Tech.Ed 2006 - Keynote

Every conference has to open with a Keynote Address otherwise it's not a conference, right. Normally keynote addresses involve product announcements and how wonderful life will be in the brave new world using this, that, and the other. Tech.Ed took a different angle to their keynote and had an anthropologist come and speak.

An anthropologist? Yep, someone who studies human behaviour. Employed by Microsoft. Go figure. If I recall correctly, Anne Kirah was the first anthropologist hired by MS and was responsible for some very "enlightening" revelations around windows and it's usability.

The beta process in particular was really interesting and explains why Microsoft has improved so much in this regard. Older versions of windows went through beta testing to figure out what was usable and what wasn't and one of the things that MS had determined in their beta testing was that the average person could get a brand new PC out of the box and up and running, connected to the internet in about 3 hours. And this was in the days of 28.8 K modems, wierd ISP configurations, slow install processes, and the like.

Upon hearing this Anne was a little suspicious so she thought she'd go check things out for herself and got a few test subjects (people in their own homes) to go through the process. As it turned out, these people couldn't even get Windows installed, let alone connected to a modem, load up a device driver, set the correct PAP/CHAP settings for their ISP (whatever the hell that was) and connect to this mysterious thing called the internet. She didn't try to helpthese people but rather asked the people how they were feeling and what they were thinking as they were trying to get things working. She video taped the whole process and showed a small snippet in the keynote - the frustration and anger seething from one of test subjects was clearly obvious and when Microsoft saw this they were staggered. They asked the obvious quesion - Why do beta testers have relatively little hassle and why do Anne's subjects struggle so much?

The answer turned out to be the segment of the population participating in the beta tests. All the past beta testers had an IT passion, they enjoyed getting through the complexities of installing, connecting, configuring and tweaking PC's and rarely reported problems once they sorted them out. Anne's subjects were normal people and didn't do this. They didn't understand I.T., technical terms or computers in general and they definitely wouldn't know what to do when faced with a default windows installation (anyone ever wondered where the idea for the Windows Start button came from?).

Ever since this revelation, Windows has been beta tested by average non-IT people and Vista is a great example of what happens when the feedback from these people is fed back into the product.

On the flip side, there was a rather ironic moment in the presentation. For whatever reason the power point used to back up the message was awful - the classic bullet pointed, multi-lined, ill-conceived presenter-prompter style of powerpoint. The funniest/saddest slide was the one talking about information overload. The idea that we have too much information on screen, and that we need to remove clutter is great - it makes for more usable applications, better presentations, etc.

The slide that talked about it had 28 lines of text broken into 2 columns (because there was too much to fit into one), it had small text, nested bullet points, a mix of normal and italicised text and all of it squashed under 3 rather small and somewhat irrelevant pictures of people. Absolutely awful and not something that should be done when talking about "information overload".

Here are a few images from the keynote. Some of my team who attended Tech.Ed (Right to left: Sausage Dog, Fish & Aladdin)

And the presentation itself (sorry for the image quality - it was taken on a mobile phone), but you can get the idea about the powerpoint.

Oh, I should also mention that the welcoming party was a fairly tame affair, but there's always some one who will do anything to get a girl to rub their leg, even if it involves standing near a guy in a blue lycra outfit...