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Rolling the Dice at a New Kind Of Conference

The 2006 conference season is largely over. I've been wined, dined, and redlined all month, attending three of the big web design conferences of March: FlashForward (at which I spoke), SXSW Interactive (at which my team from Fluid won a SXSW Web Award), and MIX06 (at which I, and other Fluidians, spoke).

But I want to focus on MIX06 in this article.

Why? It was a Microsoft-sponsored conference about user experience. The first, in fact. Maybe that's weird, on a number of levels.Las Vegas was an interesting choice of venue. What better place to talk about highly designed experiences than Sin City itself. Too bad most designers and geeks are too smart to gamble. But man, was it interesting.

At least, what I can remember of it, between the high-altitude bowling (thanks, Lynda!) and the high-altitude drinking (thanks, Brad!).

Whys and Wherefores

MIX06 was a conference put on by Microsoft to, in my opinion, tackle three distinct challenges:

• To evangelize the Windows Vista, the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and Internet Explorer platforms for deploying rich user experiences
• To woo designers with Microsoft's new Expression design tools
• To help convince existing business and technology decision makers that good user experience matters

So...was Microsoft successful on any of these counts?

Overcoming Designer Prejudice

Microsoft knows how much the design and internet communities distrusts them. This is partially born from Microsoft's limited experience with creative software, but I think it largely stems from the company's sheer monolithic presence both on and off the desktop...and the fact that most software for Windows is, well, ugly and inelegant.

This conference was a pretty critical test of the design world's appetite for Microsoft-released content creation tools. The new Expression line of tools is squarely aimed at designers and designer-developer types. I'm of the opinion that the best designers and developers forego platform bigotry and use the right tool for the right task...and sometimes that path does indeed lead to Windows. For example, I use Adobe applications on the MacOS, but I vastly prefer Visio over OmniGraffle. Microsoft has to rely on this to win early adopters to their design tools.

But these tools are still in development and won't be released at least until fall 2006. I've built real projects with them, and they've got huge promise, but they're rough, as all pre-release software is. The real-world efficacy of the Expression tools (which I've written about before) will need to be tested in the marketplace before anyone can tell if Microsoft's play for the designer's desktop will be successful.

Improving the Windows Experience

In the previous section I stated that most Windows applications are ugly and inelegant. This, I think, is because it takes a lot of work to do so. It's a complete pain to richly skin, say, a Windows Forms application. Believe me, I've done it.

Despite this, though, evangelizing Windows as a rich experience platform isn't hard. Look at the preponderance of excellent video codecs available for Windows. Think at all the amazing IE-specific trickery you can do (disregarding, for just a second, the poor historical record of IE's CSS handling) using ActiveX and more. Look at the Yahoo! purchase of Konfabulator and decision to move Widget development from the MacOS to Windows.

From this standpoint, the Expression tools provide easier ways to provide richer experiences on Windows. That is not a bad thing. Overly proprietary? You could make that argument, but it's not like Adobe (nee Macromedia) has blown their own standards wide open, either.

And, of course, no article that even mentions the Windows platform can be complete without two obligatory jibes: its much-delayed release and its seemingly derivative design. For all its promise, Windows Vista is now announced for broad deployment in January 2007. For all its innovation, Vista will be seen as derivative of Apple's MacOS...close followers of graphical nerd-dom will notice that the Windows Presentation Foundation is not just conceptually similar to Flash (vector-rendering architecture, released in 1996), but amazingly close to Apple's Quartz Extreme technology (2D and 3D accelerated vector-rendering and media playback architecture), released in 2005. Good ideas should be the domain of no single man, government, or company...but even given that, Microsoft is indeed late to the party.

But some late developments, I'd argue, are certainly better than none. And at least Microsoft is smart enough to remind everyone that Ajax-style web apps are hard to make, and that something should be done about it.

Reach, Ubiquity and Context

Windows, being the world's most common operating system, certainly has reach. But of all rich experience platforms, it's Flash that has ubiquity. Unless the much-rumored Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere effort gets off the ground someday, trying to gain ubiquity will remain Microsoft's biggest challenge as a rich experience platform.

Finally, let's look at the most vital rich experience factor of all: context. Rich experience platforms must be chosen to fulfill the needs of one's own organization or client. Does every single person in your group use Windows? Maybe a WinFX-driven expense report intranet application would really be great. Does your e-commerce client's web logs show that 20% of their purchasers use Macs? Well, an IE-specific experience seems like a pretty poor recommendation. Because of this, I don't think Microsoft's moves in this arena will pose any sort of challenge to Adobe's Flash juggernaut in the online space...for a few years at the very least.

Regardless of what technologies come along, good digital experience design is always predicated on the same three things: The business goals of the client or organization, the user's needs, and the brand of the client or organization. All design and technology decisions should flow from these things, not the other way around. Nothing Microsoft or Adobe can do will ever change that. I spoke to this effect on the Selling the Experience panel at the show (thanks to all who showed up, as well as my esteemed co-panelists).

The Adobe Connection

Finally, it's worth noting who constituted the 1,500+ attendees of MIX. I heard through the grapevine that there were less than 15% of the audience who were designers (I'm totally am offering that as rumor, not at fact)...but those designers who were there were powerhouses. More interesting, however, was the huge contingent of Adobe employees in attendance as well. That was all really encouraging, making the whole venture feel more like a collaboration. Or a discussion. Which was certainly Microsoft's stated goal.

So, kudos for Microsoft. It was an important "72-hour conversation" to have. I hope Microsoft thinks it was successful. Now, between Microsoft, their supporters, and their nay-sayers, let's get to work and focus on doing right by our users.

And no matter what happens, there'll always be Vegas. Or what I remember of it, anyway.