This email from Bill Gates to some of his employees has been making the rounds on the web but I think the message he is sending here is spot on. Senior management everywhere should take the time to “eat their own dogfood” and try their products - especially if they are online.

I’m constantly amazed by the number of executives who have never put themselves in the shoes of their customers and actually tried to use their products. Way to go Bill!

Thanks to seattlepi.com for the lead on this.

—- Original Message —-

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

So I went to Windows update. Windows Update decides I need to download a bunch of controls. (Not) just once but multiple times where I get to see weird dialog boxes.

Doesn’t Windows update know some key to talk to Windows?

Then I did the scan. This took quite some time and I was told it was critical for me to download 17megs of stuff.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Update again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

What does it mean to have to click on that folder? So I get a bunch of confusing stuff but sure enough one of them is Moviemaker.

So I do the download. The download is fast but the Install takes many minutes. Amazing how slow this thing is.

At some point I get told I need to go get Windows Media Series 9 to download.

So I decide I will go do that. This time I get dialogs saying things like “Open” or “Save”. No guidance in the instructions which to do. I have no clue which to do.

The download is fast and the install takes 7 minutes for this thing.

So now I think I am going to have Moviemaker. I go to my add/remove programs place to make sure it is there.

It is not there.

What is there? The following garbage is there. Microsoft Autoupdate Exclusive test package, Microsoft Autoupdate Reboot test package, Microsoft Autoupdate testpackage1. Microsoft AUtoupdate testpackage2, Microsoft Autoupdate Test package3.

Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Moviemaker is just not there at all.

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

When I really get to use the stuff I am sure I will have more feedback.

So the secret is out - the reason Apple does such great design work is that they do ten, count-em ten, nearly full designs for each feature they come up with.

I tried to to find the presentation that was done at the South by Southwest conference in March that talks about the Apple design process but couldn’t come up with it so this article by BusinessWeek will have to do.

Google recently published a list of 10 user experience principles that they aim to follow when designing their applications.

They are (don’t you just hear the Letterman drum roll in the background…):

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams
2. Every millisecond counts
3. Simplicity is powerful
4. Engage beginners and attract experts
5. Dare to innovate
6. Design for the world
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind
9. Be worthy of people’s trust
10. Add a human touch

For the most part all of this makes sense to me. It is pretty hard to argue with “Be worthy of people’s trust” after all. They are also all rather high level so most things that Google does are going to fit pretty well within the principles.

The one I did think was a bit funny was “Delight the eye without distracting the mind”. I’m curious as to whether any graphic designers even work at Google since everything they produce looks like it was done by an engineer who had taught himself PhotoShop. I’m an engineer who has taught myself Photoshop so I should know.

They have some work do to on #8.

I’ve always known usability was important, but I didn’t realize that it could lead to a class action lawsuit. Google is being sued because of how a specific Adwords bidding page is designed. Or more specifically how an opt-out condition is  implied based on how the screen is designed but actually doesn’t occur.

“You might get sued” is something I’ve never seen in a usability audit!

I was on a couple of review sites today (among the list were PriceGrabber, Epinions and my3cents) to do some additional research on yesterday’s post on the long term validity of online reviews and I was a bit surprised about how poor the user experience is on these sites. I mean, some of these sites have been around since the mid 1990s and should have figured it out by now.

Specifically I tried to post reviews on all three sites and actually was unable to do so. The problems I ran into fall into a number of categories but all all killers from a user experience perspective:

1) It was not possible to sign up. Either I had registered previously and forgotten my password or the sign up process employed not only a captcha but also an email confirmation link (which in two cases never showed up). It seems to avoid bots, many sites are putting so many hoops in front of a new user that it becomes nearly impossible to register. If newly registered users are your lifeblood this is really bad! Make it easy - two clicks max with immediate feedback.

2) I could not change my public profile nickname. On one site I first registered in 2001 and sometime since then the site had adopted the user ID I created back then as my public profile nickname. When I went to change it I could not and as a result didn’t bother to post a review.

3) I entered a review and it went into the void - no confirmation, no summary and nothing in my profile. Feedback is critical to make sure that your users know you value their input and the faster the better.

With the massive number of new sites vying for attention, it is absolutely critical that your site be simple and straightforward to use and that the registration process be seamless. The review sites I looked at above failed miserably in this area.

A few months back I was brainstorming Internet startup ideas in a bar in midtown, New York City (great bar by the way) and one of the ideas that we came up with was sort of a social network for data. The concept was a centralized database infrastructure where anyone who wanted could upload data sets that they had created to share, trade or sell. We never got far with the idea but at the time it sounded pretty cool - subject to the effects of three glasses of single malt of course.

Of course like all good ideas, there are many others out there who are thinking along the same lines. Bret Taylor, formerly of Google expressed the same desire in his blog and Read Write Web published a list of current sites that allow you to share data sets in some way.

I’ve played with a few of these sites and while they are interesting, the thing I keep coming back to is that they need to be much easier to use. I think the problem here is that most of the existing sites are built for techies by techies and as a result aren’t very user centric. It should be as easy for a university researcher with a huge, complicated data set to share it, as Joe Smith down the block who has a passion for coin collecting and has documented (with pictures) every US penny minted from 1850 to today and wants to share what he’s built.

The site that always comes to mind when I think about this topic is Geni.com. They have made a complicated data issue – geological research – really really easy. I put my direct family into the tool about six months ago on a whim and at last count my relatives have added 2000+ people to the tree with pictures, email addresses, birthdays and all sorts of data. If my aunt who can barely turn on her computer can do it then the tool has met the usability test. The other tool that comes to mind is FileMaker – creating data sets in it was brain dead simple.

What is necessary in this particular space is to make it really easy to model complex data elements. The startup that manages to do it will win and should be huge. If they also allow people to connect data sets together and pull them off to their blogs, websites, and so on then they will really win. Combine the business with either the Amazon or Google cloud computing databases and things get really interesting.

I hope someone solves this soon. I’ll be a user…I love data.

The term “user centric design” has been around for as long as there have been designers (of anything - I’m sure the first guy to rub two sticks together was talking about his target audience when he did it) but it is pretty amazing that even with all the evidence that making sure what you design is what your intended user base actually wants, there are still examples every day where this fundamental principle is missed.

I had a chance to talk yesterday to Melissa Fredrick, a reporter at the DC Examiner about a new web site recently announced by the Travel Industry Association in partnership with Travelocity and the Department of Commerce. My comment to her, which you can read in the resulting article, was that there isn’t any need for yet another white labeled travel site that would add nothing new to the conversation nor really promote travel to the US any better than hundreds of other sites out there including the one I spent most of my free time on - TravelGator.

What seems to be missing in this concept is what do the people out there who might consider traveling to the US on their vacation really need to make their decision. My premise is that they want relevant information, wide choice, good deals and access to the unique adventures that will present themselves across America. What I’d encourage the Commerce Department to look at is how they can provide unique content and access to the millions of smaller travel services providers that exist that are not able to get on the Travelocity platform. Now of course I like Travelocity - when I need a cheap airfare or a hotel I always check them out as they’ve got great deals. But we need more than just good hotel and airfare pricing if we are going to promote travel to the US.