Schechterville

In case anyone wanders over here from the Live.com team blog, I wanted to let you know that Live.com will have a presence in the Microsoft booth at next week's CES 2007. If you'll be at the show in Las Vegas, and would like to talk with me about Live.com, Live Gadgets, Live Search, or anything else that is on your mind, I'll be at the booth during the following times:

Monday: 2 - 4

Tuesday: 3:40 - 6

Wednesday: 3:40 - 6

I may be around at other times, but those are the times that I'll definitely be there. You'll always be able to find a team member there (Kirsten, Jessica or Arief if you miss me), but if you have a burning techincal question about the core product, try to catch me :)

If you can't make it to the booth, but would still like to meet up, email me at michsche-at-microsoft-dot-com, and we'll see if we can arrange something (emails go to my phone, if you're reading this from the show). If there's enough interest, I'd be happy to arrange an informal discussion session to allow a group of Live.com users to meet up, share any feedback, and get their questions answered. You need to email me that you're interested though :)

If you won't be at the show and want to share feedback/ask a question, feel free to email me too.

Hope to meet some of you next week!

Today was my first day back at work after a 2 week vacation. This was the longest amount of time that I've been away from work since I started at Microsoft. The reason? I'm now a married man (I still need to get used to saying that). Apologies for the blog silence lately. When it came down to working on live.com, planning a wedding, and posting to this blog... well, you can tell which one lost. Things should be better now that I no longer need to shop for cakes

Anyway, the Live.com is enjoying the company of an intern from MIT this summer who, in addition to his work on a top secret project, is gaining a reputation for his wacky emails. Makinde and I are sharing an office, and it seems like I need to give him more work to do

From: Makinde Adeagbo
Sent: Sunday, July 16, 2006 11:02 PM
Subject: Mike's plans for world domination have been foiled... 

It is done.  Stop by in the morning to see the damage.  In the true spirit of being a PM Intern, I have written a spec for the project.  Also, in the true spirit of software engineering, this spec was written after the completion of the engineering work.

Summary

Over the last 2 weeks, Mike has been out for his wedding.  Microsoft tradition dictates that a prank must be played on his office while he is away.  With a combination of hard work, tin foil and scotch tape, Makinde will make Mike’s office fire retardant.  This way, if there is a fire in Mike’s office between 10pm 7/16/06 and 10am 7/17/06, everything on his desk will be protected.

Scenarios

·         Mike walk to office.  He notices that the blinds are closed and grows suspicious.  As he opens the door, he sees that he has been foiled and starts to laugh.  Someone down the hall notices his shock and begins to laugh at him.

·         Team members come to see Mike’s office before he gets here.  They laugh as everything in his side of the office is covered.

·         Low Priority: Team members take remaining foil (located in lounge) and cover other items with foil.

Goals

·         Entertain team

Team members should get a chuckle from seeing his office.

·         Have Mike up and working within 15 Minutes

It shouldn’t take Mike too long to get running.  After uncovering the keyboard and Monitors, he should be back in business.

·         Save Mike’s computer from Fire

Non-Goals

·         Protect Mike’s computer from Hurricane, avalanche, or other natural disasters

That would be ridiculous, like 5 minute abs.

·         Fire protect Makinde’s side of the office

Interns are not afforded such luxuries.

Open Issues

·         Mouse Functionality

It is not clear if Mike’s wireless mouse will function properly when the receiver and mouse are both enclosed in foil.  The foil should at as a faraday cage and stop most signals from going through.

·         Fire Retardation

It’s not known if the foil will actually retard the flames…but it sure looks cool.

Here's some shots of the carnage (yes, my pens are individually wrapped):

I recently had a bit of an out of body (out of browser?) experience while visiting the baseball scores page on ESPN. You might call me a bit of a fanatic about the New York Mets, and now that they’ve fielded a team I’m not embarrassed by, I find myself following them a lot more closely than I have in previous years (it’s not always easy to do from across the country). In any event, I visited the baseball scores page, scrolled down to the Mets score, and was hovering over the displayed base runners to see if I could see who was on. My mouse slipped a bit, and I noticed that the cursor unexpectedly turned into the “move” cursor. Intrigued, I clicked and dragged. Much to my surprise, I was able to move the entire score module, and rearrange it anywhere on the page! Shocked by this revelation, I suddenly realized that this is how a user must feel when they discover that you can drag items around Live.com.

User feedback from Live.com goes directly to my (and many others) inbox everyday, and I make it a point to read every comment. A surprisingly frequent complaint from users is that they’re unable to easily customize their page. In nearly every usability study I’ve observed (all with experienced web users), people are shocked to see the ways in which they can customize Live.com (usually after being shown), stating that they’ve “never interacted with web pages like this before.” My own surprise with the baseball scores only served to reinforce the point in my mind: people simply don’t expect to be able to drag things around web pages.

This got me thinking a bit about what visual cues are used to indicate something is draggable in Windows. The answer, from my observations, is that there are none. As I mouse over the title bar of this Internet Explorer window (I’m running XP), nothing happens – the title bar doesn’t glow, the cursor doesn’t change, and nothing explicitly leads me to believe that there’s something interesting I can do with the window. Yet, we all know it can be dragged around the screen. Years of GUI use has instilled in us the knowledge that we can expect to drag things around my screen. How do we make that expectation shift to the Web?

Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy answer (hopefully this doesn’t disappoint you). Spaces attempts to solve this problem by providing the “grip” texture on their movable modules (though I have to admit that I didn’t realize that’s what it was until I heard it referred to as such in a demo), and I’ve seen variations of this cue on other sites as well. Even if that was an accepted standard, that doesn’t translate to the icons Live.com uses in My Stuff and Add Stuff (which are also draggable, if you haven’t tried). Is there something we (collectively) can do to make this functionality more apparent? Are we in the early days of a behavioral evolution, and just have to wait for users to adapt to the “new web”? Does anyone want to create a “feed the fish” gadget (ala Mac System 7) for Live.com to teach users to drag ? I’m not a designer, nor am I a usability expert, but I do recognize that this will be a challenge for modern web interfaces. It will be interesting to watch as this trend continues to develop (and of course, as Live.com iterates on it’s UI as well).

First post! Well, not really, as this is actually my third blog (fourth if you count my never posted-to blog on SQL Junkies). My first foray into the world of blogging was with Livejournal, during my senior year of college (a frightening 5 years ago), followed by a personal blog which I wrote myself (using ASP.NET, C#, and SQL Server 2000) shortly after starting at Microsoft. That blog still exists, and it isn’t very hard to find, but I’ll leave that as an exercise.

When I first come to a new blog there are 3 questions I ask: Who is this person, why would I want to read them, and what are their goals for blogging? I’ll try to address al 3 of these now, for anyone who happens to come across me.

1. Who is this guy?
Hi, I’m Mike. Here’s my brief bio: I was born in New York City, raised in Northern New Jersey, and am the oldest of 3 children. I went to school at the University of Maryland, College Park where I got my degree in Computer Science in 2001. The summer before my senior year I came out to Microsoft for an internship with the SQL Server team. I was there the day that SQL 2000 went gold, worked on an awesome project, met some great people, and had dinner at Bill’s house. Needless to say I was hooked, and I moved out to Seattle a few months after graduation so I could work at Microsoft full time. I spent the first few years as a tester in the SQL org, and eventually became a developer. Some of my more visible projects included the Playback Program, the SQL 2005 Application Compatibility Toolkit, the SQL Best Practices Analyzer, and the SQL 2005 Upgrade Advisor. After Yukon shipped, I went to the ship party at Whistler, took a short vacation, and decided I wanted a change. This brought me to my current job.

2. Why should I read his blog?
Well, if my personality doesn’t sell you, you may want to stick around because I just happen to work on one of the most exciting projects on the web, Live.com. As a Program Manager on the team, I get to help shape what we hope will be a home page that you’ll be excited to call (and make) your own. That’s actually a little misleading – *you*  get to shape what you want Live.com to be, and I have to write the specs. We have a lot of exciting things planned, and have only begun to scratch the surface of what we feel is possible. If you’ve followed the project from the start.com days, or even if you’re new to it, hopefully you can tell that something big is going on here, and it’s going to be exciting to watch it develop. I’ve seen the prototypes, I know the plans, and if you’re lucky, I may even let the occasional tidbit slip .

3. What are the goals of this blog?
My goals in starting (and hopefully maintaining) this blog are very straight forward:
     1. Open up another channel for users to provide direct feedback to the team.
     2. Allow for conversations that will let us interact as we shape Live.com together.
     3. Give some insight into what it’s like to work on the Live.com team, and at Microsoft.
     4. Point out cool new features, offer tips and tricks, and share how I use the site.
     5. Gain enough notoriety such that I get invited to a party hosted by Jay-Z.

So there you have it. This should be a fun ride – welcome aboard.