Windows 7 is done, but the massive Microsoft machinery is grinding slowly through the process of localising it into multiple languages, burning discs, printing, stuffing and shipping boxes and getting the PC manufacturers on the starting line. Snow Leopard is done and it went on sale on Friday. Does that mean Apple is more nimble - or just in more of a hurry?

Since Snow Leopard went on sale there’s been a flurry of posts and questions - about application compatibility. We knew Snow Leopard itself wouldn’t run on PowerPC Macs because they don’t have the Intel chips that the new features rely on, but unlike Microsoft’s massive app testing and beta program Apple hadn’t been pushing out details about application compatibility. Running 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system often causes problems. Apple was prepared for this; the reviewer’s guide says “During installation, Snow Leopard checks your applications for compatibility, and sets aside any incompatible applications that are known to create instability in Snow Leopard” and this page on the Apple support site http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3258 lists a handful of apps that are known to have problems. Most of them are the usual suspects; low-level storage and security software that has to be updated with any operating system release. But a wireless broadband card, or Adobe Director MX 2004? That’s down to a large number of API changes, designed to remove old bugs - but as Microsoft has often found, one developer’s bug is another developer’s feature and fixing it can break an app.

There was quite the snowstorm of discussion at John Nack’s blog about Adobe products and Snow Leopard. http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/snow_leopard/ The official policy; CS4 is supported on Mac OS X 10.6, although Version Cue doesn’t work, CS3 isn’t supported. The unofficial line; CS3 “works fine” “to the best of our knowledge”; cue discussion about how long you should support old software on a new platform and whether you should delay creating the Cocoa version of Photoshop to go back and do the testing. But beyond the question of what resources Adobe could or should devote to supporting an OS update when it’s company policy not to put out updates to versions of software it no longer sells, is the question of how much time Apple has spent on testing third-party apps - and how much it could be telling users about potential compatibility issues. Apple certainly works very closely with the Photoshop team and would know about any problems they found (”If we found issues, we worked directly with Apple to get them fixed,” blogged Photoshop quality assurance manager David Howe) but there’s nothing about Version Cue on the support pages.

For Windows 7, Microsoft worked with 45,000 hardware and software developers, from IT departments inside businesses to one-man-bands to the big software and hardware names. There’s a long list of just a proportion of the devices tested at http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/10/primer-on-device-support-and-testing-for-windows-7.aspx and when you can actually buy Windows 7, the Windows Upgrade Advisor will be out of beta (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1b544e90-7659-4bd9-9e51-2497c146af15) - this checks the hardware and software you have installed -  the Vista Compatibility Center http://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/ will turn into the Windows 7 Compatibility Center where you can look up that Photoshop Album needs a free upgrade to v3.2 and Corel makes you pay to upgrade to Paint Shop Pro X2. We’re still impressed by the range of hardware and software Windows 7 supports; at the end of last week our elderly Elonex Media Center PC picked up a new driver for the Hauppauge TV card that hadn’t worked for years and suddenly offered up 98 Freeview TV and radio channels.

Apple doesn’t give Mac users this level of detail (there’s a list of supported printers and scanners at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669 but nothing official for software), so they’re gathering it informally; check http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/ for a long list of apps that do and don’t have problems.

It’s unlikely that any of these application compatibility problems mean that Snow Leopard wasn’t ready to ship. But perhaps Apple isn’t able to test as widely as Microsoft does or perhaps it was so keen to get Snow Leopard on sale to deflate some of the Windows 7 momentum that it didn’t take the time to document the issues. Or is it the back to school market that Apple is chasing, now rather dominated by netbooks (which DisplaySearch now puts at 22% of all personal computers sold)? 
-Mary

Remember macro viruses? Trojans and bots have taken over from them in the virus top ten, but there could easily still be binary Office documents lurking in your business’s fileservers with unwanted code in them. The XML file formats introduced with Office 2007 mean you know when a document has a macro by the file extension (an XLSX file can’t have code in, an XLSM can) but even though XML files are smaller as well as more secure, not everyone wants to spend the time to convert a backlog of many years. So to protect you from anything worrying, Office 2010 introduces a Protected View that locks documents when you open them, and runs in an isolated, low-integrity  process with a restricted token (rather like combining the protected mode that IE 8 runs in with the secure desktop you see with UAC elevation prompts - Protected View uses the same User Interface Privilege Isolation).

As the Office engineering blog post puts it, “For a malware to actually be able to run in Protected View it will first need to find a way around DEP, ASLR, GS and our new 2010 Office File validation checks.  After all that, the malware would need to find a way to break out of the sandbox.”

The Office team is confident enough in Protected View that opening and previewing attachments from Outlook will get less annoying; you won’t have to say yes, you trust every different type of document to open and preview individually the first time you come across it. It seems like a welcome security measure that will make life easier too. Sadly, as implemented it’s currently a productivity blocker that will be turned off or loathed by every user that comes across it.

On my system at least, every single document I open in Office 2010, binary or XML, from the office network is opened in Protected Mode and tagged as coming from ‘an unsafe location’. That’s supposed to be for documents downloaded from the Internet (”When a file is downloaded from the Internet the Windows Attachment Execution Service places a marker in the file’s alternate data stream to indicate it came from the Internet zone,” says the Office Engineering blog) and I’m kind of offended that Microsoft is telling me that our network isn’t secure - it is Windows Server 2008 we’re running. I’m also losing time on every document, having to click through before I can start editing.

I tried turning Protected View off; you can’t. You can go into the Trust center, ignoring the sign that tells you not to go in there and not to change anything, and tell Office to trust network documents (again, ignoring the warning that a network is a scary place and you shouldn’t be trusting it) but that didn’t fix it. I had to manually add the file shares on the server, mount point by mount point. You can’t just give office the name of your file server and trust the whole thing; Office refuses to mark the root of the server as safe.

This isn’t supposed to happen, says Microsoft. In some cases, the proxy settings are to blame (check out The LIZ and Proxies: the surprising connection for an explanation by Eric Lawrence of the IE team of why proxies are involved in the intranet at all. We don’t use a proxy. Maybe the Local intranet setting in Internet Options isn’t set to ‘Automatically detect’? It is, as it happen. 

Ah, says the Office team; it’s a bug, and they’re working on it. That’s good news; if I only have to put up with this until the beta of Office 2010 this autumn, that’s fair enough - you expect problems when you use a ‘technical preview’ (or alpha code as we used to call it).

But the fact that Office 2010 is relying on Internet Explorer options that may or may not apply if you don’t have Internet Explorer on your system is a little worrying (Firefox doesn’t use security zones, for example). And Simon, who is joined to the domain doesn’t see Protected View on network documents. So the underpinnings of Protected view seem to be a tangle of Internet Explorer, Active Directory and Microsoft network settings; that’s fine for an all-Microsoft business - like Microsoft. It’s less useful for the rest of the world where heterogeneous networks are the norm and security is important - but will always get demoted if it gets in the way of getting your job done. Let’s hope the bug fix does more than just tweak things; Protected View uses a spiffy new architecture inside Windows and it needs to take a clear and manageable approach to defining what a ’safe’ or ‘unsafe’ location actually is, or it’s going to be unpopular and insecure (cue everyone copying documents onto their laptop to edit them without the nagging and leaving them in the pub car park).
-Mary
 

You have to get used to the Office 2010 ribbon - and now it’s a lot easier to get used to.

The statistics from Office 2007 users show that the ribbon does what it was designed to do in terms of exposing more of the features that are in the application (because 80% of new feature requests were for features that are already in Office, just not where people were finding them). More people use more of the features in Office 2007 than ever before, says Chris Bryant from the Office team.

Not everyone likes the ribbon and for some people, Microsoft learned the lesson of how multiple interface options increase support costs rather too well with Office 2007 and Windows 7. Having gone to the effort of developing a logical user interface that’s more productive than the old muddle, Microsoft didn’t allow users to stay with old and inferior if they wanted the features that went with the new and improved interface. Quite where users who want new versions of Office without the ribbon think the new features would go is a mystery - and personally speaking, I embraced the ribbon, even though not all of the commands were quite where I thought they should be, on the grounds that I’d been nagging Microsoft for years to tidy up the old Office interface and find logical places for the extra commands and features they’d been cramming in to the old dialogs like pushing socks into a drawer you haven’t been able to close for months.

I know where every feature in the old Office interface was and sometimes I have to look in two tabs to find a specific command so you might expect me to complain about it - but I don’t (much). In Office 2003 the ribbon isn’t perfect but it is still a huge improvement and if a feature is in the wrong place on the ribbon I put it on the quick access toolbar.

And Office 2010 addresses almost every complaint about the ribbon (although if you’re one of the people who hate the ribbon because you have laboriously learned the obscure location of commands that are now clearly and logically arranged in the tabs, then your issue is more about forgiving Microsoft for past sins, abandoning the time you invested and stepping out of your comfort zone - and Microsoft can’t do much about that). If you don’t like features you never use taking up screen space, you can remove commands from tabs - or entire tabs. If your issue was that, say, proofing tools don’t belong under Review with the tools for working with comments on someone else’s document, then you can either move them to the tab where you think they fit better or create a whole new tab and put those commands in what you think is a logical group. And if you dislike the ribbon because you have to switch between tabs (which is no more work that opening menus and dialog boxes, but may feel like more work because you’re comparing it to clicking buttons that are right there in front of you on the ribbon), you can make your own ‘home’ tab for each application that has the tools you use at the full size of the ribbon rather than crammed onto the quick access toolbar. You can completely customise the ribbon and make something that increases productivity generally increase your own productivity too.

Mary

Today is the first day of Wimbledon, and it’s also the release of IBM’s first consumer augmented reality application, Seer (for Android mobile devices).

Here’s Seer in action:

Augmented reality is one of the upcoming killer applications for mobile devices, where the built-in sensors mix with geocoded information to tell you just what you’re seeing - and at the same time give you more information about it. Seer’s an annotated window into the Wimbledon, using the device’s camera, built-in GPS, compass, and G-sensor. The combination of the four lets the software know where the phone is, and where it is pointing - and at what angle - at which point it overlays relevant information on the camera view of the world, in your own personal heads-up display.

What IBM is doing is an interesting example, as it links straight into IBM’s Wimbledon data feeds (and its Twitter stream!). It’s easy to see how this type of tool can be adapted to business applications. Plug Seer into a logistics feed, and you’ll be able to “see” just what’s in each package on a shop floor, or in each truck on a loading dock. Perhaps it’ll help your sales staff identify the products your customers are using, or give estate agents a new tool for annotating houses.

Seer’s not the only AR application out there. I’ve been playing with a shiny new HTC Magic for a few weeks now, the G-2 Android phone in the guise of a Google ION developer device, and as part of my explorations I’ve been looking for interesting applications in the Android Market. That’s where I found one of the nicest pieces of mobile software I’ve seen - Google Sky Map.

It’s not surprising that Google has done such a good job with this software, after all, Android is their phone platform, and they should know it (and the reference hardware inside out). The folk in Mountain View also have a huge database of data they can take advantage of - in the shape of Google Earth and all its varied information layers. Where Sky Map differs from most computer based star maps is that it’s live.It then calculates the current view, and displays it. Google is augmenting reality, making it part of its world of search.

On a deeper level it’s actually a specialised version of what Mary calls a “What’s-That”, a device that when pointed at something, well, just does that. It annotates the world with an overlay of information to give us the information we want and need. Phones don’t have the power needed to deliver that level of image recognition, but they do know where you are. Constrain the problem to maps of the heavens, and you’ve got a winner on your hands.

The sky at night can be confusing - with light pollution and high cloud making identification hard. Just being able to point a phone in the right direction to get the names of the objects you can see is an excellent solution to the problem. After all, it’s the most personal of devices and one that’s going to be with us when we most need it.

Then there’s Wikitude, which is a step even further in the direction of the What’s-That, using the device camera and the device sensors to overlay points of interest from geo-coded data in Wikipedia and Qype on the phone screen.

Here it is, letting me know what’s in the world outside a hotel room somewhere in Oregon. There’s still not enough data in the world of public geo-coded information - but what there is is enough to make you want more.

You know, I really like living in the future.

(I’ll go into all the hassles involved in screen-capping Android another time!)

–Simon

The next time you get some piddling small change to make what’s actually going to take you hours, put up your blood pressure and make no difference at all but you have to do it to comply with some idiot directive like ‘all the images in the CMS must have file names with Separate Words Starting In Upper Case’, you could start writing scripts with complex regular expressions - which is a little easier in Windows 7 because you get PowerShell and a simple little script IDE. Or - especially if you’re doing it on behalf of a user - you could turn to a tool that’s saved me hours of time over the years I’ve been using it: ClipMate from Thornsoft.

As the name suggests, it was originally designed to make the Windows clipboard more useful. You know how you see something interesting, like a URL or the instructions for fooling Windows 7 beta into upgrading to Windows 7 RC and you copy it, only to get distracted and copy something else before you get around to pasting the first clip anywhere…

Personally, I think that’s one of the main reasons that the Web page you’re most likely to open is the one you’ve just closed, but ClipMate saves everything you copy into a rolling list (mine goes back to May 30th). If there are things you paste a lot (frequent flyer numbers, your address, directions to your house that stop people taking what looks like a short cut, basic instructions for internal applications that don’t work the way users expect, a scan of your signature for pasting into that one fax a year you still have to send…) you can put those into a ’safe’ collection that doesn’t get cleaned out automatically and you can have multiple collections to keep handy scripts separate from Polite Responses To Stupid Requests.

But once you have something copied, ClipMate also has a bundle of tools for working with it. You get a word and character count at the bottom of the window, or the dimensions if it’s an image. You can see spelling mistakes  (and correct them before you paste the text back). You can remove line breaks - ideal for fixing URLs that break apart in email. You can strip out fancy text formatting (very handy if you like to compose your blog posts in a real word processor and paste them in to the blog editor without worrying about getting weird fonts and weirder HTML codes in there). You can show non-printing characters like tabs and spaces to see why text doesn’t lay out the way you expect. Or you can just highlight HTML formatting and URLs in the clip, to make it easier to read. You can strip out any formatting - the >> quote marks on email inclusions or any other specific character that’s in your way (the icon for this is a magician’s top hat and wand). You can add macros and regular expressions to clips that activate when you paste them (ideal for scripts). And you can swap the case of the clip - not just by clicking an icon or a menu entry, but with a keyboard shortcut.

So you can iterate through your list of image names going click (select filename), click (rename file), Ctrl-C, Ctrl-Alt-C (open ClipMate), Ctrl-Alt-M (Change To Leading Caps), click (select filename that’s still live for renaming), Ctrl-V. It’s the kind of soothing repetition that you can speed through even while you fume about whoever decided Leading Cap Image File Names were a good idea in the first place.
ClipMate: it’s just so useful.

Is it really just a buzzword? Since 2001, the venture capitalists who fund start-up businesses have invested $29 billion in Web 2.0 companies, but there hasn’t been a single company in the sector that’s been successful enough to have an IPO and become a rich, successful company (and pay back the VC investors). Even if you want to push the definition of Web 2.0 to include Skype, they got their investment in 1998.

In fact, talking at the Future in Review conference this week, Seattle VC Rick LeFaivre of OVP Venture Partners says only 15% of venture funds have made money since 2001.  “VC as we know it is over”, says Jeb Terry of Aberdeen Investment Management and the US has some hard lessons to learn. Engineers and developers who used to train in the US and start companies in the US now go back to China or Japan and set up there. US companies and products aren’t always setting the standards for the rest of the world either, he says; “The idea that if you won here you could be successful elsewhere is no longer true. You have to think about the rest of the world.”

For Australian companies, the US used to be 65% of the global market; Roger Buckeridge of Australian VC Allen & Buckeridge says it’s down to 30-40%. And start-ups in other countries get more support - from government or other programmes - than new US companies. “Everyone is trying to solve the same problems all around the world and in other countries they’re helping far more than we are helping,” says Michael Pfeffer of Kolohala Ventures in Hawaii. “How much time does a start-up spend fund raising? Five, six months out of the year? If there’s some guy in Israel working on the same problem and all he’s doing is building value in his company, you’re at a disadvantage.  We all have to think globally now.”

If investors don’t get a return from start-ups, they’ll stop putting money in and we’ll stop seeing new companies and new products. The venture capital business has made so much money it’s not going to stop overnight, but it is going to change. The VCs are going to be more involved in fewer companies, for a longer time.  Expect more tools to come from start-ups in countries other than the US as well.
-Mary

User experience is a complex thing, with the smallest elements affecting everyone differently. Big changes in an OS UI can have significant impacts of applications that were designed to work with another version. Take Office 2007 for example. It’s a productivity tool that ends up running your online world. I spend most of my time in just three Office applications (and a web browser) - running Outlook, OneNote and Word.

It’s Outlook where the problems appear. If you’re using XP or Vista the option to hide minimised windowx from the task bar, you’ll end up using Outlook’s status bar icons to show if new mail has arrived and to open and close your inbox. It’s a simple way of working, and one that completely falls apart once you upgrade to Windows 7.

It’s purely down to the new task bar. Icons in the task bar are large and compelling. They show when an application is running, and when it’s closed. Unfortunately they don’t show an application as running when it’s hidden - so using the old “hide Outlook” approach fails. The task bar icon becomes the place to click for new windows, and suddenly your PC is running multiple Outlook instances, chewing CPU and memory, and slowing shutdown times.

There is a simple answer - turn off the hide when minimised option, and move the Outlook status bar icon to Windows 7’s new status bar overflow bubble. Suddenly you’re back to doing everything with the task bar icon (albeit without all the information you used to have). One Outlook, one window - and a task bar preview to help you find the things you need to run your day. It’s just a pity that you had to throw away all the useful information you got from the status bar.

One thing occured to me a while back: the icons on the Windows 7 task bar are large and clear - so why shouldn’t they be a tool for displaying information about running applications. After all, my iPhone uses dynamic icons to show me how many messages are unread, and even just what day it is… The keynote at Microsoft’s TechEd here in Los Angeles showed that Microsoft has been thinking the same way, and is adding subtle status icons to the task bar in Office 2010.

The most obvious was in Outlook 2010. There’s no need to keep looking at the status bar for new message indicators - they’re now an overly on the task bar. New mail shows as the familiar envelope image - but as part of the Outlook task bar icon. Read the message, and the envelope vanishes.

It’ll be interesting to see how many other software vendors start using dynamic icons in the Windows 7 task bar. It’s a technique that makes a lot of sense, turning placeholders into a means of delivering quick hits of contextual information, simplifying interactions and giving developers a new way of delivering content to users. You can imagine workflow applications that display current tasks, or to do lists that alert you out of the corner of your eye. The Windows 7 task bar will become what it really needs to be - a dashboard for your PC.

 –Simon

“Anti-patterns” is a developer term that refers to solutions that look good but lead to inefficient or ineffective results. It’s a concept that’s worth sharing with the wider world, as there are many many anti-patterns in the ways we work that we need to identify, and throw out. At last week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, IBM’s Aaron Kim ran through some of the anti-patterns that are affecting the uptake of the latest web technologies inside business, and which threaten to derail current Enterprise 2.0 currents.

The first was one he labled “Fear 2.0″. It’s not so much fear itself, as what you do to repond to it. Leaping into a project out of fear can be as bad as being afraid to get started, and one of Kim’s points was that fear is not a bad thing but action paralysis is. Corporate fear is always a risk, but so is indvidual fear, as people are afraid to act decisively - as failure comes with a name tag. Yes, innovating is risky, but not innovataing may be riskier, and the latest technologies take full control is out of your hands. In the end, says Kim, you need to “Fail often, fail quickly, fail gracefully, and learn from it.”

Fear may be the obvious anti-pattern, but it has its collolary - Hype. Enthusiastic leaps into an unknown future can be as a disasterous as sticking with old and decaying processes. Just wanting somehting because it is cool, or because someone told you it was cool, isn’t enough to justify a new project. As Kim points out, “The lack of a business case will come back to haunt you.”

It may be a new world, but people still have old habits. A lot of Enterprise 2.0 services are collaborative - and people don’t share. There’s too much of an advantage in keeping information to yourself, and you need to educate your users, as they’re your competitive advantage. Collaborative applicaitons need connections, and opening them up lets you access what Kim calls “the invisible majority”. What we have is a collection of technologies wrapped up in a new management philosophy, and to get success you’ll need to transform the culture around you, not just deploy new tools.

You can’t just have a Field Of Dreams approach, you may build it, but they won’t come. People need to be brought on board, and you need to meet their actual needs, not what you think they are. It can’t take up a lot of their time, either. People have limited bandwidth and are often overloaded to start with. They’re also not all geeks, and we often assume too much of our users. Why not take a leaf out of the book of school nutritionists, who found the route to a healthier diet wasn’t just education - it also meant putting healthier foods where they were easier to access. People are lazy, and making it easier to try something new than to go the old way can have a significant impact on a project’s success.

One other thing came out of Kim’s talk: Intangible doesn’t mean unmeasurable. You need to consider how a project adds and captures value in a business. Projects need easy to understand business cases, and ROI must be easy to calculate. Even so, there are no magic metrics, and returns need to be broadly defined.

–Simon

When Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 for what happened after the dotcom boom and crash (dotcon to dotbomb as the 2001 technology downturn is sometimes known), what he didn’t take into account was the stunningly naive assumptions that people in the technology industry are prone to make.
Web 2.0 was a name for the principle that the companies that survived the crash were the ones that had learned to use the Web as a platform. That’s not just Google Docs and Zoho building Web applications that I personally compare to Microsoft Works or at best Excel circa 1998; it’s Amazon and eBay and sites that get better because people use them and add information (whether that’s reviews of historical price trends).
Google Docs and OpenOffice give me the same feeling I had when I saw Mono on a stand at Web 2.0 labelled Open Source Innovation; what’s so innovative about recreating something that somebody else already built? Far too much of open source is conscious or unconscious reaction to Microsoft.
That’s understandable when you hear the rather self-satisfied way people like Microsoft’s Stephen Elop refer to Web 2.0, innovation and the role of Microsoft; he said that he’d found moving from Silicon Valley to Seattle not as different as he expected when he left Macromedia because it had the same “huge concentration of people concentrating on fixing  problems” and when no-one in the audience agreed that “Microsoft is the most interoperable company in the world” he fired right back “I would argue that’s becoming true.”
Microsoft is working hard on interoperability and standards, and it does have a huge concentration of smart, smart people. But it’s also something of a monoculture. With Windows and Office as a multi-billion dollar revenue stream that’s inevitable. Add to that the number of users (around half of whom pay for Office Elop added) and you have if not a barrier to innovation then at least a brake; innovations that come from Microsoft are going to have been worked out carefully enough that they may no longer be new by the time you get them.
Chatting with a friend who’s planning to move back to Windows from Mac because he’s had too many hardware failures, wants a cheap PC and finds he can do many things on Mac but not write fiction, I urged him to try Windows 7 on the netbook he’s trying out. It’s in beta I told him, but it’s very reliable. There are some drivers that aren’t ready yet, but most things just work (thought I do wish I could persuade someone at Microsoft to slip me a copy of build 7068, say) and the performance is better than XP or Vista. And at this point I thought to myself that if Microsoft were to ship Windows 7 right now, based on the beta plus the improvements I’ve been told are in slightly more recent builds,  it would be like Vista - a good product that needs more work from both Microsoft and the ecosystem. This time around, the Windows team is going to hang on until it’s done.
Will we call it innovative when it arrives? Will it be a platform that inspires developers with its potential the way Web 2.0 does? Will it look as cool as Palm’s Web OS - which is also likely to arrive some time between April and September? Windows 7 isn’t a dramatically new idea of what an OS is (and Windows 8 may not be that either), but neither is Web 2.0 (which in many ways grew out of Outlook Web Access, the original Ajax application). Web 2.0 is about discovering how much more you can do with the technology you already have. If Windows 7 can unlock the value in servers and applications and storage that Vista didn’t quite reach, then that should certainly count as innovation.

-Mary

Good design isn’t just for those fancy marketing advertising sites. It’s an important part of how you relate to your users – and how they work with your applications and services. A SAP line of business service needs just as much design as an ecommerce web site. Internal users need to love the applications they use just as much as they love eBay or LiveJournal or IT Pro…

Here at MIX09 Microsoft is evangelising user experience to designers and developers from all over the world. Microsoft Research’s Bill Buxton has provided dynamic and entertaining keynotes, and his ideas are showing up in the next generation of design tools that previewed here in Las Vegas this week. But the most interesting and inspiring keynote wasn’t the Silverlight 3 extravaganza, or the unveiling of Internet Explorer 8. Instead it was one woman standing on stage talking about prescription medicines.

I was tempted to save this story for Ada Lovelace Day next week, but Deborah Adler’s work with redesigning the prescription label shows just how good design can make people’s lives easier (and even save them), while also changing the public’s perception of a business.

It all started when her grandmother accidentally took some of her grandfather’s medicine. It’s not difficult for that to happen, as the standard packaging for pharmacy medicines all look the same: little orange plastic jars with badly printed labels. Adler was working on her master’s design thesis at the time, and took on redesigning the packaging as a task.

She used information architecture principles to redesign the labels, and came up with a packaging design that made it easier to view important information. The result was a clearer, safer view that could be personalized to avoid confusion, and which prioritised key pieces of information – the drug, the dose, and when it should be taken.

Of course that was just a college project, but Adler believed in what she was doing and felt that things should go a lot further than just being shelved in a college library. She took her ideas to regulatory bodies and to many of the large US pharmacy chains.

She ended up working with Target, where her ideas were refined, using more user research and industrial design. The resulting Clear RX system had redesigned packaging, with Adler’s new clear labels, as well as a new set of documentation to go along with the pill bottles – and the bottle included a magnifying lens to make the text even clearer.

Clear RX has now won many awards, and has also changed the perception of Target’s pharmacy – significantly increasing its market share. A new user experience has ended up not only saving lives, but adding business value.

Adler’s rules for design are a good set of guidelines for anyone designing an application, or a service:
1.Having a love affair with the customer and digging into their needs

2.Solve those needs humanly and humanely

Having a love affair with your users may seem a little odd, but it’s all about making a connection to your users and understanding what they need and how they need it.

Simon
At MIX09 in Las Vegas