Programming Windows: Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek Interview (Premium)

In January 2004, Joseph Jones and I interviewed Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek, two of the key figures involved in the design of Longhorn. Both were then members of the Windows User Experience team at Microsoft, and they worked on some of the company’s more advanced user interface projects over the previous several years, including MSN “Mars,” Internet Explorer/shell, Windows “Neptune,” Windows XP, and then Longhorn. We were also joined by Microsoft’s Greg Sullivan.

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Tjeerd: I started at Microsoft in 1994 as a product designer. My background is in industrial design and engineering. The key disciplines for product development that we have at Microsoft include product design, user research, program management, development, test, and UA (user assistance); at times we call it UE (user education) as well. UR is user research. Typically, the key team that is driving the design of features includes one person from user research, one person from product design, one person from program management … they try to get the plan together for what the product needs to do, and how it’s going to do that. That design helps them develop a spec, which they give to the development teams.

I started with a product that was called At Work. We worked on printers and copiers and scanners.

Tjeerd: Yeah, we did too, but it never really panned out. A little while later, that was canned and part of the kernel actually became Windows CE over time. So I went to [the Office team] and started working on a little bit of Office 95, Office 97—it was originally going to be Office 96, but it slipped a year—and 2000, and I did early [work] on Office 10, which became Office XP later. And then I moved to Windows.Paul: Right. I always thought [At Work] was a great idea.

Paul: So you’re not the guy responsible for all the crazy proprietary Office interface stuff, are you?

Tjeerd: Command bars?

Paul: Yeah. Every version of Office has some unique UI that doesn’t exist anywhere else in any other Microsoft product.

Tjeerd: Right, well yeah, basically yes.

Paul: I think we need to talk.

[Laughter]

Tjeerd: For example, I did File Open/File Save, and stuff like that. And I did command bars.

Paul: You’re command bars?

Tjeerd: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Hillel: Go ahead, give it to him, Paul. Lord knows I have.

[Laughter]

Tjeerd: Aww, it’s not too bad. I wasn’t responsible for writing the code …

Paul: It’s even worse if you’re responsible for the vision of it …

[Laughter]

Tjeerd: So… [Turns to Hillel] He hasn’t mentioned the Office Assistant yet, so that’s good.

Hillel: That’s not your fault.

Tjeerd: No, that wasn’t my fault, that’s true.

Paul: But arguably, you let it happen.

Tjeerd: I was there. I did vetoes of it. But I do still maintain that the Office Assistant isn’t the terrible idea that people make it out to be. Actually, it’s just the way [that technology] was used by many teams was worse than its actual implementation. It’s actually just an animated puppet. And there’s some truth to the idea of social UI. And some people really do enjoy it. Needless to say, they aren’t the people who work in our industry.

Paul: Yeah, it’s also not the kind of people that spend a lot of time word processing.

Tjeerd: So I went to Windows to work on what we were calling at the time Neptune, which I know you’re familiar with. Joe [Belfiore] was heading up that team for us, doing a lot of follow-up concept work to all the Neptune thinking that had already been going on. I joined the team at the time that we were trying to make Neptune real. And after that, there was kind of a reset, where we focused even more on shipping the NT code in [what became] Windows XP. That’s actually the point where Hillel and I, and a bunch of other people from the team, when to David Cole. He had this ambition to build a client for the MSN service. And there was already some work going on at the time, to try and merge IE and instant messaging and media player…

Paul: Right. So this was the Mars project.

Tjeerd: Yes, exactly. So we did that, we worked on both the client and a bunch of the pieces of MSN that we started to pull in as we realized that we could actually get a holistic experience for users around those services. We needed to take more ownership of all these separate pieces of MSN. And then, after we did a couple of versions there, which of course shipped fairly quickly after each other, we were both called back to the Windows team, to merge back into the Shell team, and make it a lot broader. A whole bunch of people came back.

Paul: Right. Didn’t a lot of IE guys come back at that time as well? Joe B…

Tjeerd: Yes. Joe Peterson was the head of that [new Shell team] and we basically created this Windows User Experience team under them. So I own the design team within that organization, and I report to Hillel. We have about 34 product designers, which is a uniquely high number of people. This company typically considers 10 designers a strong, big design team…

Paul: You know, I never heard of you guys until the PDC. Where were you hiding?

Tjeerd: [Laughes]

Hillel: We try to keep the troll under the bridge, away from the public. Away from the press, especially. They’re worried about what I’m going to say.

[Laughter]

Paul: I see.

Tjeerd: So that’s me.

Hillel: [to Tjeerd] This is your first job out of school, right? You came right to Microsoft.

Tjeerd. Yeah.

Hillel: Now, I’m one of the rare people that actually worked in the real world before I got here. I’ve been a Microsoft employee now for six and a half years. I’ve been a Windows user for five and a half years.

[Laughter]

Paul: Wait, wait…

Hillel: Ah. So I worked in a few small companies before I got to Microsoft working on Mac software. One company, we did database consulting and a bunch of small Mac utilities. Then I went to work for Aladdin Systems—StuffIt and all that—and then I got laid off there. And I actually said no the first time Microsoft offered me a job, and that was a big mistake.

Tjeerd: Well, it worked out…

Hillel: Yeah, it did, but trust me, it was a mistake. I’ve got other things to make up for it. But not things that were as good. I started at Microsoft as the program manager for Java for Mac IE.

Paul: [Laughs] Oh, man.

Hillel: That was my first job.

Paul: So your prospects were looking good!

[Laughter]

Hillel: Yeah. Well, remember the days. Right? We had a browser, [and] we were going to do all that stuff. And then within a couple of months, I took over as the lead program manager for Mac IE, period. So I was working on Mac Internet Explorer. I came at the tail end of when 4.0 shipped and really shipped 4.01, which was much better. Then a bunch of us quickly realized that the presence we had down in San Jose was nothing … really, the action and excitement was up here. Really, it’s different today. But back then, the excitement was up here. So we figured up here we’d have a much stronger presence. And so we all said, we’re going to Redmond. And we’re going to work on Windows. So we picked up and we left.

A bunch of folks went to work on different things, but I ended up working for Joe Belfiore on this pre-Neptune, researchy, next-generation Windows user interface project. But I was very naïve about how things worked. So I didn’t realize it was more of a research project than a shipping thing. And then we did Neptune, which was still a little more research than product. And then I convinced Tjeerd to come over, after begging him for more than a year. And then I was co-program manager for MSN Explorer for a couple of versions, so we shipped that, and that was very exciting.

And then I came to work on Longhorn. I’m what they call the product unit manager of the Shell Core team. Think of it, in a sense, as the classic shell, the absolute core user interface, both around the storage work that we showed [at PDC 2003], and the core user interface elements, like the taskbar and the Start menu.

Tjeerd: But the cool thing, of course, is that the team, apart from owning a number of specific features, and having the devs directly build those, we are responsible for driving the more holistic user scenarios that exist in Windows for users. So we really try to step back and think more broadly about what people do. We go to other teams and try to talk to those guys to work out how we can make things more seamless for people.

Hillel: In addition to the Shell Core team, I’m also part of the MSX team, which is the product design/user research/user assistance folks.

Paul: What is that? Does that stand for Microsoft eXperience?

Hillel: Yeah, something like that. The interesting thing is that even though we’re focused on Windows, because of the nature of the product as a platform operating system, we end up trying to think beyond Windows as a platform, both for the rest of the company and for the industry, which is kind of a scary responsibility, which we take on with humility but high aspirations. So that’s kind of what I do.

Paul: So … Unfortunately, Joe [Jones] wasn’t at the PDC, but I probably bored him to death with my excited explanation of your presentation …

Joe: Yeah, a phone call from Paul is almost as good as seeing the presentation.

[Laughter]

Paul: Almost.

Hillel: Lord knows he shot hours and hours of video.

Paul: It’s like tech porn.

[Laughter]

Hillel: And by the way, I’d like to point out that I saw comments that … what was the comment on me? That I sounded like I was on acid or something crazy…

[Laughter]

Tjeerd: Who wrote that?

Hillel: It got posted somewhere on some website and there was a discussion board and they were like, “Who’s talking? That guy sounds crazy.” And by the way, Paul, I blame you, to be clear. There’s something about the way you shot the video, and acquired the audio, that really transformed me into sounding weird…

Paul: Yeah, that sounded nothing like you. [Laughs]

Hillel: I’m standing by that claim.

Paul: Well, I apologize for that, I guess. But …

Hillel: Just kidding. I have to take my lumps.

Paul: Well, you can tell you’re not from Microsoft [originally], right? Because most people from Microsoft are … are … what’s that word?

Hillel: You know…

[Laughter]

Paul: No, I mean, in other words, you get the typical [Microsoft] executive up there … and it’s not very exciting.

Hillel: Oh, come on. Watching a group vice president code? That was cool.

[Laughter]

Paul: OK.

Hillel: I thought it was exciting. And what about Ballmer? There’s no one more exciting than Ballmer.

Paul: Yeah, so anyway.

[Laughter]

Paul: Let’s just say there have been moments … in my many experiences sitting in the audience at a Microsoft event, where they will cart out some person who is not from the [computer] industry. They’re just interesting because … all of a sudden you realize that there’s been a standard here in the computer industry, especially with Microsoft, where these people are a certain way, and they are what they are. What was interesting about your talk [at the PDC keynote] and then also your session, was that you don’t have the stock Microsoft PowerPoint template going, and … it’s interesting. You really stood out.

Hillel: Cool. Well, I appreciate that.

Paul: It bodes well for Longhorn. You don’t have the “three bullet point” thing going that we always see.

Hillel: It’s a funny thing. It’s very easy to look at a company—and I’m not saying you’re doing this, but I did do this—and see some of the very obvious spots where we could be less boring, less formulaic, or whatever those things are. There’s something underneath all that, which has resulted in a lot of the success the company’s had, and I can’t take any credit for that. I got here and realized there were a lot of things that I personally cared about, and I was certainly not alone or being original; I wasn’t a genius for thinking of things I wanted Microsoft to do. I found lots of people who got here out of school, who cared about the same things. But I eventually realized that you didn’t need to replace anything that Microsoft was good at to do them. It was an “embrace and extend” strategy. Things sometimes feel a little conservative.

Paul: You don’t really notice it until someone else shows up on stage …

Hillel: So there’s contrast, yeah.

Paul: And then you really see it.

Hillel: Oh, I noticed it.

Tjeerd: That’s another thing we were trying to do at the PDC. The User Experience team had been appearing there [at past PDCs] and had often had messages that were just, “don’t do this. Don’t do that.” They were negative, prohibitive kinds of messages. And we were trying to turn it around, and do something positive and, very deliberately, do a bit of whipping our own backs, recognizing that we really haven’t lived up to the things we’ve asked of the ISVs.

Joe: It’s a little malicious though, because you showed off all this great stuff that you weren’t actually handing out at the PDC.

Hillel: Yeah. But if we hadn’t shown it, you would have said we were mean for not showing our plans, right?

[Laughter]

Joe: True.

Paul: You’re the bad guys either way.

Hillel: And we know that. It’s OK, we accept it.

Paul: So the User Experience team started up in the XP time frame, right?

Hillel: There’s always been a user experience team for Windows. It was just called the Shell team. Back before XP, I suggested—I worked for Joe Belfiore at the time—that we rename it the Windows User Experience team. But it’s been the same team. The transition that happened, the growth that happened in terms of the charter and the actual size of the team, happened after XP, for Longhorn. But the attitude—and you can see it even in the XP UI—is an attitude of, hey, it’s time to really start evolving forward in terms of the UI. That definitely started with XP. So we renamed the team, and we finally saw Microsoft investing in aesthetics. You know? It’s counter-intuitive, compared to what Microsoft’s done in the past. And that started, not with Longhorn, but with XP.

Tjeerd: Well, it can go to a new level. I think when we’re pushing products, it’s often hard to get the right dev done, make the right investments, and we knew for XP that we had to go to a new level. And now with Longhorn, we will go to another whole new level. And that’s where the Avalon investments really come into play.

Joe: Did you look at XP, to some extent, as just testing the waters? To see how people would respond to a richer UI, or was it just the first step towards Longhorn?

Tjeerd: It did what they could do, I think, at the time, with the technologies …

Greg Sullivan: Yeah, I think it was the first example where this more holistic approach came into play. It wasn’t “holistically holistic,” but it had a couple of key scenarios where we did a better job on the end-to-end. Photo acquisition is an example. It’s not just incrementally better. We said, let’s take a couple of scenarios, and improve the end-to-end experience, and recognize that this is the model we are using to approach the industry. It’s not vertically oriented. We don’t make the hardware. We don’t make the devices. But if we are not the place where these things come together in a more end-to-end way, then it will never happen.

Paul: So clearly, in Longhorn, there is going to be way more of that [end-to-end, holistic solutions], it won’t just be a few key scenarios?

Hillel: I don’t want to over-promise, but we have big dreams. We’re really trying to have a level of attention to detail that surpasses anything out there. And we think we’re resourced appropriately for it, and it’s really just a matter of time. We’re not going to get to everything, but we’re going to do a bunch of things we can be really proud of, and that customers can respond it. We’re working really hard on it. The thing that’s heavy lifting for us is that we don’t just have these user experience goals in a vacuum. If our goals around Longhorn were just about improving the user experience, we’d be done a lot sooner. There’s an ecosystem to involve first, and to aspire with different innovations, inventions, and platforms. But I’m glad [Longhorn] isn’t just [a new user experience].

But it makes our job harder, right? The more powerful you make something, the more difficult the user experience is going to be. That’s just a fact. You want to make something simple? Make it do less. Well, our customers have made it clear that they want our software to do more. How to balance those things has been a challenge for us. We don’t want to ignore our heritage, our strengths, our quest for the ideal—on paper, anyway—user experience. Because we think that new user experience is going to accomplish a lot for users.

Paul: Sure. So what changes? One of the examples you talked about was the different ways that you can handle things like CD burning. In other words, for a power user, you might have this right-click method, but for other people, it steps you through a wizard. Where do you draw the line for this stuff? Is everything in the UI going to be this two-tiered structure for doing things?

Hillel: There are really two things to compare and contrast here. One angle is, OK, what are the general tactics that you have in your toolbox that you’re going to use? And you brought up a few of them: Right-click, wizard, click and just do it, et cetera, and so there are a bunch of those. We look at that as, we have a canvas to paint on, and we have a bunch of paints to use, and those are the different paints.

I’m mixing metaphors all over the place. [Laughter]

There’s a separate issue, which is, how do we focus our efforts there? And it really leads back to what Greg said. Well, we pick the scenarios we care about. For example, managing tons of information. This is one we’re going to nail. Make sure we bring to bear all the resources we have, all the tools in the toolbox, and really embody the value system that we articulated at the PDC in that scenario. There will be a couple of scenarios where … yeah, OK, we didn’t get there this time. But we want to get there at some point.

The scenario focus, I think, is the most interesting, because it lets us really measure things. We said this at the PDC. Microsoft is very good, in my opinion, at giving you the pantry. Here’s one thousand ingredients. You can do anything. And it’s very powerful. And we’ve been fortunate enough to be successful, and I think that’s part of the reason for it: We give customers choice, opportunity, and power. The flip side is, we have not always been good at saying, hey, if you need to do X, here are the pieces, pre-connected for you. But we did a much better job of that in XP, in my opinion. So I think XP certainly shows the start of that. Before XP, we were not very good at that. And I think Longhorn will take that to the next level.

So we measure things not by, hey, does it follow the guidelines for right-clicking, or a wizard, or whatever, but more on, let’s look at the scenario, solve it end-to-end, and let’s make sure that the customer can find it, use it, and get their job done. Finally, they should be psyched they used it.

Joe: In terms of the user interface, how do you balance subtlety with learnability? The obvious example is Paul’s favorite example, the Mac OS X “jumping icon” on the Dock [where an application that wants to notify you causes its Dock icon to jump up and down, indefinitely, until you address it]. Tell me when this gets annoying [bounces hand up and down in front of his face].

Hillel: Ah, this is like the guy who made the video … “Jack – f#$%ing terrier”!

[Laughter]

Paul: Exactly.

Joe: But if you make it too subtle, will a less experienced user even notice it?

Tjeerd: Yeah, it’s a very hard trick. We have to think a lot about the types of things we want to put on the screen, and what can go into the peripheral vision areas. We get into discussions about features: How important is this, really? What’s the failure scenario? Even with things like toast [the MSN-style alert windows that appear in the lower right corner of the screen in Windows], there are issues about how you want it to appear, what it will look like, and when it will disappear. Some things you can test—you can actually bring them into a lab—and some things you have to do by experience.

Hillel: Have you seen our user experience labs?

Paul: No.

Tjeerd: Microsoft as a company has made a huge investment in user experience labs.

[At this point, Hillel demonstrates his group’s internal tracking system for Longhorn user experiences. The demo highlighted the success rate of every single task in a photo scenario, measuring how the company is doing in each Longhorn build, and was amazingly detailed. For obvious reasons, I can’t say much more about it right now.]

Hillel: This is us actually monitoring the quality of every single user experience scenario we care about, with every key milestone of the build. The way we measure this is to walk through every single thing, every screen … we’re a little crazy about this … but we have to be.

Paul: You guys really don’t get enough credit for the amount of work you do in this area.

Hillel: Well, that’s because we don’t tell people. In the past, the way we measured these things was to measure discoverability, task completion, and time on task. But that didn’t really get as deeply as we needed to in order to understand how people feel about our products.

Tjeerd: Also we would test things in isolation. Like a single dialog: How is it functioning?

Hillel: Right, so what you saw before isn’t just about acquiring pictures. Who the heck just wants to acquire pictures? You want to organize and manage them, you want to print, you want to share, and you want to post them on a Web site. You have to measure the thing in total to understand the end-to-end scenario. And these are the things we started doing in XP and will really expand on hugely in Longhorn.

Tjeerd: With this tool, we can see the quality of the product, broadly, as it applies to these scenarios. As a feature is designed, we do very targeted testing, usually with a prototype that we build in Flash, HTML, whatever. We do very targeted tests and produce deep reports detailing how these features might work.

Hillel: The difficulty for us is that the more [information] goes on the screen, the less simple it feels. We can prove to people that we’re easier to use in many cases than anyone else, but yet it doesn’t always feel that way. It’s a very difficult trade-off to make. For Microsoft, it’s in our DNA to say, look, I don’t care how it feels, look at the numbers. We’re getting 9 out of 10 users [completing tasks successfully] and they’re getting 5 out of 10 users. Who’s better? That said, we gotta be a little more … We gotta do both. It’s not good enough for us to say “We’re 9 out of 10 and you’re 5 out of 10.” We gotta be able to say that we’re 9 out of 10 or we’re 10 out of 10, and by the way, you know what else, our users feel great about using it.

Tjeerd: That gets back a little bit to what you were mentioning earlier. When you use a wizard, you make it really easy for the people who are unfamiliar with something. Whereas if people are completely familiar with something, and they do this thing every single day, [you want to get out of the way]. In the past, we had often bogged down the latter folks with the easy-to-use UI that steps you through it, and guides you, and tells you all about it. People are saying, “I know this, I know this … I burn CDs every day; don’t keep telling me how to do it.” And so we’re trying to do a better job now.

Paul: This is the Mac myth. The Mac is supposedly easier to use, but in reality, it’s only easy to use when you already know how to do everything.

[Laughter]

Hillel: Well, everything is easier when you know how to do it!

Tjeerd: [Apple is] great at enabling the optimal scenario, enabling the optimal path. But as soon as you deviate or you have some problems, it gets a little harder. You start seeing people fail.

Paul: Right.

Tjeerd: We’ve done usability testing and we know, for example, that, yes, [Apple’s] UI is very clean and simple, but even the most basic things sometimes are really hard for people to actually discover. It’s almost like a game, you know?

Paul: Yep. There is no discoverability in Mac OS X at all. That’s just a fact.

Hillel: No.

[At this point, Hillel invites Paul to visit Microsoft’s campus-based usability labs in action. I’m hoping to write about that visit sometime this spring.]

Hillel: It’s very exciting stuff.

Tjeerd: There are many components to usability.

Hillel: Absolutely. In our research team, we have the highest concentration of PhDs and master’s degrees [when compared to the wider User Experience team or Windows division].

Paul: This came up at the PDC. There is a lot of stuff you are doing [on the User Experience team] that people just don’t know about. It’s probably pretty accurate to say, if you go back before XP, that things were just kind of slapped together. You get the idea that whoever was working on Windows back then said, “hey, this dialog works, we’re done.”

Hillel: Right. But I want to caution you about that. The system definitely wasn’t as involved as it is now, and frankly, since we have yet to ship, and prove that what we’re saying makes sense, I’d be loathed to claim credit for anything beyond what [Windows] used to do. That said, remember that in most of the industry, there are no resources for thoughts around testing ease-of-use. In the fact that, pre-XP, Microsoft had been making investments in usability for ten years.

Look, we’re the number one kid on the block. If that means we get a target painted on our back, that’s OK, we’ll bear that burden and not complain. But a surprising amount of thought went into [the user interface in pre-XP versions of Windows]. I was shocked when I came here because I was a Mac guy. And I was assuming that everyone up here was dopey or just didn’t care.

Tjeerd: The problems seemed simple.

Hillel: Right. Actually, that was the shocking thing about coming here: The problems weren’t simple. The number of people that I met who were humble, that cared deeply and passionately about making the user experience better for customers and weren’t just saying, “Hey, here’s a new API”–not that I don’t love a new API–was surprising. These people were really deeply concerned about how they could make customers’ lives better and had thought a lot about this, way more than I had. I was blown away. I just couldn’t believe it. Part of the reason I never understood Microsoft before was that I was a Mac guy. It’s a very self-referential community, in a good way. It’s fun; you’re doing the Mac thing.

Now I get in trouble [at Microsoft] for saying we’re bad at anything, but I’ll just say, we’re very bad at telling this story. We’re very bad at telling the story about what we do.

Paul: Oh, I agree totally. And I can help with that.

Hillel: I appreciate that.

Paul: People are fascinated by this stuff. This time last year I came out to the campus for a bunch of meetings with the Windows Server guys and talked with some of the folks who were involved with NT in the early days. And people are just amazed to discover that way more went into this stuff than they ever would have imagined.

Hillel: We make it hard on ourselves because our style is not to push a single personality as the genius behind all of it.

Paul: Are you sure about that?

[Laughter]

Hillel: No, when it comes to the UI … Look, we certainly have a single personality when it comes to the guy that is running the company. But even there, there are a lot of people on stage during keynotes, and it’s not just people doing a demo for Bill Gates. I mean, that was my job, but …

I’m talking about, from the UI perspective, this is a real team effort. The bench that we have around the UI is so exciting, but you’re only seeing two of us today. When you come back in April, you have to meet everyone else.

Here’s the truth. The reason we’ve never been great at telling this story is that ultimately, if we have to choose between making it as great a product as possible and getting the story out, we’ll always choose the former. We don’t really care about the credit. We’ve only started to care recently because we’ve realized that it sets the tone for what users expect from the product. So it’s not so much that we really care about getting credit, but if we’re going to talk about what we’re trying to accomplish, the credit goes to a broad group of people.

Paul: Honestly, even with XP, the perception in the wider world is that Microsoft isn’t looking at feedback, that they’re just shoving this thing in our face. It’s actually even more negative than that. People don’t just think you don’t think about it, they think you …

Hillel: Oh, they think about it. They think we’re screwing them.

Paul: Exactly. Hey, let’s change the location of everything in this release. It’s funny. The notion that some thought actually went into the design of these products, and it’s way more than they could possibly have imagined, is to me what’s interesting.

Greg: You know we had these conversations. And we decided it just wasn’t interesting cover. We just never tried to tell the story. You’re unique in the sense that … not everyone gives us the same credit.

Hillel: Let’s put it this way. We try, but we can do better. We can agree on that. And I think we will do better this time [with Longhorn] getting out way ahead, and in being more open about what we’re doing than ever before.

Joe: How come you’re gradually moving into a fetal position as we talk?

[Laughter]

Paul: Freaky ex-Mac guy running the …

[Laughter]

Hillel: We care about getting the word out to that people say, wow, some real thought went into this, and I recognize that Microsoft’s trying to make my life better, and they’re listening. And now they can get involved earlier in the process, and tell us what they think. We turn away no opinion.

Paul: People are so resistant to the notion … actually, I have a term for this; I call it “general knowledge.” It’s things that aren’t true, but everyone believes them to be true. People are very to the notion that the Windows UI is in any way helpful or works better than the competition. I wrote this article about iterative UI in Windows XP, and it’s interesting. Every once in a while, I’ll actually get through to somebody. But it’s so hard to overcome this widely held perception. It’s frustrating to me. Not because I’m a Microsoft sycophant as is so often charged, but because I know what’s really going on.

Hillel: The reason we’re going to get names associated with work now, and faces, and I’d like to get as many as possible out there, is because I’ve found the only way to combat [those misconceptions] is to meet us. That’s the only way to do it.

Paul: Exactly.

Hillel: I meet people on planes, and I talk to them. And they’re like, wow, you’re so nice, you couldn’t possibly work for Microsoft. You’re not as evil as I’d imagined. You’re not crazy or arrogant. That’s why I’m excited to get the names and faces of as many people on the team out there as possible. Because you’ve got the two of us, but there’s a whole bunch more back at home in the other building, who are busy working right now.

[Plans are made for the next campus visit, which will include a group session with the User Experience team, a tour, and so on.]

Paul: OK, so what’s happened since the PDC?

Hillel: We’re in this funny position because we came out so early … Honestly, I feel a little empty-handed here. I wish I had more new stuff to share with you, but I don’t. But I will confess to that, one of the things I love about Microsoft is that it’s the most self-flagellating company I’ve ever seen. The people here are just … I think we overdo it a bit, actually. We’re very down on ourselves all the time. Oh, we suck… Oh…

We had this meeting a couple of weeks ago with our team, and I was like, is there any way we can reflect on some of the good things we’ve done, before we go back to beating ourselves up? And once in a while, we try to take a moment to remind ourselves we’re OK. Could we be more efficient? Absolutely. Could we do things a little faster? I sure hope so, because there’s gotta be a faster way. But once in a while, we do need to remind ourselves that the thing we’re doing is very difficult. And I don’t say that to pat ourselves on the back, or to exalt our efforts, but because, frankly, it’s challenging. It’s because it’s the Deep Think. We could do the shallow UI much faster. And I think we’ve done it. I don’t mean “shallow” in a bad way. Go look at MSN Explorer. We shipped those things in 9 to 12 months, boom-boom-boom. All of a sudden, you had a brand-new shell for MSN. We’re proud of it, and we think it’s very cool. It’s a beautiful UI, it’s simple and discoverable, and all the right things. But that was this self-enclosed MSN thing. We’re doing the Windows thing now. It’s … man. We’re hopefully realistic, but we have high aspirations.

So that’s why we really don’t have anything new for you per se, we’ve been working on making all that stuff you saw [at the PDC] real.

Tjeerd: What we showed at the PDC was real, of course. We’ve always done a lot of design work, coding, and so forth that still hasn’t gone into the product yet. What we showed at the PDC was real, but it was new to a lot of people internally too. A lot of what we’re working on doesn’t make it into the wider builds. It doesn’t make it outside of our team.

Paul: Yeah, you guys have gotten a lot better with that, which I don’t appreciate by the way.

[Laughter]

Greg: We really got out ahead this time, in terms of disclosure. And maybe right or wrong we set an expectation that continuing that level of disclosure. Maybe we could have done a better job of setting expectations.

Paul: Well, you did this so far in advance for good reasons. But suddenly everything we have now sucks. And we want more.

Greg: That’s the other edge of the sword. You want to make it better, you want to give the industry a platform to build off of. The difference between the MSN shell and Longhorn is that, in Windows, you have all the other parts that need to build off of it, or rely on it. MSN is just an application.

[Hillel displays a recap video highlighting the design work that led up to the Longhorn user experience Microsoft briefly showed off at the PDC.]

Tjeerd: Most people just see the end result; they never see the work that went into it. Even internally we have that problem.

Hillel: It still has a ways to go, and it’s not close to final.

Tjeerd: We have this process, where we initially define what it is we’re trying to do with the design.

Hillel: About a year ago, the design team did heavy aesthetics investigations. There were thousands of images made to try and figure out what the direction was that we would take. Ultimately, we wanted something that felt would be appropriate for a couple of years from then, because we knew it wasn’t shipping any time soon. So we had to define state of the art.

Tjeerd: We’re really trying to hit the professionally designed, beautiful aspect … And we’re very specifically designing for very high resolution, wide aspect ratio monitors, with incredible quality.

Hillel: At first, our user experience explorations were very wide, but once we picked a direction, we started to go very deep.

Tjeerd: The largest part of the product design thinks about how things work, what’s the flow, and then we have a number of people thinking specifically about the look and feel. The early work was all static–screenshots. Then there’s a whole separate effort around how these things move, what kind of animations are really appropriate, what do we want the movement to say to the user? There are functional aspects to shared relationships in terms of our brand, or the emotive aspects, and the user experience. We have prototypes that really get into the animations, where a lot of the feel comes to play. You really get the sense that you’re interacting with these things onscreen.

Paul: Now I have the same queasy feeling I had at the PDC.

Hillel: What’s the queasy feeling?

Paul: The stuff that’s coming is very interesting, and this renders what I’m using now less interesting.

Hillel: Well, that’s part of the reason we’re loathed to really get it out there. For most people–there are still a ton of people running Windows 9x today. We feel like XP is such a huge improvement compared to that, and we want them to move to XP before we hit them with this stuff.

There’s nothing we’d like better than to just go nuts telling you every detail about every single thing we’re doing, get your opinion, get your feedback, all that stuff. It’s just that…

Paul: Greg’s here…

[Laughter]

Hillel: You think if Greg leaves the room, he doesn’t have cameras, microphones?

Greg: There’s a ridiculous number of people still running Windows 98 that have no idea how much better Windows XP is, that suffer through stuff every day that we already fixed in XP. And we’re still trying to tell that story.

Hillel: We don’t want them to miss that step of enjoyment.

Tjeerd: But I know your frustration because part of what motivates us as well is that, no matter how good XP is, there are still so many holes, or places where you just realize it could be so much better.

Paul: We’ve also settled into a nice evolutionary path over the last ten years. I was an Amiga user and I was never excited about Windows until Windows 95. That was the first Windows version that I thought was worth even thinking about.

Tjeerd: I was a Commodore 64 user…

Hillel: I had an Atari 800.

Paul: We can have that debate later, but I had a C64 as well…

[Laughter. Conversation predictably moves off-topic to 80’s computer systems.]

Tjeerd: What I was going to say was that, XP is so great in its underpinnings and its foundation, and there are good interactions in it, and we did a whole bunch of things very well. But in terms of how the product really comes across in its aesthetics, and how well integrated and carefully produced it looks, it just doesn’t hit the quality bar. And so when you see these pictures [of the Longhorn UI prototypes in the video], you say, yeah, that’s the kind of quality I expect from the best operating system in the world. That’s really what I think this thing should look like.

Hillel: Although, again, compared to Win9x, XP is beautiful.

Tjeerd: Yeah. Right.

Hillel: XP was the first … XP made me stop using my Mac. Right? I worked on Windows for a while here, but I still had both Mac and Windows at home. I was using both. I did all my photos and stuff on my Mac, and I did other stuff on my PC. But my PC was just faster. And then XP came out and I was like, wow. And I stopped using my Mac. That was it.

Tjeerd: You’re not the only one.

Joe: I know a lot of Mac users who gave it up when XP came out.

Tjeerd: Look, [Apple] did a great job on OS X. They did some good stuff there. We like the … competition.

[Laughter]

[Talk turns back to the annoying “bouncing OS X dock icon” effect.]

Tjeerd: The whole [Mac OS X] dock thing is just too toyish to me …

Paul: Well, even XP was going to have a similar effect. The taskbar buttons were going to flash an orange color forever until you dealt with them. But during testing, people complained that it was too annoying, so now it just flashes three times and stops.

Joe: It’s a good example of balancing subtlety with noticeability.

Hillel: It’s so funny, we get a little myopic because we want to make sure the user can see it, and we don’t want them to miss an opportunity, and we don’t want to get in a bad place, and … you gotta stop being so paternalistic. You can’t overprotect. Everyone’s a grownup here. Give them the tools, let them do their own thing. It’s a hard balance.