I’m comfortably settled in to my new office here in building 40 with the Silverlight team and spent my first morning installing Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2, the Silverlight 4 Tools and watching a couple of videos from PDC to help with the deep dive ramp up. I enjoyed Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview (I sit across the hall from Karen), Improving and Extending the Sandbox with Microsoft Silverlight 4 (Joe is my Grandmanager) and Building Line of Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 4 (by David Poll). This afternoon I’ve been playing with some of the new ‘stuff’ and thinking about what I might create as a first application (the new drag and drop capabilities, RichTextArea and HTML capabilities are very interesting).

While the designer features in Visual Studio are nice I’m feeling relatively comfortable writing and reading the raw XAML and wiring up events so I’m just going to stick with that approach for a while to learn the nuances of the markup. I’m actually surprised I like hand editing this much -- but I guess all of those years writing Media Center Markup Language (MCML) has me conditioned to doing so!

My focus on the Silverlight team will be media – a fairly broad subject but one I really, really enjoy and is quite deep. It’s now time to begin meeting Silverlight developers so I can understand what you folks would like to see in the platform – leave a comment with your feedback and tell me what you’d like to see in the future, especially if it is in the media realm.

Last week I took an hour to evaluate the Ask A Question page design over at http://superuser.com. Jeff and the community provided some valuable feedback in the comments on that post as well as this meta discussion. A single hour isn't really enough to do a good job looking at an end to end user experience so I decided to take this weeks Coding Friday to examine the feedback and look more closely at the overall user flow to see if we can improve things to keep the proposed redesign largely intact.

The Related Questions feature is probably one of the most important for this page -- it helps users find answers AND helps to prevent duplicate questions from being asked. In response to my suggestion we move this to the right side bar Jeff responded...

"I don't think we can get away with removing the "How to Ask" entirely -- you assume mightily about the competence of our audiences :) And if we can't get rid of that, that means the sidebar is now unavailable for the related questions."

I agree with Jeff the 'How to Ask' section is important to the audience -- and I think I've got an idea which helps put it front and center while at the same time respecting returning users and preserving the Related Questions side bar.

But before we go there, let's take a look at the overall user progression and note some of the outstanding issues.

1. User navigates to the Ask Question Page.
2. When user leaves the Title field the Related Questions appear.
3. User types their question text.
4. User selects a Related Question.
5. User selects OK and is navigated to the related question page.
6. User presses the Back button in their browser to return to their question.
7. User leaves the Title field.

There are four issues we need to resolve with this user experience…

1. Whether the user has visited this page once or hundreds of times the 'How to Ask' and 'How to Format' sections are present.
2. Related Questions between Title and question text pushes the preview below the fold.*
3. User gets a dialog box and is navigated away from their question when they select a Related Question.
4. When I return to my question the Related Questions section has disappeared until such time I leave the Title field.

*Note: Even though Jeff thinks the fold is largely irrelevant it is important to consider for the task he originally lamented: Keeping users from posting incorrectly formatted questions. Being able to see the live preview as I type will generally aid in this area -- therefore we should strive to keep the preview above the fold if possible.

And here are some suggestions to address the 4 issues identified above with the end to end user experience.

• Make 'How to Ask' a dialog which is presented the first X time(s) a user enters this page, where X is 1 to 5.

• Revise 'How to Format' in the right column with a bounding box to separate from the balance of the page.

• Replace 'How to Format' with the Related Questions when the user leaves the Title field.

Update: Jeff posted this to the SuperUser.com meta discussion to get feedback – check it out here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/27204/alternative-ask-page-layout.

I simply love reading Jeff Atwoods codinghorror.com – consistently good. They are having usability issues with the Ask A Question form over at superuser.com and Jeff’s post on the subject has resulted in an astonishing 270+ comment thus far – lots of opinions about what to do with individual pieces and parts to make it better. Unfortunately, none provide much of an all encompassing view of what could be done to make the form better and solve problems. So took my Coding Friday to do a cognitive walkthrough (something us Program Managers do quite often) and see if I could come up with 10 usability suggestions for the superuser.com development team. Spending just a couple of hours doing this for your user experience can reap big usability rewards.

Of course, since the audience are ninja developers I’ve chosen to make my list zero based.

Feedback welcome!

Note: Click on the images to see 100% screenshot.

0

Issue: We have redundant titles in the 'Ask Question' non-actionable button and the 'Ask a Question' page title).

Solution: Get rid of the page title and let the non-actionable button tell the user their location. Use a better color for a non-actionable button -- in this case I grayed out the button -- literally.

1

Issue: Jeff says "What we're doing with the trilogy is not exactly rocket surgery. At its core, we run Q&A websites. And the most basic operation of any Q&A website is … asking a question. Something any two year old child knows how to do." and then proceeds to tell the end user exactly how to ask a question. Like great comedy, your user experience shouldn't talk down to your audience.

Solution: Unless your audience is, in fact, under the age of two, delete altogether and use the space more wisely.

2

Issue: The Related Questions (which are really potential answers) and the search box navigates me forward (potentially destroying my work) and results in a dialog box (at least the first time I try to navigate away). The Related Questions experience pushes my question text further down past the fold.

Solution: The title is actually a search (and is quite a brilliant feature). Delete search from the header, move Related Questions to the right navigation, persist them and let more of them appear as my question text gets longer. Clicking on any of them opens a new window (or an in-page preview). This way I can see if it answers my question or is related (bonus: I can get the Url to embed in my question).

3

Issue: The preview is likely to be beneath the fold assuming screen resolution of 1024 x 768 – which is still more common than you might think.

Solution: Moving the Related Questions over to the right navigation helped as did removing the page title. Moving the label for the Title input field gains us a few more pixels. The more the end user can see the preview the better chance they will have to get things right.

4

Issue: Offline writing then copy and paste doesn't work. This is likely where the author of this question started (I did for the purposes of this post).

Solution: Replace Markdown with a more elegant solution which understands CRLF. Even better, implement a true WYSIWYG editor if possible and avoid the disassociated (and unfriendly) separate preview window altogether. Realizing this may be harder in practice I've left the core editing experience alone recognizing superuser.com (and its peer sites) might have special requirements which necessitate this editor. (Interesing idea: What if I could use Windows Live Writer or something like it to post questions?)

5

Issue: Input box for notification which doesn't tell me what to enter -- I can assume email address.

Solution: You know what they say about assume. Clean it up and be explicit. Use the actual text box space to tell the user what they need to enter -- automatically replacing when they start typing. Same thing with tags, by the way.

6

Issue: The 'Ask Your Question' button wording is too complex. If I were to localize the interface (using German because it usually results in the longest strings) 'Ask Your Question' becomes 'Stellen Sie Ihre Frage'. Plus, I have a greyed out button style for an actionable button which seems counterintuitive given all of the other actionable buttons are the color teal.

Solution: Change to the standard seen around the world: "Submit" (which in German is "Senden") and make the button a standard color (teal) to fit with the rest of the actionable buttons at superuser.com.

7

Issue: Hyperlink Hell. Do we really need About and FAQ at the top and the bottom? Not including things I’ve already deleted with suggestions zero through six I count 24 text based hyperlinks on the page.

Solution: Don't have the same link in two different places. If it's important, put it at the top. If it's not important put it at the bottom. If it’s truly not important, don’t have it. Better yet, put all links either at the top or the bottom -- if bottom, you can get some additional user workspace at the top. Realizing this may not be possible I’ve pretty much left all hyperlinks in place below. Think seriously about what hyperlinks you really need – could your user be better served with putting a bunch of them on the About page, for example.

8

Issue: Font hell + visual clutter. We have a combination of fonts (Arial, Consolas, Trebuchet MS at least) at a good number of varying sizes and weights. Plus we have boxes (look at Related Questions and the Markdown editor) which have dissimilar styles and don't line up. Some boxes don’t have borders. Some boxes are solid colors with reversed out text. The net effect is the overall design can't seem to make up its mind.

Solution: Stick religiously to a defined style. All input boxes should look the same. All section headers should look the same. All hyperlinks should look the same. Make things line up. Logically group items. You can never have too much polish, polish, polish.

9

Issue: The formatting reference can't make up its mind on how much information to give and for almost every user will be either too much or not enough. Making the information bigger, bolder (or neon pink) can’t solve this problem.

Solution: As noted above having a better WYSIWYG editor can solve most of these problems. Giving the user a better chance to see the preview (getting it above the fold) will also help. Given the constraints of this editor it's best to either (a) embed the full formatting reference in this page (at the bottom) for extremely convenient reference or have exactly one link to the formatting reference (as I've done here) – note: should be a new window or in a preview pane so I don’t have to leave my work. Having a preview + confirmation page which appears when the user clicks the Submit asking them 'Do you like the formatting of post' can also help them double check their work and perhaps prompt them to clean things up.

Here are the results if you follow the suggestions above…

I finished up fixing the last few bugs for PowerPlaylist 2 for Windows Media Center in Windows 7 and posted the installer and source to http://www.codeplex.com/powerplaylist. PowerPlaylist adds a start menu strip with up to five tiles to Windows Media Center in Windows 7. Each tile represents an audio, slideshow and / or visualization combination which will start when the tile is selected and is highly customizable by the consumer resulting in a highly personalized Windows Media Center experience.

Also included is the PowerPlaylist Editor which makes it really easy to modify the start menu strip name and individual tiles.

Enjoy…!

Yes.

Here’s why…

• Windows Media Center always shipped that way. Even in the Windows XP Media Center Edition days when it was shipped ‘out of band’ every year it was still as a feature of Windows. Changing to a different development model is harder than most people think and brings more risk than might be necessary. Staying on this path allowed the Windows Media Center team to focus on shipping the next great set of features.
• The distribution model is a big win both for customers (it’s right there) and the Windows Media Center team (it’s right there). There is the hurdle of hardware (think tuners and remote controls) but shipping standalone raises the hurdle higher. Hurdles, generally speaking, are bad for adoption and user friendliness.
• I think the community would agree there are awareness problems with Windows Media Center – those would be compounded (multiplied) in a standalone application. Once the consumer becomes aware they can immediately begin using.
• The engineering task to build as a standalone product could very easily double (perhaps even triple). Windows Media Center relies on a lot of technology built by other teams throughout Microsoft and the Windows organization (three that easily come to mind: Windows Media Player, .NET Framework, Home Group). Generally speaking, you naturally get the ‘latest, greatest stuff’ when you ship simultaneously.
• Windows Media Center isn’t really all that unique when you think about it – more of an alternative user interface on features already present in Windows. Why force consumers to download / acquire something else?
• The business model works out this way. Standalone would automatically mean much fewer resources which in turns means much fewer features. Some would argue that might be a good thing – feel free to leave a comment with an opinion. I think the key takeaway here is the resources might force you to cut features beyond what most of the market would consider ‘must have’ and make the overall value proposition much less.

I’d be interested in your opinion: Do you think it was the correct decision to keep Windows Media Center as a feature of Windows rather than a standalone application?

Edit: I've locked the thread from further comments. The conversation got out of control with such negativity that it ceased to be helpful to those involved or the community.

Niall Ginsbourg posted this the other day…

“…unless you’re after some pretty specific (and less than useful) changes offered in the Win7 incarnation of this SDK – my best advice to developers would be to completely give this SDK a miss – and instead revert back to Vista Media Center SDK /along with Vista Dev platform (if you do plan on persisting with Media Center development).”

Bad advice. I mean really, really bad.

Windows 7 is generally accepted by the industry as a whole to be much better than Windows Vista. By the time all is said and done it will sell loads more copies and be much more prevalent than Windows Vista. The Windows Media Center platform has quite a few improvements for Media Center Markup Language (MCML) and the Managed Code Object Model which gives you the most seamless and elegant chance to have a great experience.

I got this question a lot when I was on the Windows Media Center team. Usually it assumes the enthusiast market is an undesirable place to be and I never agreed with that position. Reading Chris Anderson’s 'The Long Tail' convinced me of that a long time ago.

Before I give my answer let me define 'beyond the enthusiast market' for the purposes of this post: I consider items like televisions, DVD players, cars, computers and phones as things which have gone beyond the enthusiast market. Leave a comment to tell us how your definition might be different.

My answer: It's possible, but highly unlikely at this point.

Products which become mainstream are usually very simple in nature to use (televisions, DVD players, phones) or are complex yet fundamentally market changing over a very long period of time (cars, computers).

The user interface for Windows Media Center greatly simplifies the enjoyment of core media experiences (music, pictures, videos, TV) but underneath the covers it's highly complex. It's also very complex to setup for most mainstream consumers for two big reasons (among several smaller ones)...

1. It's an interface designed for and best used on a television with a remote control. The mainstream market doesn't typically place a computer next to their television.
2. The unique core value proposition* is the digital video recorder functionality. Getting the TV signal to the computer is a challenge for the mainstream market.

The Windows Media Center team did a fantastic job of overcoming the first hurdle (co-location with a TV) with the introduction of the Extender. At the same time it also introduced another barrier: the home network. Throw in the fact the mainstream market doesn't have Ethernet jacks in every room next to their TV. This requires a high availability wireless network to push lots of [HD] video around which presents yet another hurdle.

So, given it's relative complexity can it be one of those fundamentally market changing items over a long period of time?

Probably not. Windows Media Center had its genesis with the coax cable (referring back to its unique value proposition) and it was a game changer in that context. There were many others doing broadcast TV on a computer long before Windows Media Center. Windows Media Center brought a scale and awareness not seen before.

As with many things (especially in technology) the market around it dramatically changed. The game changed.

To remain relevant (and become mainstream) in a market where the internet will increasingly be the dominant way of getting nearly all forms of commercial content the Windows Media Center team must fully embrace the internet rather than simply leveraging. Over the course of Windows 7 development the equivalent of three people (one each PM, Dev, Test) on the platform team tried to do just that with the Data Access Model Items, Media Collection and Page Model, Navigation and State API work. Another relatively small team continued to crank out the Internet TV features for customers in the United States. By comparison a significant number of resources continued to work on the traditional TV pipes paradigm (broadcast, cable, satellite) for Windows 7. In a nutshell, very little embracing.

All that said…

I do believe Windows Media Center has paved the way for much richer, elegant and interactive experiences for the television beyond what game consoles are offering today. It gives the mainstream market a glimpse of just how powerful the next wave (or two) of internet connected devices in our home might become in the future. I challenge folks all the time to tell me what other distributed audio / video / photo system has as much bang for the buck. It's a pretty hard value to beat. Nothing else on the market allows me to enjoy all of ‘my’ content (personal and commercial) in such an elegant AND affordable way. Leave a comment if you believe you have a worthy contender.

It may be niche, but the niche sure is sweet!

And because of that I’m quite bullish on the future prospects despite the hurdles faced. Like you, I’m now waiting to see what comes next while I enjoy what I have today.

Got a question about Windows Media Center for someone who worked on it once upon a time?Ask on Twitter via @charlieo.

* The unique thing about Windows Media Center compared to other features which ship with Windows is the digital video recorder and electronic programming guide. Most (if not all) of the other key features (photos, videos, music) have equivalents on the desktop.

The Windows Media Center team posted the RTM version of the Windows Media Center Software Development Kit 6.0 for Windows 7 to the following location.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/C/6/6C6B665D-6240-4958-A028-A944B8BD6860/WindowsMediaCenterSDK6.msi

You can leave feedback here or chat about it over at http://discuss.mediacentersandbox.com.

Kudos goes to Niall Ginsbourg for breaking the news.

On a recent family vacation we went horseback riding near West Yellowstone, Montana. It was a gorgeous day and I got a few shots I really liked – click thru to see larger versions or the unedited others in the set. If you are interested in a trip yourself we went riding with Diamond P Ranch – excellent hosts!

Adrienne DeLiso of Troutwater Gallery is on hand to get so great photos at the start of your ride.

She does a great job capturing your group, editing some to give them an ‘old west’ flavor.

On the right in this picture is our guide, Dirk Moore, chatting with the group after we leave the corral.

If you wonder why they call Montana the ‘Big Sky’ country, this is why…

Towards the end of the ride coming down a beautiful wildflower meadow.

I forget what type of horse Dirk was riding but he was stunning.

Postcard perfect…

While perusing the rack of photo magazines at a local bookshop I came across a (new to me) publication called PhotoPlus, described as follows: “PhotoPlus is dedicated to helping Canon EOS users to get the most from their digital SLRs. It's full of tips and inspirational pictures – as well as tutorials on how to get your best from your pictures using Photoshop and other software.”

A quick glance revealed it appears to be aimed squarely at a weekend photographer rather than professionals. I purchased (stiff price: $13 at the bookstore for a single copy) to go deeper at home. After reading the May 2009 issue cover-to-cover I found it to be filled with people that look like me and take pictures like me! The magazine really appears to go out of the way to involve their subscribers / readers – including cover stories. I’ve become hooked on a single issue and subscribed (although it wasn’t cheap due to airmail costs since it’s a UK publication – about $115 per year).

Chris George is the associate editor of the magazine and has an article (pages 52-53) titled “Recreate Moody Lith Film Effects” using Photoshop Elements (MSRP =  $139.99 US). I would link directly to the article but I cannot find it online – the resource appears to be print only. I wasn’t able to find a better explanation than his so I’m going to excerpt the first two sentences from the article itself:

“Lith film was the secret ingredient in many of the most spectacular darkroom effects. This super-high-contrast film was originally designed for the printing industry, getting its name from the lithographic process that was used to print magazines and books.”

I love the result of lith effect – the high contrast monochromatic look can give photographs (especially portraits) a very powerful, gritty, emotional tone. Here is an example…

Before

After

Here are the detailed instructions to get a lith film look and feel with your photographs using Windows Live Photo Gallery (MSRP= Free!). The entire process described below will take you about 5 minutes the first time. Once you get the hang of it the time investment really goes down: it now takes me about 60 seconds (or less) to get the desired output – very, very fast! Click on the screenshots to view full size in a separate window.

1) Launch Windows Live Photo Gallery

2) Select the picture you wish to edit and click the Fix button in the ribbon. (Shortcut: Double-click the picture with the left mouse button).

2) Select Black and white effects in the task pane. The task will expand.

3) Select the effect you find the most pleasing. In this example I used the Red filter to dial back the rust color, primarily for the front of the mail box.

4) Select Adjust exposure in the task pane.

5) Note the Histogram which provides information about the overall levels of brightness in the photograph.

6) Adjust the sliders on either end of the Histogram to your liking. I typically bring them just inside either end of the curve. Moving them closer will generally drive contrast up and remove levels of gray within the photograph.

7) Select Adjust detail in the task pane.

8) Windows Live Photo Gallery will automatically zoom in to 100% so you can more accurately preview the results of this particular task.

9) Adjust the Sharpen slider until you are happy with the results.

10) Click the Back to gallery button in the ribbon. Windows Live Photo Gallery will automatically save your edits. Note: It does so in a non-destructive manner – more on that in a later post.

And you are done with the updated image now in your gallery.

This post is actually the first of three – in the second I’ll outline how to use layers in Paint.NET (also MSRP = Free!) to get a hand tinted look, and in the third I’ll demonstrate how to use the Revert feature in Windows Live Photo Gallery to restore your original photograph.