IT's all about the User Experience
The User Experience of moving to BPOS
Mar 24th
BPOS is short for Business Productivity Online Suite and is Microsoft’s cloud-based service similar to Google Apps. You get Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online for a pretty low price per user (currently 85 SEK/month per user, minimum 5 seats). No need to host and manage your own servers, no mess of updating, patching, securing and backing up your server environment – amongst other benefits.
There are a lot of articles and marketing material out there reflecting these benefits of BPOS and what cost benefits it will bring, and there’s also a lot of information on back-end migration processes, but the actual end user experience I’ve found very little on.
Having worked in a Microsoft Office environment in the large-scale corporate world for many years I found it interesting to evaluate BPOS from a User Experience point of view; what will be different for users if the IT department decides to move from on-premise SharePoint, Exchange, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server to BPOS? So, here goes…
Top-5 issues that are likely to annoy your users:
1. Client auto-configuration failures
Perhaps you will do thorough analysis, testing, configuring, packaging and deploying of the client components as part of the overall migration processes to BPOS, and if so, this problem will not apply as much to you and your users.
However, presumably many corporations will align the strategy to move into the cloud with a strategy to move to BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer). You would therefore expect client-side components required for the cloud services, such as the Microsoft Online Services Sign In client, to be easy to install and configure so that users potentially can do it themselves.
Not likely.
The client software itself is a simple download followed by a next-next-next-wizard, but when it starts to auto-configure your locally installed software (such as Internet Explorer, Outlook, Office Communicator and Live Meeting) that’s when problems start to arise.
The problems may not be noticed at once, but once they do occur you may have difficulties tracking the source of them – at least we did. Here’s one problem we got in our pilot whenever we tried to open a document from within SharePoint Online:
We also got the following error whenever we tried to save a document from within Word (or PowerPoint or Excel for that matter) onto SharePoint Online:
The Microsoft Office Upload Center did not help much with its taciturn error messages, but after time-consuming trouble-shooting and searching the net this issue seems to be pretty common amongst BPOS users, and one workaround (which at least worked in our scenario) was to disable “Automatically detect settings” in Internet Explorer:
No idea why the Sign In client enabled this setting (no, it wasn’t enabled before) and disabling it will not work for all businesses since this setting may need to be enabled depending on your infrastructure setup. The point is; there’s a risk the Sign In client will make changes causing problems for your users. Do not leave it to them to install it themselves.
Another issue that may cause problems is that the Sign In client will create a new Outlook profile for BPOS/Exchange Online, meaning if users already were using Outlook with a default profile they will have to logoff and logon Outlook whenever they want to switch between mailbox accounts. That’s just not acceptable in the BYOC world. Do not expect novice users to be able to add BPOS as an additional mailbox to their current profile themselves (unless given very clear and specific instructions), the Outlook profile settings for BPOS are quite advanced.
If users do end up with multiple Outlook profiles because of client auto-configuration, then the side effect may be that synchronization with mobile phones and other hand-held devices will not work as supposed to. In our tests, we had all sorts of problems with getting iTunes and iPhones to sync the correct mailbox and data once BPOS had done its auto-configuration.
2. Not possible to add users outside own organization
In a world where businesses outsource, offshore, acquisition, merge, partner and externalize as everyday business it’s really critical to be able to communicate and collaborate with users outside your own company and organization. Sadly, this is not possible with BPOS/Office Communications Online. Here’s Microsoft’s response when I asked them about this issue:
“Unfortunately at this time Office Communications Online (OCO) only works within your company and will not accept users that are not account license holders. A future release of OCO is planned to include what is referred to as “Federation” meaning it will be open to outside users and even other Instant Messaging applications but I do not have a date when that will be available”. Hopefully they will add this when BPOS is upgraded to version 2010…
Also note that person-to-person audio and video communication can occur only between two PCs on the same corporate network where no firewall exist between the computers.
3. No easy way to initiate ad-hoc meetings
Normally if the LiveMeeting client is installed, the option “Share Information Using Live Meeting” is enabled in Office Communicator allowing you to select one or several users you want to collaborate / web conference with. You simply right-click and choose ‘Share Information Using live Meeting’, that’s all you need to kick off an ad-hoc LiveMeeting.
However, when it comes to BPOS, even when the LiveMeeting client installed on both the calling and receiving client this option is greyed out:
Without this option in Office Communicator users will have to initiate a LiveMeeting via the LiveMeeting web interface, which is anything from intuitive and easy to use. I’ve done usability tests previously in large organizations that prove this – very clearly. It’s easy enough to join an already set up LiveMeeting if you’re provided with a direct link, but to set up a meeting takes too long to even call it ad-hoc.
4. Office Communicator presence does not sync with Outlook
The note field in Office Communicator is supposed to sync automatically with Outlook when a meeting appears in the calendar at the time, or when Out of Office reply is active. This does not seem to work in BPOS and instead an Exchange Connection Error is shown:
There might be workarounds to this, but we have not been able to get any solution or workaround to this from Microsoft, nor find one ourselves.
5. Limitations in web-based capabilities
Imagine your business moves into the cloud and heads for BYOC and so on; your users are supposed to be able work from anywhere, any time and any device. It’s an old worn out slogan, but nevertheless it’s the vision for many businesses. Does BPOS support this vision? Not fully.
For one thing, one of our pilot users was not even able to logon to BPOS using the Safari browser on Mac. The browser simply reloaded the page when trying to logon without even giving any errors. Unfortunately this was discovered at the end of our BPOS trial period so we never had the time and opportunity to dig any deeper into the issue.
But even if you’re on a Windows client that is not part of your corporate network, for example if you use a temporary PC in an airport lounge or a coffee shop, then you will notice that BPOS is really designed to be used together with locally installed client components and software products (aka software-plus-services, which is Microsoft’s strategy) rather than through a thin client web-only interface (aka Software as a Service; SaaS).
The picture below gives an overview of what features you will lose if you use BPOS through a web-only interface compared to if you use it together with locally installed client components and software products from Microsoft.
Of course all client-side components that need to be installed to avoid the limitations with the web-only interface will result in resident processes occupying resources on your PC.
This document further describes some of the current features and limitations with BPOS:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/9/1/C9168B0C-5FC8-49C6-A1A4-1632C76C193D/OCO_Standard_Service_Description.doc
Additionally…
When comparing Microsoft BPOS to Google Apps there’s a few other disadvantages with BPOS such as you need pay for and have Microsoft Office installed locally, and you cannot real-time co-author any documents. You will have to check-out and check-in documents when editing them and only way to collaborate real-time in authoring/editing documents is using LiveMeeting.
However, these shortages, including some of the issues and limitations listed above, will be addressed once BPOS will be based on SharePoint 2010 instead which will be released 12-May-2010. BPOS is expected to be upgraded to 2010 within 3-6 months after its release. I would therefore recommend you consider not moving to BPOS until then, if your plan is to move.
We’re currently also evaluating Google Apps in comparison to BPOS so next article will be about the User Experience of Google Apps. As a heads-up, if your users are custom to an on-premise Microsoft environment, then it’s very likely they are better off moving to BPOS than to Google Apps.
Adobe got RIA backwards and spelled it AIR
Mar 10th
The new version of Voddler released 8th March is using Adobe AIR. I can understand why; for one thing they need the code to run outside the browser to be able to force the user to watch the commercials before the film starts (for those that don’t know, you cannot even Alt-Tab to another window or program while the commercials are showing). Interestingly, it’s like not being able to flick to another TV channel in the commercial break, which no one would tolerate…
But that’s another story and potentially another article. This article is about Adobe AIR and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). According to Adobe’s home page “The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems”. Fair enough.
However, the problem with Adobe AIR is that not only does the AIR runtime require admin access to install on Windows Vista/7, but all the AIR applications do too. In a locked down client environment this means AIR apps will need to be packaged and deployed like any other fat client-side application. One of the RIA principles and main reasons for enterprises moving to web based apps in the first place is to avoid this costly, complex and old-fashion deployment method.
Not that Voddler is something enterprises will deploy, but presumably Adobe Flex is something they will use to develop RIA – especially to achieve browser- and operating systems independency in a world where you outsource, offshore, acquisition, merge, partner and externalize a lot and have no or little control of the target environments in which your apps will run. I have a feeling many foresee the fact that if Flex apps are developed with dependencies to AIR (rather than just Flash) then you may still end up in a scenario where your RIA apps can’t be used due to locked down client environment.
I raised this with Adobe some time ago, and they did admit AIR does not fit the locked-down corporate environments yet, but that they are working on it. So will be interesting to see what they will do in future releases to address this. And yes, title above is exaggerated.
Strictly out of the box – a bad user experience
Feb 9th
I’ve been designing and deploying standardized Windows Desktops in world-wide corporations for many years, and I’ve also presented and discussed the usability aspects of corporate clients with various businesses. What seems to be common is that central IT departments often want to keep the configuration as close to default as possible, apart from security configurations which they love to tweak and tighten – or even if they don’t love to they do so because the security guys tell them to. Nobody questions security, which is more than you can say about usability.
However, the closer you get to the actual users, for example to local IT coordinators, support personnel or the like, the more they want to configure the client for improved usability. I know an horrific example where the Corporate IT department said “usability is out of scope”, “keep it strictly out of the box”, and then the local IT departments went and tweaked the heck out of the client to make the transition to the new client easier for their users. A failure in governance of course. The company ended up with more than 40 different client “designs” globally and needless to say it was a nightmare to manage and maintain up-to-date.
So why and what is it they so desperately want to change from default, you may ask? Well, those who understand the users also understand why you shouldn’t deploy a client that looks like this:
Some time ago I did a usability review of the first beta build of a corporate client based on Vista and Office 2007 which was going to be deployed to 70,000 users, and this was all default and strictly out of the box (apart from the security configurations of course). The first 15 minutes of use I had been prompted about 30 times with questions that normal users don’t understand or simply ignore and just click whatever is default.
Take the lower left prompt in the picture as an example. It asks if the user wants to synchronize RSS Feeds between Outlook, Internet Explorer and whatever else uses something called the Common Feed List. This is Hebrew to most users in large organizations. Most of them don’t even know what an RSS feed is. Hence they will click a random button and not knowing what it means. Some users will have feeds synchronized between Outlook and IE, some won’t. Some will call Helpdesk and ask why behavior is different between their PC and their colleague’s PC next door. And if your Helpdesk is outsourced, it’s likely they will not know the answer because it’s not documented.
Next example – take a look at the lower right prompt in the picture. This is one of the default prompts first time you start a Microsoft Office program. Most users will NOT fill in their name and initials; they will simply hit Enter or click OK. This means all their Microsoft Office documents will be tagged with whatever is default in this field rather than their actual name, which in turn will cause the author META data to be incorrect and result in negative Enterprise Search experience. You have the power, in client design, to ensure all Microsoft Office documents across the enterprise will be tagged with proper user details (and you can even enforce your own model of META data in Microsoft Office “Save dialogue” with SharePoint in the background, see here).
By preconfiguring settings like these (there’s many!) once and for all in the build you’ll avoid confusion and frustration being first impression users get from the new client and you’ll also ensure that the client is configured and behave consistently across the enterprise. In my next article I will describe the approach I normally apply to find out what to configure how for best corporate desktop usability.
.
Usability vs. User Experience (UX)
Jan 15th
I sometimes get the question what the difference is between Usability and User Experience (UX). One may think that User Experience doesn’t necessarily imply that something is usable (whether it’s good or bad, it’s still an experience), and hence Usability is superior to User Experience. However, the emerging trend is to refer to User Experience as the wider perspective and Usability as being part of User Experience, as illustrated below.
By this definition Usability is a subset of the overall User Experience. Usability answers the question, “Can the user accomplish their goal?” with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction about the results (as per the ISO 9241-11 definition of usability). User Experience also answers the question, “Did the user have as delightful an experience as possible doing so?”. User Experience takes far more effort to do well, but the results have far better impact.
A commonly used example of great User Experience is the Apple iPhone where Apple has spent efforts in all of the areas above and succeeded in doing so. The early iPhones did not include latest technologies (far from it) but was a success nevertheless due to being a great User Experience as per definition above. As the NeoSpot slogan states; IT’s all about the User Experience, not about the technology itself.
The new version of ISO 13407, the International Standard for Human Centred Design (which will be called ISO 9241-210 to bring it into line with other usability standards), will also use the term “user experience” according to this link.
There’s a lot of debate on this topic out there. Here’s a few links for those interested:
