Conceptual Clarity

Mike from Atlassian recently responded to the obvious derth of Australian startups on the software scene.  It's an interesting, complex and somewhat disappointing issue and it lead me to think about the issues facing software companies in my home state of Queensland, Australia.  Disturbingly though I think that the issues I'm seeing might be a little more fundamental than a lack of startups.  It appears that Queensland is, or soon will be, experiencing a lack of people to start those startups.  Put simply, I think we will soon be running low on IT graduates.

Queensland is currently riding the wave of Australia's mineral boom, a great thing for the state's economy.  Here in sunny Queensland we have enormous coal, alluminum and other mineral reserves, all of which are adding to the economy, offering jobs and attracting investment in spades (excuse the pun).  However, there is bad news in the offing for some other industries, including IT.  I've heard that IT-related enrolements are significantly down in two of Queensland's key universities, the Queensland University of Technology and the University of Queensland.  They are down so much that QUT has dramatically reduced the size of its IT faculty and UQ is preparing to locate IT teaching at one of its secondary campuses outside of central Brisbane.

Further to this one of the Australian Fairfax papers recently published an article indicating that this is a national trend (it's quite an interesting article, so give it a read), with IT enrolements down at many east-coast universities.  For interest sake I also did a quick survey to see if jobs were also down, but they aren't.  A quick survey shows there are many jobs with IT staff of all kinds - from the help desk through to product management - in good demand all over Australia.

So there's not been a reduction in the number of IT jobs, nor does there appear to be a reduction in salaries, if anything they've increased.  Indeed as the flow-on effects of the economic boom kick in surely there will likely be more positions available with good salaries.  Though, from Ephox's experience in recruiting it is becoming harder to find the right people to fill IT positions and I expect that this is being felt throughout the industry. 

As an industry we should be asking ourselves how we can make this industry more attractive to young people seeking a career.  When I was at university I had never heard of product management and I never expected to be travelling the globe visiting clients, the industry has definitely delivered all I expected and then more.  We need to do a better job of articulating the opportunities within IT, the deversity of roles available and the fact that while the bubble burst, IT never went away and is a much needed part of business and our daily lives. 

As someone who enjoys life in a democratic country I know the benefits that choice can bring.  However, if you've ever attempted to build a program to control humanity, or if you've watched The Matrix Reloaded you will know that choice can introduce a fundamental flaw in your evil plans.  So at what point does choice go from good to bad?  At what point do all those benefits of choice transform into a bad Keanu Reeves movie and what does any of this have to do with business?  Well read on…

A few nights ago I was trawling through the great ABC (that's Australian Broadcasting Commission) video on demand libraries when I came across a very interesting story on choice from one of the ABC's science programmes, Catalyst.  Now before you go thinking "science schmience" the interesting part of this story is when they start to look at the way choices influence consumer behaviour.

In the story they run a quick experiment to demonstrate the benefits of choice and the perils of too many choices.  I won't go through all the details of the experiment here but in summary it demonstrates that when they presented people with 24 different jams to try and buy they attracted a lot of interest from potential consumers, however there were very few sales.  A similar group of people was then presented with only 6 different jams and while there were overall fewer potential consumers interested there were 10 times the number of sales.  Interesting!

So how does this apply to the software business?  Well in the software business we love choices, we love different versions and we love to produce variations on a theme but is all this choice bad for business?  Time for some self analysis.  About a month ago I was having some Windows problems (that's right, laugh it up Mac users) and I thought I might just go for the Vista upgrade instead of an XP re-install.  The first thing I discover is that Vista has some good benefits for memory management, multimedia and it looks pretty (all good so far).  The very next thing I find out is that there several different versions, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business and Ultimate to name a few, so now I have to find out which one to buy.  Well I tried, I checked out the very informative Vista SuperSite from Paul Thurrott and managed to get myself even more confused as to which version I wanted (the site was clear, my wants were not).  Back in the Windows XP days this was easy Home or Pro, now I just wind up confused; curse you choice!

At the end of all that I decided that I would stick with the devil I know, so I'm still a Windows XP user.  Why?  Well I think it's because I had too many choices - Ephox would have kindly covered the cost of Vista for my company laptop.  It's not only Microsoft that suffers from this, I think many companies have gone down the same road.  I know I certainly experienced the same problems when evaluating some issue tracking systems recently and certainly every time there are separate editions of the same product.  Incidentally, I also have similar issues when shopping for any kind of electronics, whether it's a TV, washing machine or mobile phone.  The end result is that I almost invariably delay my purchase, or just not purchase something at all.

So yes, choice is good, and I am glad I live in a society where I can chose what career I can follow and who my elected officials are.  However, too much choice can drive me nuts.  It can prevent me from purchasing and cause me to over-invest in evaluating the options, further delaying any purchase and increasing the chance that I will just give up and not buy anything.  If you're about to introduce a new purchasing option for your products stop and think "is this going to enable us to enter a new market or just further fragment and confuse our existing one?"  If the answer is the latter, well then chose your path wisely!

As the product manager for EditLive! I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can enable people to be more productive using one of the most familiar software applications - the word processor.  Certainly there are major features that can improve productivity in leaps and bounds - spell checking as you type, or track changes for instance - but, for me, making productivity gains in any piece of software is a game of clicks.

When you think about your user interface design give some thought as to how many clicks it’s taking your users to browse around the interface.  As a user a click is not just a click, it’s a series of actions.  You start by looking for the command you want, you then move the mouse and make a click, you may then have to interpret the new dialog or information presented on screen and then, finally, perform the action you wanted to perform.  The effect of adding clicks is even worse for web applications where each click can mean another HTTP request and, even in the age of AJAX, a screen refresh.  Sure, most of the time this is a process performed in less than 10 seconds or so, maybe a minute for a very slow web application - but those 10 second blocks add up and they add up fast and they add up to dollars.

For example, lets take a team of 50 knowledge workers getting paid about $30 an hour each.  As part of their daily tasks they have to add information to a wiki, to a blog and perhaps to a content management system.  To do this our hypothetical knowledge workers will be using my favourite web word processing interface; EditLive!.  Conservatively I’m going to assume that we can save each one of these people 10 minutes a day (that’s only about 60 clicks a day).  Over the course of the year this means a saving of $62,500 just through a few less clicks.

When playing the game of click minimization though you need to be careful not to confuse it with feature minimization.  Fewer clicks does not mean fewer features, it simply means making the commonly used features easier to find and use.  A great example of this is the Apple iPod.  With my iPod I can do anything from browse a photo library through to playing a song, but the most commonly used functionality is simply a button press away in the form of the play button.

When looking at EditLive!’s interface there are several of things that we do for click minimization.  For starters there is the context menu, making it easy to access the most relevant commands for a particular cursor location within two clicks (a right and then a left).  Then there’s the keyboard UI, for example, the tab key can be used to add four spaces, indent a list, outdent a list or add a table row all depending on where the cursor location is.  Finally there are the EditLive! dialogs that will not be blocked by popup blockers (saving all those clicks to allow popups) and they’re already cached by EditLive! ensuring you never have to wait for the web server to send you the dialog.

All these elements quickly add up and you can see that it doesn’t take long to reach savings of over $60,000 a year.  So, if you’re designing a user interface today or evaluating a productivity tool put some thought into how many clicks your users will have to go through because it will save you time and money.

My name is Damien Fitzpatrick and I'm a Microsoft Word 2007 user.

There, I said it, I use Word 2007.  In fact I've been using it since its release and being somewhat experienced in the whole WYSIWYG editor space I thought that I would share a few of my favourite features and a few of those that I could live without.  I use Word day in and day out.  It's something that I use for work and something that I use even more for my university assignments so I'm pretty familiar with the product - or at least I think I am.  That said, I've never been one to heavily customize the interface and I've certainly never written a Word macro.

Before I get underway though, credit where credit's due, congratulations to the Microsoft Office development team.  It's been a long time between Office releases and they've really made some progress in this release as well as trying to freshen up one of the most enduring product families in software.  They've made some bold moves with this release (say hello to the ribbon bar) and I think some of them have paid off while the jury is out on some others.

What I Like

Let's start out on a positive note.  As part of working through my MBA I often have to produce professional looking reports as part of a case study or some other exercise.  Unfortunately my documents just don't look fancy or that professional - they just look like another Word document.  At least that was the situation until Word 2007 got installed on my PC.  The Word team is to be congratulated on their ability to format plain text and make it look great.  I particularly like the new functionality around the styles for a document.  I can now easily choose a set of styles to make my document look distinctive, modern, fancy or formal (just some of the style sets available).  I also like the changes to the header and footer functionality and the ease with which I can create a great looking cover page from a template kindly provided by Word.  

The jewel in the crown of the styles functionality for me has to be the textbox functionality.  Wow, textboxes look great and they're just text.  I know I could have done some of this in Word 2003, but the textboxes in 2007 and so much better.  I can now quickly and easily create textboxes to highlight phrases and to make page borders in a great variety of new ways.  It shows that just because something is in plain text doesn't mean it has to be boring.

As a student submitting referenced assignments I'm also a big fan of the new functionality for citations and bibliographies.  They make it much easier for me to put referencing in my document which is great since creating reference lists has to be one of the most painful tasks I go through as part of writing an assignment.

What I Don't Like

By now you've probably noticed that I am yet to write anything about the new ribbon toolbar - well as you might have guessed, it's because I don't like it.  It's because I can't FIND anything (don't get me started on how long it took me to find the zoom scroll bar).  Granted, there's going to be time taken in learning any new user interface and it did take me time to find things on the old menus, but over the years the menus and I had come to a grudging respect, well mostly I learnt to respect them and not the other way around.  Maybe I will get used to the new ribbon over time, but part of me thinks that that's hardly the point, I thought we were all told it was supposed to be more intuitive?  Yes, the ribbon bar was supposed to be more intuitive, yes it was supposed to be more usable and it is, up to a point.  In case you're interested, for me, that point is up to anything that's on the Home tab, beyond that I'm lost - incidentally the Home tab is made up of all those things that already was on the toolbars of Word.

So you are probably wondering now whether I'm just one of those stubborn users adverse to change even if it's for my own good.  Obviously I'd like to think that I'm not so I did some introspection to try and work out why I can't find anything.  As you might have guessed I've come up with a few points:

• To me the options on the ribbon just aren't ordered well by default.  Yes, I could re-order them and I probably will at some stage, but right now I really wanted to use Word how it's creators intended and given how long it took me to find where to customize the ribbon I'm not sure they intended it to be customized.  To date every time I've used Word 2007 I've had to go searching through the ribbons at least once and it's not because they aren't intuitive it's because my intuition obviously expects a command to be in a different place to the Microsoft UI designer's intuition.  For instance, why isn't the Headers and Footer functionality on the Page Layout tab where I expected it to be and where did my spell check and print buttons go?
• Secondly, I have an issue with modes.  As a Mac user and someone familiar with the works of Jef Raskin, Adrian, has always warned me of the dangers of modes within user interfaces.  Of course I had always laughed this off as someone who can operate a VCR's recording schedule mode is entitled to do.  However, it's come back to bite me.  Adrian you were right, modes are bad.  I've found a great article explaining my conundrum, and yes, it's from Adrian.  He was well ahead of me on this issue, his article on Modes and the Office 12 [2007] UI is spot on.  I'm wondering how many other people are having this problem?  The most significant problem I have with modes is that I seamlessly switch between them (at least in my head).  I might be reviewing a document one moment and then wanting to add a table or paragraph to it the next and now that means all those other functions are yet another click away from me because I have to switch tabs.

The Verdict

There's a whole lot more to Word 2007 including a new file format, integration with Sharepoint and that's just for starters.  However, the things I've mentioned briefly above are the features that matter to me when I'm using Word.  I'd have to say that for me Microsoft Word 2007 is mostly a winner.  I'm prepared to learn the new ribbon user interface for the benefits that I get from the new styles functionality.  However, I think it's going to be tough for many rolling out this huge user interface change across an entire business.  The user interface is the foundation upon which business productivity is built and since Microsoft Office is all about delivering productivity gains let's hope that I'm wrong and that the ribbon is going to make us all more productive.

UPDATE: Sample Document

Jason asked me for a sample document, so here's one.  Sorry I didn't have anything more exciting than this, but this document uses a cover page automatically generated by Word 2007 and themed headers, footers and headings to match.

It wasn't just the Lotus aficionados who were excited about Lotusphere this week Orlando, we had a team there as well in support of our EditLive! for IBM Workplace Web Content Management (IWWCM) integration.  Things got even more exciting for us when Mike Rhodin announced that the integration had taken out the Best in Lotusphere Showcase award (at the time of writing the Lotusphere page is yet to be updated with this news).

This is great news for the Ephox team and certainly made my day when I heard it on Tuesday (Australian time).  However, I think it's even better news for all those people out there creating content on the web, whether they are using EditLive! or a competing offering.  To me it signals realization of the importance of rich word processing applications for the web and how these applications can make the task of getting content online so much easier.

Creating compelling web content is complicated, much more so than using Microsoft Word to create a document.  The web's componentized architecture really makes it difficult for your average contributor to write content.  The web adds a whole lot more complexity - as a user I have to work with my style sheet, I need to collaborate with others, I need to upload the images I want or find them on another server…and this is just the beginning!  If I have to do this through an unfamiliar interface, if I can't run a spell checker, if I don't have a thesaurus or if I can't create a list properly then something that's already hard for me just became really difficult.  Sure blogs, wikis and content management systems make it easier today than ever before, but you still might have to explain to someone why their images are on Flickr, why ==Heading== (MediaWiki markup) is a heading, or why they can only see versions in web pages but not as tracked changes.

This is exactly where I believe WYSIWYG editors like EditLive! come to the fore and our EditLive! for IWWCM integration is one of the best examples of this.  EditLive! for IWWCM is the best of "integration at the glass".  There's a lot that has gone into the integration, though from the user's perspective using it is as simple as using Microsoft Word or Open Office.  From the instant that the user opens an item for editing, EditLive! is customizing their experience to be personalized and, most of all, pain free.  To begin, EditLive!'s interface is customized according to their role within the system and EditLive! fetches the appropriate style sheet from the server and presents it to the user in a drop down with built in styles preview.  If the user needs to insert a link or an image they simply press a button on EditLive!'s interface and can immediately browse the content repository for all available content and images they have permissions to use.  In addition to this there is EditLive!'s spell checking support, that is automatically set to the appropriate language for the user, as well as a thesaurus, comprehensive table and list support and all of EditLive!'s other rich editing support.  Finally there is track changes, working just as it does in Microsoft Word with the addition that EditLive! has already been supplied with the user's name and is logging all their changes so they can easily collaborate with their colleagues and work with the changes in the editor.

As we move into 2007 I hope that all this is a sign of things to come.  This year we want to take EditLive! to places it hasn't been to before.  Not only in new content management systems but in blogs, in wikis and in all sorts of other web content systems and in each place we take EditLive! we're going to aim to create rich, integrated user experiences.

In December we started a new initiative at Ephox called LiveWorks!.  It's something that I'm very excited about because I think it has the potential to offer a tremendous amount of value to Ephox and, more importantly, to you!

As I mentioned in an earlier post Ephox follows an Extreme Programming (XP) methodology for our development which delivers us a great amount of value internally.  Some of the benefits we get include:

• Test driven development has greatly improved product quality and code coverage
• Iterations ensure that we can deliver the most valuable features first
• We are becoming increasingly flexible with respect to changes in the market and how they reflect on the product roadmap.
• We can now release software at any time, at least internally.  

The last couple of points have been of great value internally, but there's more to releasing a software product than just developing the software.  When releasing some of the major things that need to be addressed are sales, marketing and support of a product.  Obviously these are critical aspects of releasing any product, but they do increase the time between code completion and release.  Thus, as clients, to date you may not have seen the results of our internal flexibility for roadmaps and release cycles.

LiveWorks! is about delivering this value to you.  LiveWorks! will give you an insight into what we're working on at the moment and provide useful code, integrations and plugins we've developed previously that we can release more easily on LiveWorks!.  All the integrations and plugins available on LiveWorks! come with source code and are free for you to download and use.

LiveWorks! is about hearing from you.  We've provided a community mailing list as part of LiveWorks! that myself and many of the Ephox developers are on.  If you see a project on LiveWorks! that interests you or you'd like to suggest  an integration please let the LiveWorks! community know.  If you'd like to share an integration or some code that you've found useful we'd also love to hear from you.

LiveWorks! is still evolving.  Over time we will be adding more value to LiveWorks!.  In the near future we hope to be releasing more prototype integrations and plugins.  We're also hoping to provide you with a better view of what we're planning by providing development road maps, early access releases and weekly builds so you can monitor the progress of our products and be ready to take advantage of new features.

So I've been tagged by both Andy and Andrew.  Here goes with five things that you may not know about me:

1. I have been known to cling to my inner child.  I still love the Muppets and my workspaces at home and at work are proliferated by desk toys and real toys.  Believe it or not I think this does help keep things creative at work.
2. I played tennis for around 10 years until my younger brother, Adrien (who is now a tennis coach) got better than me, this was around the time I switched to playing touch football.  The crowning moment of my touch football "career" was getting to play against Darren Lockyer in a H-grade social match.  For those who aren't aware Darren Lockyer is the captain of the Australian Rugby League team.  I'm not quite sure why he was there and our team lost by a considerable margin, but it was still a lot of fun.
3. I spell using The Queen's English and EditLive! (or Word/Outlook) corrects it to proper American English for me.  To be honest I prefer the Queen's version - give me "U"s and "S"es - but I know that many reading the things I write would prefer me to Americanize the spelling.
4. The first concert I ever went to was a Ben Folds Five concert in 1998.  The band has broken up but still remain one of my favorites.
5. My siblings and I have rhyming names - Damien, Adrien and Vivienne.  As a child this made it difficult when Mum or Dad was yelling at one of us from the top of the stairs…you'd often mishear which of us was in trouble at any particular time.

Unfortunately, I don't know of five other people who are blogging who haven't been tagged.  As someone who has just started blogging you know that something is at the end of the line when it gets to me.  So here's a super special bonus fact instead:

• I've been known to write a poetic verse or two and I am told that it's actually half decent.  For the record my favorite poem of all time would have to be Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 (also known as Let me not to the marriage of true minds).  If that's not a great poem then I never writ - little Shakespearean humor there.

Tonight I had my first class of the new year for my MBA.  So I'm back into it, at least one evening a week taken up with a class from 6 to 9pm.  However, it does mean that I reprise one of my highlights of the week.

Brisbane, is divided by quite a large river - the aptly named Brisbane River - and every night I go to class I park my car on one side of the river and walk over the Goodwill Bridge to the QUT campus on the bank directly opposite, right next to Brisbane city.  The walk lasts only about ten minutes, but it is one of the highlights of my week, yet I never realized the value of this simple walk until I started my studies (and discovered the cheap parking on the south bank of the river).

Over the course of these ten minutes I get the chance to clear my head, but the undoubted highlight is from the middle of the bridge at about 9:15pm on a weeknight.  It is then that I pause and look out at the myriad of lights that form Brisbane city.  The light glistens on the water and the sounds of traffic are somewhat distant.  On the bridge itself I'm often alone, though sometimes one of Brisbane's CityCat ferries will motor underneath but for the most part it's a serene and beautiful outlook on a city of around a million people (I will take a photo next week so you can enjoy it as well).  The moment passes and I am on my way again having enjoyed one of the highlights of my week.

This simple, little act of taking a moment, just a moment, from my busy week helps keep me sane between the rigors of work, study and everything in between.  Grab these moments when you can and appreciate them as you will, they may not come often, they may not last long, but it helps keep you in touch, after all, not everything is business.

When we first started developing the track changes functionality a year ago we only had an inkling of how useful it was going to be.  Afterall, over the years content applications have found ways around this deficit through various differencing and compare and merge engines and there was definitely a question in my mind as to how our track changes functionality would stack up against these.  Since I've been using track changes in an online editor longer than anyone else out there (all of four months) I thought I would relate my experience thus far for those wondering the same thing.

To put track changes to the test, it was deployed to both our internal wiki and the CMS for the Ephox web site.  This ensured that the functionality received some real world testing.  It took some time for people to start using it on the wiki, but with the Ephox web site the benefits were immediate.  From Australia I was able to work in collaboration with our marketing and sales departments in the USA without several long phone calls or screen sharing sessions.  Everyone could immediately see what had been changed and by whom.  Also, most importantly, changes could be seen in context and worked with immediately in the editor.  This saved hours, days if you include the time delay between the USA and Australia!

More recently I've been doing some planning on our wiki for some new product ideas and initiatives for 2007.  As part of this I've been collecting feedback from people throughout Ephox.  Previously, I would have watched our wiki's RSS feed for changes and read through document comparisons, often re-reading the complete document to see the changes and comments in context.  With track changes, this becomes significantly easier.  I can see who made changes, when and see their comments in color coded text.  Yes, we've had this in Word forever…but in a wiki?  In a wiki I've found track changes really shines!

The other "feature" of track changes that has me particularly excited is the ease of install.  I've incorporated track changes into five systems now, a wiki, a blog, our custom CMS, IBM Workplace Web Content Management and Alfresco Enterprise Content Management.  In each case installation was as easy as flicking a switch.  Once I turned on the configuration options for track changes (about 10 mins work) I was up and running, no more changes and no server-side components required.  Congratulations to our engineers!

The work is not finished yet, already I am finding things that need improvement.  For instance, I really want to be able to right click on the marker in the left margin to accept and reject changes.  Also, I really want comments, right now we are just adding these as if they were part of the document but they need to be separate.  As always I would be eager to hear from you what you would like to see with Track Changes and about your experiences with it in general.

Track changes has saved me hours, maybe even days, of my time by now, if you take that figure and multiply that those savings over a company - well to quote Keanu Reeves "WHOA" - that's some saving!  The feature has enabled me to collaborate much better via our wiki and the content management system on our web site.  Download a copy of EditLive! 6.0 to try it for yourself and within your team.  I think you may well get as much benefit out of track changes as you did from when you first deployed EditLive!.

EditLive!'s Track Changes Markup and Tooltip

Today I had an issue with one of of Australia's telecommunications companies and needed to call through to their customer service center.  This company is not particularly well known for it's customer service and support, but I must say that today I was pleasantly surprised.  They solved my problem quickly and cheerfully and I went on my way a happy customer.

This really got me thinking about the role of client support and service within companies today and how those people working tirelessly in support are the unsung heroes of many companies.  I know quite a few people in this kind of role and I realize that it's certainly not the most glamorous of roles in a company and it can be pretty thankless at times, so let me start by thanking all those of you who work in support and especially those supporting Ephox products, both at Ephox and at client sites.

Computer related customer support has long had a stigma about it.  I am sure many of you have seen parodies of unhelpful technical support staff and maybe even been unlucky enough to have had a bad experience or two.  Certainly in this day and age of globalization and the internet, as consumers it's often the case that we never speak with, personally e-mail or interact with representatives of the companies whose products we are using.  Customer self service has greatly increased - purchasing airline tickets or ordering a Dell PC are great examples of this - and with the introduction of self-service many have been under pressure to further reduce customer support costs, particularly post-sale - after all the money is in the bank right?

However, take a look at support from another angle and it becomes immensely more valuable and more important in today's marketplace, particularly the Internet marketplace.  As social beings people basically want to make connections with people, yet in situations where products are bought and sold online interactions between your clients and your staff can be few and far between.  In fact, its likely that most of those interactions are going to be through your support desk.  It's those experiences of your company that your clients are going to remember and theres a good chance they will tell their friends and colleagues about them.  Indeed, it's those experiences that your company may well live and die by, at least in the eyes of your clients.  Though perhaps even more importantly, these experiences give us within companies the opportunity to learn more about our clients - what do they want, what features they are using, what we can improve, what do they find difficult, what do they wish the product could do or, from one person to another, whether they are having a good day or not.

If I was to look at support in this context I would say that the challenge is not "how do we reduce our support costs?" but rather "how do we make our support more valuable to our clients and to our company?".  The value is definitely there, the challenge is to realize that value!  As a member of the software industry I think we still have a long way to go.  I make support calls to our clients today and often they are surprised that I've called them and that the response is so fast but at the end of the day it is me who should be thanking them, for taking the time to share their experiences with our software and their real-world use cases for it, each call is a valuable learning experience for me (so thank you if you're a client reading this!).  There are glimpses of brilliance in the support field out there though.  An example of a company who is doing this right is Atlassian.  Their promise and delivery of Legendary Service shows that they really understand the importance of supporting their clients.

Finally thank you once again to everyone in any kind of support role out there.  Sometimes it might be tiring, often it may be thankless, but trust me, we couldn't do without you and to some of us you're worth your weight in gold.