Before I begin, I'll be explicit and state that I am a Microsoft employee who works on Outlook:Mac. You'll see it in my signature, and of course there's my @microsoft.com email address, but I'll start off with that to ensure that it's clear.
On 10/4/10 8:48 PM, "Mark Falchook" <[email protected]> wrote: >How does MSFT determine what percentage of users make use of a particular >feature? Please explain to me why anyone would want to waste time and >workflow having to logout and back in again with a different account when >they can simply switch identities? My wife and I use this feature >constantly. In Office:Mac 2008, you have the opportunity to anonymously send us usage data about your applications. This is completely anonymous, and isn't about everything in the application. You're asked about this at installation time, and you can change your mind later by changing it in the Preferences for any Office app. (In Outlook, it's Preferences -> Feedback, and something similar in Office:Mac 2008.) Aside from this anonymous data, we have multiple other methods of determining usage of a particular feature. For example, we often conduct surveys of large swaths of our user population, and can explicitly ask if a specific feature is used. That's in addition to usability studies, focus groups, and other methods that we have of collecting data from our users about how they use our applications. In the particular case of identities, the usage of them is extremely low. They were originally intended as a solution for allowing multiple users to share a computer, before Macs had multiple user accounts and the ability to quickly switch between those user accounts. With the introduction of fast user switching, it's much easier to give everyone their own account and leave Outlook or Entourage running in that account. Then you just click on the icon in the menu bar, switch between the user accounts, and everything's right there waiting. It is a much better solution for multiple users sharing one computer than our piecemeal solution of allowing switching of identities. Furthermore, Apple strongly encourages developers to not do things like this and instead rely on multiple user accounts, so we're following Apple's recommendations in this regard. Personally, my husband and I also have a shared Mac at home, and we use fast user switching. We have a single shared account (the username is "Tipsy", which is our cat) for things that we share (like Netflix), and then we have our own accounts for our individual stuff (mail, Quicken, etc). It's not about hiding stuff from each other (we both have read/write access to each other's directories, so he could go read my personal mail if he were that bored), but rather conceptually knowing where my stuff is and where his stuff is. We used to just keep everything together in that single shared Tipsy account, but it was more of a hassle to have to figure out that I was looking at his Quicken data instead of mine and have to go and switch. Furthermore, while some folks have come up with other ways to use identities, the ability to switch between them has caused lots of problems. Plenty of folks will just explore and poke around to see what they can do. We've had support calls where a user accidentally created a new identity and couldn't figure out where their old stuff was. For the vast majority of users, multiple identities is a power-user feature, and being able to access it causes more problems than it solves for the power users. So we've put it in a location where the power users can still find it, and we've removed that problem for regular users. Regards, Nadyne Richmond. Nadyne Richmond | user experience researcher Microsoft Corporation | Macintosh Business Unit [email protected] | +1(650) 693-1640 http://www.nadynerichmond.com/blog/ -- YouTalk mailing list List information: http://www.entourage.mvps.org/support_options/list.html List moderator: [email protected], [email protected] To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
