The power of SmartArt

Posted on by ewand

Careful you say it, “SmartArt“. It’s a new capablity in Office 2007 which is designed to make manipulation of graphical representations more easy – you know, instead of a boring list of words, a presentation or document can have more impact if a diagram is used instead.

Here’s just one example a colleague gives, which illustrates the point beautifully. Let’s say we’re in Powerpoint and want to do a simple chart of steps in a process. You could enter the steps as text, and select it like shown in the screenshot. Look on the Ribbon after you’ve selected it, and select “Convert to SmartArt”.

What you’ll now see is a “live preview” of a selection of SmartArt shapes which will modify the layout of the graphic you’d convert the text into. There are about 115 different SmartArt schemes, arranged by category (eg are you trying to show a hierarchy, a process flow, a relationship etc). Once you’ve settled on which scheme you want, the Ribbon’s context will change and offer you lots of ways to vary the style of the graphics (adding shadows, empahsis, colour schemes, 3D effects etc).

It’s not a one-time process this, either: you can go back and tinker with the layout scheme, the colours, effects etc, and since most of the time you’ll see what effect that change would have immediately, there’s a lot less of the to-ing and fro-ing you might have expected when you try stuff out, then think “I don’t like that”, go back, try again…

If ever you’ve sat down and drawn a process flow or relationship map etc in Visio or Powerpoint (or pretty much any other tool), one of the more challenging actions is to insert a new step – imagine the case where you’ve got a simple 4 step model like in my example. If I wanted a cycle type map (maybe illustrating an iterative process) but then needed to add a new step later, I’d be moving all the shapes around and possibly would need to modify all the arrows that link them. With SmartArt, it’s literally a 10-second step.

In my example here, once you’ve applied the style to your SmartArt, a text box will pop up (or you can always click on the SmartArt object to edit the text later)

… and by simply inserting a new line, the graphics representation will be updated and will even vary the colours according to whatever scheme you’re using…

When my colleague Steve was demonstrating this to someone a few months ago, the customer looked agog – and then said he’d literally spent 2 hours the day before, reorganising a diagram which had to have some modifications just like this. I can honestly say, it’s saved me hours of work too when doing flow charts for documentation. Truly one of the coolest features in Office 2007 which lets the author concentrate less on making everything look pretty (since that only takes a snap), and spend more time on making the content right.

Whilst looking in the Office help yesterday (and it really is very helpful), I noticed there are links to demo videos on the web – there’s one quite nice one on using SmartArt. See if you can count how many times the presenter says “Hmmm, I like that!” 🙂

Finally, a sidebar gadget worth having

Posted on by ewand

Oooh, that’s a bit flippant. The whole Vista sidebar thing has kind of passed me by, though it really does make sense on widescreen monitors.

Kitten has nothing but destruction on his little mindI set about looking for a particular gadget today, though – one of my cats managed to knock my home PC over last night (it’s a desktop which I have standing vertically under the desk, propped up on a couple of old plastic floppy disk boxes to allow airflow under).

Following Arnie’s destructive rampage, the PC refused to boot. So I had to drag it out from under the desk, and start pulling it apart to figure out what was wrong. After a process of elimination, I figured that the CPU must be the problem and sure enough, the CPU cooler had come loose. On closer inspection, the CPU itself had been yanked out of position (by the weight of the huge heatsink/fan combo) and managed to mangle numerous of the 478 pins…

… which is never going to be a good thing.

Anyway, I eventually gave up trying to straighten the pins (that’s one way to make you go cross-eyed) and decided to sacrifice the CPU from another PC that happens to be elsewhere in the house. By the time I’d taken *that* one to bits, put the CPU in my main machine, reassembled both and reinstalled the system unit under the desk, I was pretty happy.

Until about 5 minutes in to using the thing, when it abruptly shut itself down and emitted a selection of beeps on restarting… uh oh, sounds like a thermal shutdown where the system throws itself on its own sword rather than bursting into flames.

It turns out the CPU fan cable had got wrapped around the fan itself so the cooling forces were less than optimal (ie none, apart from the heatsink). After fixing that and reassembling/reinstalling the machine, I went looking for SpeedFan, a great little bit of diagnostic software that displays all the temperatures, fan speeds, voltages etc from the numerous internal sensors within the case (if your system supports it).

There’s even a beta SpeedFan gadget, which will report any of the info that Speedfan can grab, right there on the sidebar. Excellent!

More information here.

PS – another tip for Sidebar usage… Windows Key + Space bring it to the fore.

Chris Bangle – an inspiration

Posted on by ewand

I was fortunate enough to listen to Chris Bangle, group chief of design at BMW, talk about design, about his own personal journey to where he is now and what inspires him, when he spoke at Microsoft’s TechReady conference in Seattle earlier this year. Paul Foster wrote a good review of that session, closing with a comment that Chris presented to us (bearing in mind the audience was several thousand technical people):

For generations, man has wondered what dreams are. We’ve had Freud and many others try to define dreaming, but Chris said Microsoft had helped him solve this mystery. Dreams are really just our brains defragmenting over night…

Now Chris is a man who has made quite an impact on car design at BMW, and has legions of fans and detractors in the car industry. His controversial “flame surfacing” design style, which first saw light in the BMW 7-series redesign of a few years ago and has gone to influence every model since, is a great example of the kind of design change which initially many people are resistant to, but get over it in the end and may even look back on it favourably.

When Windows XP came out, a lot of business people complained that it was too glossy and consumer-oriented, and they wanted to swtich off all the nice stuff and make it look like Windows 2000. I haven’t heard too many people say the same about Vista, but the question of whether there is a “classic mode” always comes up with any UI redesign, like the Ribbon in Office 2007.

Listening to Chris talk about the way design evolves, and how sometimes it takes a leap forward, it’s quite possible to draw comparisons with the world of IT, or wider into consumer devices, fashion etc.

I came across a video of Chris talking to car people, at the Autocar Awards 2006, on his thoughts of the cars of tomorrow. Quite a bit of the content he used was also part of his speech to Microsoft people, but what he said and the emphasis on what points he was making, were subtly different. It’s well worth 12 minutes of your time to watch this video – even if you don’t like Chris’s car designs, you can’t deny he’s a smart guy who appears really likeable in person.

| Link to video | Link to Autocar TV |

How to really wipe a hard disk

Posted on by ewand

In one of those weird coincidences, someone asked a question to an email DL in MS this morning, about how to securely erase a hard disk (since, as every skoolboy kno, deleting files doesn’t really remove them from the HDD, and even formatting a HDD still leaves residue that could be recovered).

A few suggestions came back:

As it happened, Robin Harris from ZDNet blogged today about some freeware utilities to go over the disk and overwrite every track, even blocks marked as bad, using the “Secure Erase” function that’s built into most ATA disks, but is not typically made accessible by the BIOS. It’s a process that’s not for the faint hearted, but still seems effective (and appears to be good enough for the US National Security Agency).

The best comment I saw in response to the internal mail was the final suggestion, though:

  • Military method – a team with angle grinders destroy the platters + one person to witness that it was done.

I suppose the military really like to do things properly 🙂

Communicator phones sneaking out

Posted on by ewand

When Microsoft first announced the Unified Communications strategy & partnerships last year, one of the pictures that was shown off was of a prototype “Communicator phone” – a networked device which could be used to make phone calls through the Office Communications Server, and would show the presence of the user’s list of contacts, as held on OCS and normally manipulated through the Office Communicator client.

I’ve had a play with one of these prototype devices (courtesy of Mark Deakin) and although it still has the air of an unfinished product, it’s a really interesting idea – sign in to the phone and see the presence of all your contacts, or search the AD directly from the phone so you can dial people by name rather than a number.

I saw a slide the other day with a photo of a device that Polycom is building – and came across the same picture on Tom Keating’s blog too… it’s starting to look very interesting device-wise. Word is, further details will be available soon, so watch this space…

Thread Compressor for Outlook – do you want it?

Posted on by ewand

Here’s an appeal – nearly 8 years ago, I wrote* a little COM addin for the-then new Outlook 2000, which “compressed threads”. The idea was that it could take an email thread (eg a discussion over a period of time and a number of responses, from any number of people, and typically sent to a distribution list for the purposes of discussion), and compress that thread down to the salient points. It has evolved over a few iterations since but has been largely dormant for the best part of 5 years – it does everything I need it to do, so I’ve never developed it any further (and if truth be told, a hard disk crash blew away the source for the last version and I could never face going back to a previous beta and re-developing the changes I’d made).

I’d like to understand if anyone else would like it.

The basic assumption with Thread Compressor is that when people reply using Outlook, they tend to add all their comments at the top – some do inline replies, but most eschew that – and don’t edit the original contents. If this assumption holds true, then it would be possible to compress all discussion threads down to only holding onto the final email or the final post (to a public folder) since it will contain the entire history of that branch of the thread. Of course, there may be multiple branches of the thread, and Thread Compressor handles that.

The first time many people run TC on a large folder, it will routinely get rid of 50% or more of the content, so proves useful in slimming down folders where you archive stuff, or folders where distribution list contents are sent by Outlook rules, never to be read but to be indexed by Windows Desktop Search or similar.

In my last run, I scanned almost 1Gb of email and the Thread Compressor discovered about 21Mb of mail which could be removed… not quite as dramatic as 50%, but it saved me reading over 1,000 emails and it reduced my mailbox size a little…

There are a few obvious benefits to thread compression…

  • It reduces the size of your mailbox, so keeps you under-quota
  • It removes spurious email so you have less stuff to plough through
  • When searching, it reduces the number of hits since it won’t return every mail in a thread which contains the same word(s)

… but some obvious potential downsides…

  • The assumption at the top of this post. If I reply to someone’s email, but change the contents of their original message in the reply, then TC will retain the modified version and it will look like the originator really said that. There may be ways to work around this limitation now, but I never bothered to figure them out.
  • Legal compliance – maybe you need to keep a copy of every mail for compliance purposes: if so, users programmatically deleting messages could be a *bad thing*.
  • erm, can’t think of any/many more…

If you think this kind of functionality should be either built into Outlook or available as an opt-in addon, then please let me know. We have many thousands of regular users of Thread Compressor inside Microsoft. It would be cool to think of millions more outside as well…

//Ewan

* The really smart bit of TC was actually put together by a guy called Peter Lamsdale. All I did was take his algorithm – which I still have difficulty understanding much less explaining – and strap a UI around it. An earlier version of TC was published (unofficially) on a website and an article was written about it by Evan Morris. There is even an unconnected MSDN bit of sample code which is nowhere near as effective (IMHO)

Blackberry outage – worrying for mobile mail junkies

Posted on by ewand

I just read news of an 11-hour outage in RIM’s Blackberry infrastructure on ZDNet – ouch. Not only did email stop flowing to the devices during the outage, but the backlog of mail which built up is taking time to clear.

Without wishing to gloat (really), users of Windows Mobile devices for push email wouldn’t suffer something like this (with the possible exception of their mobile carrier having a major network outage, which would affect Blackberry users as well and would be unlikely to last so long). Once you’ve deployed a real mobile mail solution, having any kind of serious outage is a worrying thing – especially if users are giving up laptops in order to rely on their mobile devices…

There are some architectural documents which outline the approach to using Windows Mobile and Exchange – such as the one in the Deployment Guide.

If you’re interested in how Direct Push works, you’d do well to check out these posts on the Exchange Team blog too:

Outlook 2007 update – performance improvement on large PST/OST files

Posted on by ewand

I’ve been beta-testing this update for a little while and it seems to make quite a difference to the performance of Outlook 2007 (especially at startup) when you have large PST files, or a large offline cache of a mailbox. The Outlook team released it live, yesterday.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933493

I’d highly recommend giving it a go – it’s one of those updates where you might not really notice much positive improvement after you’ve installed it, but you do notice that there are less of the times where you notice there’s a performance problem 🙂

The day I met Tony Blair, talked about online healthcare

Posted on by ewand

I am feeling under the weather at the moment.

Been off work for a couple of days with what seems to be some kind of chest infection. I finally decided to stop waiting for it to go away on its own, and went to see the doctor – starting by looking at the website of the surgery, since I’ve moved house in the last year and haven’t had a need to register with the new place yet.

Just as a precaution, I went off to NHS Direct to see what was wrong with me – they have a wizard that asks you about the symptoms you might be experiencing, after you give it a steer. So I thought, “Breathing difficulties in Adults”, yep… then filled out the next set of answers… 

Now my lips aren’t blue (as far as I recall), I can talk OK but now and again do have a bit of a wheeze, so that sounds about right..

YIKES. Anyway, I’m pretty confident I’m not in the midst of a heart attack so I’ll ignore that advice for now.

Having a look around my doctor’s website, though, it turns out they are now offering appointments which can be made online. Now that seems like a great step in the right direction for busy people. It set me thinking about the time when the UK’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his wife & entourage, dropped in to see us in Microsoft UK.

 

The Blairs visit

This was in the run up to the June 2001 election, and the Labour Party had asked if Tony, Cherie & co could come and see us on the day they launched their business manifesto. Of course, Microsoft said yes, and went ahead arranging an event in our central atrium where we would do a few demos to the PM and Mrs Blair, on some forthcoming technology (Office XP) and some future directions stuff.

I was asked to do one of the demos, and with a colleague concocted a mock-up of a system that might be imlemented some time in the future, but in this case was using a Pocket PC with Wireless LAN (then a PCMCIA card in a Jacket that clipped to the back of a still-shiny Compaq iPaq).

(that’s me at the bottom in case you haven’t guessed)

The demo was a little app which a health visitor might use if doing a home visit to a couple with a new born baby, notices the baby’s a bit off-colour. The app would:

  •  issue a prescription of the appropriate medicine
  • let the parents chose which pharmacists they’d like to have the prescription details sent to automatically (advising back when the prescription would be ready for collection)
  • arranged a date of a follow-up appointment with a doctor at the surgery, based on their availability and the parents’ preference of time.

SIx years ago, this might not have looked like rocket science to IT people but could really change the way healthcare is delivered. Now, it looks like a straightforward thing to do technically, what with advances is size and power of mobile devices which would be 3G connected or similar.

I stepped through the wizard on the device, which was being shown on Plasma screens all round the place, and the deal was that I’d give the device to Mr Blair at the end of the wizard, so he could sign the prescription (as the parent, obviously – at this point, the Blairs had a fairly young baby themselves, so that scenario seemed plausible).

The trouble was, in order for the signature to be visible on screen, I had to remember to tap in a specific place (to set the cursor at the right point, actually) and in the nerves of the situation, forgot – so I handed the PM the device, asked him to sign, which he duly did with a flourish… but nothing came up on the screen. He did look a little bemused (and smiling) while handing the device back, but said nothing … he’s either a total pro, or had literally no idea what was going on… I’ll leave the judgment to yourselves 🙂 I just mumbled something about the signature being secure etc, and moved on quickly…

Anyway, the visit seemd to go well, and the whole demos were broadcast live on Sky News (where the news presenter said, on coming back to the studio after my piece, that he felt sorry for the PM after receiving “an ear bashing like that”!) There was a little negative commentary from the usual places, but otherwise a day to remember – for me at least, if not for the guests of honour!

The Design of Everyday Things

Posted on by ewand

In part 2 of my book post about design (part 1 was earlier this week), I’ll revisit an old title which is still great reading for anyone interested in cognitive theory or design. It was written by Donald Norman, and first published nearly 20 years ago as “The Psychology of Everyday Things“. The author found that bookshops & libraries tended to lump the book in with all the psychology textbooks, so a later edition was re-released under the modified title of the Design of Everyday Things.

The book itself looks at lots of good examples of where a designer has clearly thought about a problem and taken account of it in the design, but the more interesting (to me, at least) cases are where the usability of a system is so totally shot just because the designer didn’t take a simple thing into account.

Examples of the kinds of scenarios that Norman deals with are cookers where the layout of controls for the burners is different to that of the burners themselves (eg the burners are 2 x 2 but the controls are in a line of 4 – very common) or light switches which seemingly bear no resemblance to the layout of the lights they operate. I’ve lived in houses for years, and still kept getting the switches in the hall round the wrong way, so I know where he’s coming from there. In fact, in my house right now, the left hand switch operates the lights at the right side of the room and vice versa – I really must get round to rewiring that switch one day.

My favourite examples in the book are of the humble door, however. Here are some example photos I’ve taken on a camera phone (my new Orange E600, a version of the HTC S620 which Darren recently raved about).

The first 2 pictures are of a fire door in Microsoft UK’s TVP campus; the point about design here is that there are no instructions on the door about what to do. If you walk up to a fire exit door, for example, and it has a horizontal bar across it, you would be drawn to grab it and do something – quite possibly pull on it, but when it doesn’t move up, you’d push, and the door would open.

Similarly, when you walk up to a door which doesn’t have any handles, the only thing you can do is push, so that’s what you’ll do, right? 

To make it a little easier, a good designer would put a plate of some kind on the door, to underline the fact that there isn’t a handle for a reason (ie it hasn’t fallen off or anything).

Conversely, when you see a handle, you’ll instinctively grab it and pull. So a well designed door will have a handle on the side that needs to be pulled, and nothing (or a plate) on the side that’s pushed.  The only other marks on these fire doors are signs saying that the door is to be kept closed. Interestingly, they was part of the original Thames Valley Park campus which opened in 1997.

Now if we move to a newer part of the campus, there are nicer-looking glass doors, but their design is less clear – there are handles on both sides which look swish, but offer no affordance – ie they don’t give the user any clue which way the door is going to open. Maybe you could look out for hinges or the likes, but it’s very common to see people walk up to a door and pull it when they should be pushing.

To try to avoid that confusion, the door company puts a little sign saying “Pull” or “Push” on the door – something that still evades many people’s attention, a bit like The Far Side cartoon of the School for the Gifted.

Here are just two examples…

Even the old part of campus has plenty of glass doors, but they are designed correctly. Evidence:

There is nothing on this door other than the furniture – a piece of design which looks good, doesn’t have anything superfluous, and yet is easier to use than the more fussily “designed” items.

It’s books like DOET which give you a new perspective on the mundane things you’d not normally notice, and as a result, are well worth a good thumb through even if not an exhaustive read.