putting it all together, with the filters as text links (aligned left) on top of the message list

So here is where we landed. We removed the blue link treatment, aligned them left (at the expense of our sorting functionality, which migrated to the less visible far right icon). We also evaluated this in usability testing and found that once folks interacted with the filters, it was clear to them how the filters worked, and over time, they grew to love them. Boom! Goal achieved: an easy way to slice and dice the message list for quickly managing your email.

Hotmail’s navigation and overall UI

One of the harder principles to sort out is the idea that change is bad unless it’s great. To accommodate all the new features we wanted to add, we knew that we had to evolve the overall “wrapper” (that’s what we call the outer edges of the Hotmail interface). But we didn’t want to disorient anyone.

One of the first places we started was the left-hand navigation. We knew that we wanted to make the left-hand navigation in Hotmail work more like the left-hand navigation in Windows Explorer for Windows 7. This goal was hard to achieve, but it made sense to us, in order to make your overall Windows experience feel consistent.

Early concept

Early on, we explored placing the search entry box in the left-hand navigation area. We also made the “cogs” (which open little panels for actions like “manage folders”) visible by default. Given our desire to reduce distractions, we ended up making the cogs visible only when you move your mouse near them. That made them harder to find, but it tidied up the interface. Another decision we made early on was to remove the active email address. This allowed the top of the blue box around “Inbox” to be nicely aligned with the box around the message list.

Final decision

Late in the process, we decided to move search out of the left-hand navigation area since it didn’t really have a lot of space for typing. We relabeled “Contacts” to be “Messenger” since we wanted to make sure folks knew that this wasn’t simply a contact list for sending email – it’s a way to start IM’ing!

Conversation threading (back and forth conversations in email)

As we started working on conversation threading, we paid close attention to how Gmail, Outlook, and of course our sister product, Windows Live Mail, handled the feature. We all agreed that none of those designs were optimal for the Hotmail experience. We knew that we needed a design that would allow users to understand distinct messages in a thread, turn threading on/off easily, and collapse unread messages in an elegant and intuitive manner. We also were conscious of the fact that conversation threading was going to be new to a lot of people. So we wanted something that would be completely clear at a glance.

Early on, we thought about email conservations being more like instant messaging, with speech bubbles:

The trouble with bubbles is that they limit the overall width available to the message, so we tried another approach. To help each box “feel” like an individual message, we put a big ol’ yellow Unread envelope at the top. We also added a “show message history” as a way to build a bridge to the previous messages in the conversation and began exploring where to place reply actions.

The next image shows where we were toward the end of the process, when we were still exploring where to put the reply actions. Here, we moved these actions to the top. We felt it was close, but one of the biggest pieces of feedback folks in our user studies told us was, “Hey, when I have a long message, I have to scroll all the way to the top to respond.” The concerns around customers seeing where each individual message starts and ends were something we had to take care of.

After this, we moved the reply actions to both the command bar and the bottom of each page. To help users reply to individual messages, we also provided an “actions” pull-down menu within each message.

The biggest issues we faced—breaks between messages, the placement of reply actions, and overall layout—required extensive iteration, consideration, and feedback from customers.

Could conversations be the default view for all Hotmail customers?

We asked our longitudinal study participants whether they wanted to use the existing “one line per message in the inbox” approach or group messages by conversations. That is, “Should everyone on Hotmail see messages grouped by conversations by default?” We gathered feedback after 7 days, 45 days, and 90 days, and here’s what we heard them say:

Needless to say, this told us that we probably shouldn’t turn it on for everybody. It was promising at first (72% said “yes”) but over time it slid progressively downwards from 58% to 51% the last time we asked, so we’ve left “conversations” as something each individual user can turn on.

These features took a lot of time to get just right, and they represent a lot of hard work. Needless to say, we’re thrilled with the way they came out, and judging from what we heard before and all the way through our design process, we think you’ll like it too.

I hope you’re enjoying this look at how and why we do what we do here at Hotmail. Part three will be coming soon, with a look at some more of the fun and super useful things we’ve put together for you. Check back soon.

Michael Kopcsak – Senior User Experience Lead, Windows Live

Here at Hotmail, we’ve had quite a busy week! All of our customers are now upgraded. The majority of you got the new Hotmail just this past week, as we completed the rollout to over 350 million people in more than 220 countries around the world. Now, everyone can take advantage of a faster Hotmail experience with great new features like one-click filters, Sweep, Active Views and more.

We hope you like the new Hotmail. We want to hear from you, whether you like it or whether you’re having any issues or problems (or just found things you don’t like). You can leave comments in this blog, use our support forums or click the feedback link right in Hotmail (you can find it in the lower right corner of the page).

We’ve already gotten lots of feedback, and we’ve already made some changes based on the feedback we’ve received – for instance, we no longer sign you into Messenger by default. We’ll continue to go through feedback, and we’ll continue to make improvements and updates. So, keep the comments coming and thanks for using Hotmail.

Mike Schackwitz

Here at Hotmail, we’ve been busy getting our latest release out to our customers – upgrading server clusters, building the new indexes for conversation threading, and making tweaks to our site metrics and deployment software. This deployment was complex, but it has been one of the smoothest in Hotmail history. We know many of you have been anxious to get the new Hotmail for your own accounts ever since we announced the new features, and we appreciate your patience and your feedback.

I’m very happy to report that we are picking up the pace of the rollout. In fact, as of this morning, we have over 100 million customers using the new Hotmail, and we’re upgrading even more users as we speak. We expect to upgrade nearly all of our customers within the next week.

Once the rollout of the new Hotmail is complete, we’ll start preparing for the release of Exchange ActiveSync for Hotmail, which will allow you to sync your email, calendar, and contacts with your mobile phone. That release will happen later this summer – keep watching this blog for details.

We hope you like the new Hotmail. Thanks for all of your feedback and support, and thank you for using Hotmail.

Mike Schackwitz

What we set out to accomplish

Talking to customers gives us great ideas about how to make Hotmail better.

One of the things we hear about the most is inbox overload: folks want to find important emails quickly. Whether it’s an important back-and-forth conversation with friends or a YouTube video that brightened your day, it can be hard to find the messages that matter most. When we set out to design the new Hotmail, our main goal was to solve the problem of too much clutter.

In addition to cleaning up the inbox, customers also told us they want to save time doing email. In response, we designed the email interface to make your message content come alive so that you can enjoy it from right in the email itself. For example, when your sister sends you a link to photos on Flickr, you won’t actually have to go to Flickr. When you buy a package online, you can see where it is from inside your shipping receipt. When you’re collaborating on an Office document, you can do it online without having to install Office. Our goal was to make these features natural and easy to use by putting a lot of careful thought into a clear and uncluttered design that would save you clicks and work without getting in your way.

The design principles we used throughout the process

Our design and research team is made up of people who’ve spent years learning about what our customers care about and how they expect to interact with services on the web. Over time, we’ve developed design principles to make sure we do what’s right. These principles, the Windows User Experience Principles, are intended to make changes feel smooth, not like a sudden “big bang.”

CHANGE IS BAD, UNLESS IT’S GREAT

We realize that change is hard for our customers, so we don’t take it lightly. Any change we undertook needed to have clear purpose and a worthwhile payoff.

Questions we asked:

• Do we fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of the previous experience?
• Have we considered all the drawbacks of the change?
• Will people thank us for making this change?

SOLVE DISTRACTIONS, NOT DISCOVERABILITY

We need to make the hard design choices so that our experience is natural and intuitive at the right moments and trust that people will explore the rest.

Questions we asked:

• What is the experience going to be great at?
• Are we presenting interface elements when they’re relevant?

INCREASE CONFIDENCE BY REDUCING CONCEPTS

It’s easy to get excited about making every possible thing new and get carried away refreshing or rethinking every last detail, but that doesn’t always make for good design.

Questions we asked:

• Are we reducing what’s unnecessary in our design?
• Are we reusing what works and reinventing only when needed?
• How is any new concept justifiably different from what’s already there?

A closer look at some of the big changes

In my next two posts, I’m going to give you a behind-the-scenes peek at how we arrived at particular designs for some of our bigger changes in the new Hotmail. I’ll be showing you ideas and concepts that we debated and discussed with Hotmail customers along the way so you can see the range of options we considered and evaluated with real-life customers.

Michael Kopcsak – Senior User Experience Lead, Windows Live

UPDATE: We’re working hard to get the new Hotmail rolled out to the rest of the world. Read this update post for news on the rollout, and once you have the new Hotmail in your hands, look for parts two and three of our look at the design process.

The Hotmail rollout continues to go along smoothly and we’re right on track with our release plan, having now upgraded nearly 50 million accounts on several different clusters. Of course, we continue to get comments from many of you who are eager to get access to the new Hotmail, and we’re just as eager to get the new version out to everyone.

I’d like to give a bit more detail about why it takes time to do the rollout. In the last post, I explained that we go slowly at first in order to give our engineers an opportunity to study the operational characteristics of the new software in all the different environments. That’s true of every release. But there is another reason why this particular release can only move so fast.

In order to turn on the new features in Hotmail – features like conversation threads, QuickViews, and Filters – we need to build new indexes in the storage system for your email. These new indexes allow Hotmail to instantly show you mail from your contacts, or show you messages that contain photos, or let you organize your email by conversation.

We are currently running software on the site to create the right indexes for all the mail in your Inbox. That software must read from and write to the many, many hard drives where Hotmail data is stored. And, of course, it can’t get in the way of you accessing your inbox or receiving new emails. At the end of the day, we’re constrained by the “laws of physics” for how fast we can read and write thousands and thousands of hard disk drives!

When the indexing process is complete, we’ll be turning on the new Hotmail for all our users. We’ll continue to keep you posted on the progress right here on Inside Windows Live.

Thanks again for your patience and support – we’re getting very close now, and it’s very exciting.

Mike Schackwitz

As Piero mentioned in his blog post, we had two main goals when building the newest version of Windows Live: making everyday tasks simpler, and connecting Windows 7 to the cloud. In the new Windows Live Mail beta, we did a lot of work to make these goals a reality, and today I’d like to give you a quick tour of some of the high points.

Making it easy to share photos via the cloud

Given all of the talk about sharing on the web, you might be surprised to hear that fully half of all content sharing is done through email. Attaching photos to an email message is convenient, but it actually isn’t a great way to share because of limits on the number and size of email attachments. A lot of people try to deal with these limits by shrinking photos before mailing them out, or sending them in small, separate batches instead of all at the same time, but these are compromises that you shouldn’t have to make.

The new Windows Live Mail gives you a better option. Now, by simply dragging your photos into a message that you’re composing, you can create beautiful photo email messages like these:

There are a bunch of different album styles to choose from, so you can show your photos in a way that best reflects your style and personality.

But the Windows Live Mail beta doesn’t just give you beautiful albums; now, limits on photo size and attachments are yesterday’s news. When you send photos, a SkyDrive album is automatically created for you, and your photos are uploaded to the cloud. The people who receive your mail will then see the photos in the email, of course, but they’ll also see them in Messenger, in the social highlights feed:

…and in Hotmail:

…and of course, when they click the images in any of these places, they can view your SkyDrive album from any computer or mobile phone that has Internet access. Your albums are privacy-protected, so only your friends who receive your mail can see your photos. All of this happens without any extra effort on your part – just drag your photos into your email, and Windows Live Mail takes care of the rest.

Windows Live Mail makes it simple to organize your mailbox

We also made big changes to make it quicker and more efficient to read your mail. The most obvious change is sitting at the top of the window. To make it quicker and easier to perform your everyday tasks, we identified the most frequently used commands, and put them front and center in the ribbon:

Next, we turned our attention to the inbox itself. Those of you who get a lot of email know it can be confusing to follow email conversations that extend over several days. In the traditional, sorted-by-date view of the inbox, it’s tough to quickly find and skim any but the most recent replies in an email conversation. In Windows Live Mail’s new conversation view, related messages are grouped together, which allows you to see all of the replies on a subject in one place:

I find that this makes reading and responding to my email much quicker and easier, but since some of you prefer the traditional inbox view, we made it easy to turn the conversation view on or off using the ribbon:

Simplifying your schedule too

Last but not least on our tour of the new Windows Live Mail: the calendar. I live my life by my calendar – if something’s not in there, it’s not happening, or at least I’m not going to be there. Our user data shows that this is true for a lot of you as well: 25% of Windows Live Mail users use the calendar to schedule events.

To help those of you who are addicted to your calendar, we added a calendar pane to the side of the inbox. The calendar pane shows you upcoming events, and provides a quick way for you to create new events without ever leaving your inbox:

Together, these changes help you to manage your email and calendar more quickly and efficiently, all in one place.

So, that’s the short tour of the new Windows Live Mail beta. We hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed building it!

Stephen Hui
Lead Program Manager, Windows Live Mail