Deborah Adler at MIX09 Keynote

Bill Buxton, the Spirit of MIX09 (who, so I understand, now has a typeface named after him), returned for this morning’s keynote to welcome Deborah Adler, whose work as principal designer for Target’s ClearRx medicine bottles provided the focus for our discussion about design and its impact on user experience.

ClearRx Case Study

Deborah’s research identified and addressed many serious problems with traditional medicine bottles. Her prototype was refined by Target into the ClearRx products, and the resulting “return on experience” included brand awareness for Target — and, much more importantly, the potential to change behavior and save human lives.

Her advice to us was twofold – (1) to have a love affair with our customers, and (2) to bring our design skills to bear both humanly and humanely.

There is more about Deborah’s work at the Target:Health site.

[Update: I just saw Robby Ingebretsen's post and agree with him - these two MIX09 keynotes together (and particularly, Deborah and Bill's contributions) were the best and most inspiring MIX keynotes yet.]

Clear Rx (link goes to Target ClearRx site)

IE8: In other keynote news, Dean Hachamovitch announced that Internet Explorer 8 was released today.

For more info: You can now watch streaming video of the keynotes (for both days) here, and Tim Sneath’s thorough Play-by-Play is here and here.

The Cloud?

So I expected today’s keynote was going to be about the Cloud. I was totally wrong.  Clear skies.

My Keynote Mind Map, with Day 2 on the bottom, now makes more sense: the “Return on Experience” discussion provides the roots for everything we’ve discussed at MIX09 this week.

MIX09 Keynote Mind Map - Days 1 and 2 - with Return on Experience at the root

p.s. More Misc MIX notes on the rest of Day 2 in a future post — I am shattered tonight. Johnny Lee’s HCI talk was particularly memorable (link goes to his killer TED talk).

MIX09 Keynote: Bill Buxton

Today’s MIX09 Day 1 Keynote and Sessions put the ‘Software’ into Microsoft’s ‘Software plus Services’ vision.

It was the “feet on [presentation layer] ground” bit, made memorable by the energetic call to action delivered by Bill Buxton to get things started. His job was to deliver the “what”, and the Blend team is helping provide the “how.”

Hotlinked Play-By-Play

Tim Sneath has a thorough and thoughtfully hotlinked play-by-play of the keynote in two parts – here and here.  And fellow Canadian Jean-Luc David took over 500 keynote photos which I am sure he will filter before he uploads them here on Flickr, because apparently the man does not need sleep!

In the spirit of Bill’s Sketching User Experiences, I drew a mindmap, even though I have all the artistic ability of a slug (see below).

Blend 3 and SketchFlow

The most important words on my entire mind map the morning were “THEY HAVE CHANNELLED BUXTON”.

SketchFlow in Blend 3 looks superb. SketchFlow and its player will, unquestionably, change the way I flesh out user experiences to clients and get their feedback.  It will be very interesting to see how this tool actually gets used in practice, and evolves as designers and developers embrace it.  It’s not SketchFlow’s intent to replace all other forms of sketching, but rather to augment them with something innovative and useful.  I hope it will also improve developer/designer communication, by providing a tool and talking point that both can use.

MIX09 Keynote: ScottGu sporting red

Silverlight 3

Although nothing surprised me per se during the Silverlight 3 announcements, that was a good thing. There are significant improvement in v3, and answers to some (but not all) hopes.

The very promising: Out-of-browser and offline capabilities, server data push (caching on client), VisualStateManager invalid states and validation, Merged ResourceDictionaries, etc., that will address important shortcomings and challenges for people building Silverlight line-of-business apps.  Things like SaveFileDialog.

The important: Better text (desperately needed), library caching (for reducing download time – how many of my SL2 apps bundle whittled-down bits of the SL Toolkit?), sample data.

The cool: GPU support (opt-in @ plug-in and control levels). Multitouch support. Perspective 3D, which will be much more approachable than the 3D support in WPF, and address most of the scenarios where 3D adds UX value.  Pixel Shader effects – which aren’t hardware accelerated, but look good. Pixel and Bitmap APIs which open up new scenarios.

The awesome postscript.: Siverlight 3.0 runtime is actually 30k smaller than Silverlight 2! Madness!

The things I hoped for but didn’t find in v3: Commanding, Printing (unless you count Nikhil’s “make an ASP.NET page and print that” solution), FlowDocument.

The change in messaging that I didn’t expect: I attended BradA and NikhilK’s Silverlight presentations in the afternoon for more information about building business apps in Silverlight 3, and feel like I need a little more time for all of it to settle in.  The core message seems to have shifted a bit: from “you can run Silverlight on any web server”" to “you can run Silverlight anywhere, but it’s better together with ASP.NET, and you can use ASP.NET to obtain some things you’re looking for in Silverlight, like SEO and Printing.”  I’m also a little foggy on how some of the this ‘prescriptive framework’ all fits into where my mind was going with Prism and MVVM for Silverlight, as proposed by the Patterns and Practices group.

IIS Media Services: As someone who’s more Dev than IT Pro, I’m not best qualified to comment on this… but adaptive, on-demand and live streaming sounds and looks pretty amazing.

The New Microsoft-ism: It’s the verb “to party,” which I heard in contexts such as these:

“now we can party over this data we got back”, and

“you can go ahead and party on this MatrixTransform now” or in summary

“I’m super-jazzed that we can go ahead and party over this data we’ve got back from the DataSource.”

I expect tomorrow we will party over the cloud.  (The cloud and Azure, although mentioned, were not today’s focus by any stretch).

And that’s why this MIX09 Keynote half-sketch is really upside down, isn’t it? I should have left the top side of the page to deal with the part that’s “in the clouds!”

MIX09 Day 1 Keynote Mindmap (would make a nice deep zoom)

Is Guy ever not on form? He did a great job asking Steve the tough questions, making it fun, and getting a few candid answers, along with some “PR” answers as well, including Steve’s cautious response to “What about Adobe?”, which wasn’t asked until they opened up the floor to questions.

Bruce sums up the details on what they discussed here and here.

There was some interesting discussion about Yahoo, Google, Apple of course (including some ribbing about Guy’s Macbook Air) and other players in the industry.

I put a few photos up on my MIX08 set at Flickr.

In an update to WPF that should be available some time this summer, we’re going to get SHADER SUPPORT in WPF.

Yes, that kind of shader.

It was demoed during the keynote with some custom shaders being applied to WPF content (including UI elements) presented in 3D.

WPF team, I love you guys.

(image credit: LearnWPF Blog)

- Silverlight 2.0 Beta is available!
- Expression Blend 2.5 (!) March Preview is available!
- [update] Silverlight Beta tools for Visual Studio 2008 are available
- formal announcement of Silverlight Mobile device support!

In my presentation last weekend I was asked about Silverlight adoption stats, which I predicted we’d get during the keynote. We did, with:

- a montage of apps already built with Silverlight
- the stat of 1.5+ mllion installations of Silverlight runtime / day

Now, you can ignore the rest of my notes if you want, and go check out the Silverlight 2.0-powered Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia demo: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ It incorporates the “Big, Wide and Deep” Microsoft Research technology I wrote about a year ago. GREAT application of that technology.

…or, read on…

Silverlight and Media

3 key points here:

1. Improving experience: Adaptive Streaming – “please choose your connection speed” not only fails the Mom test but even for an “expert” you don’t know if you will receive consistent bandwidth over a shared or patchy connection. So the streaming service can now adjust the bitrate automatically even without user input. No code.
- Evidence: Move Networks – strategic partnership with Microsoft (Disney etc)

2. TCO: Streaming and progressive download experiences using Windows Media Services 2008, which is free to run on any Windows Server 2008 box. The quality of the service is a big reason why the Olympics will be hosted using Silverlight. For the case where users stop 1/2 way through a video, set up bitrate throttles for video, so that after a burst, you are only paying for x seconds of unwatched video.

3. Business Opportunities: Great demo of advertising intergration into a page using Silverlight, Blend 2.5 March Preview, Video.Show integration, XAML used to present dynamic ad content on top of video. Ari Paparo from DoubleClick showing advertising integration opportunities in order to monetise web properties.

Olympics Evidence for Silverlight Media: Perkins Miller, Sr VP Digital Media, NBC Sports and Olympics. 2200 hours of live coverage, which will then be made available as video on-demand (VOD). How to deliver in a way that is interactive? Today they delivered an engaging demo where you can do instant replays, overlay expert commentary, send and share links while watching, have a UI to see what’s going on across many feeds, set up picture-in-picture, watch 4 LIVE feeds at once, and have community interaction (see top videos etc.).

Silverlight and RIA
- Multi-Language support
- WPF UI Framework subset – layout management, data binding, styling, animation
- Robust networking stack (REST, SOAP, WS-*, standard HTTP endpoints, cross-domain networking, sockets)
- Integrated Data Support (incl. built-in support for LINQ, local cache)
- Small download, fast install: 4.3MB download, 6-10 seconds to install on clean machine
- Control templating and skinning model from WPF comes to Silverlight – including visual tree and animations!

- shipping the controls as source!!
- shipping a testing framework that allows you to write unit tests!
- shipping over 2000 unit tests that cover the Silverlight controls!

Silverlight 2 Beta 1 and WPF 3.5 evidence

AOL - mail client – power of Control Templates, basically. meh.

Hard Rock and Vertigo - 70,000 pieces of rock memorabilia
***** Demo – first GREAT demo of the morning
2 billion pixels
oh my goodness: http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

Aston Martin – online, dealership and ownership experiences
- online – Silverlight experience
- dealership – WPF and XNA experience
- ownership – “true telemetry” proof-of-concept demo
p.s. I can please has an Aston Martin? for demo purposes?

Cirque du Soleil - WPF Line-of-business app demo – Head of Casting, Resident Shows America, Krista Monson
***** Demo – second GREAT demo of the morning!!
They managed to make a WPF line-of-business app demo really engaging and relevant. Wow.

[Quick update: you can download the IE8 Beta here.]

I know that this conference is fundamentally about connected systems, and the web browser is a vitally important component.

But I thought this was a profoundly boring way to begin the technical announcement part of the keynote.

At first I was like “meh,” but then there were a couple of great demos that redeemed this segment, which I’ll mention after listing Dean’s 8 new things about IE8:

1. CSS 2.1
– of all the w3c working groups, this one should have the most impact

2. CSS Cetification
– 702 test cases made available under BSD license to w3c
- by default, IE8 interprets content in the most standards-compliant way

3. Perf
– much improved, esp. JScript related to strings

4. HTML 5 Start

5. Dev Tools
- set breakpoints in IE using “Developer Tools” . You can add a watch, there’s an immediate window, CSS style tracing and more.

6. Activities (integrate site into rest of web)
- “Smart-tag” like activities when you select, e.g., an address, a product that we can find on ebay, etc., without having to leave the page (using a hover-over window)
- very easy to extend

7. WebSlices (deliver user-specific content)
- allows me to subscribe and interact to portions of a page that interest me.
- examples: an ebay auction, the Facebook status
- dev experience: just add a div to the page, no need for a separate feed

8. Beta1 for Devs available after the keynote
- Get IE8 Beta here

My initial thought on this part of the keynote: IE8 does NOT make for an interesting demo. Why is this where we are starting our day?!

But then the things that engaged me:
- Showing IE8 responding to “Network Connection Lost” — and support for DOM storage
- Dev Tools built in to IE8 for setting breakpoints in code, adding watches, immediate window, CSS style tracing, and more.

Already available: First look at IE8 Activities and WebSlices

So in summary

Ray Ozzie began by saying he sees Mix08 as one of several milestones on a path culminating at the PDC event in October. The evolution he sees happening around the web are organized around 3 core principles:

1. (impact to the individual:) Think of web as hub (social)
- linking, sharing, ranking, tagging will become as familiar as file, edit, view

2. (impact to the enterprise:) Power of choice as enterprise moves to embrace the cloud
- enteprrise based software, partner-hosted services, and services in the cloud
- distributed, federated services between enterprise data center and the cloud

3. “Small pieces, loosely joined”

Connected Devices
– “Personal Device Mesh”
- unified device management where devices can report in for management, health, location
- an app plat cognisent of all your devices
- software+service offering

Connected Entertainment
– license your media once, and enjoy the media anywhere you want

Connected Productivity
– Office, Office Mobile, Office Live
- Office Live Workspace – wide public beta yesterday

Connected Business
– “inevitable shift toward utility computing in the Enterprise”
- Exchange Online, Office Communications Online, Office Commnications Server, SQL Server Data Services

Connected Development
– .NET offerings

More to come over a couple of posts.