With the official launch of Microsoft Surface in Europe just a week or so away, I thought it was time I updated the world on what we’re doing with it. As a Microsoft Surface partner, based in London, working across the entire Europe and EMEA region, but part of a global organisation, we’ve been working with Microsoft Surface for over six months now, so we’ve had a little time to get going with it.
I won’t go into the history of how we got here as that’s a whole other blog post, but what I will say is that when I started the hunt to get us onto this amazing technology, I believed the following to be true:
- Microsoft Surface would make natural user interfaces (NUI) a mainstream method of interaction – with repeatable, mass manufactured devices and accessible software development tools
- To develop for Surface meant having the optimum balance of serious expertise in user experience, interaction design, brand and of course application development. As this has always been the EMC Conchango ethos, this seemed to fit very well.
- That customers would be beating down our door to get deployments out there.
The first two are still true. The latter is partly true. It’s true that there is a ton of interest in Surface. However, as it’s such a different usage paradigm, many of our customers have taken a while to get their heads around where and how it might work in their businesses (and note there was no mention of a credit crunch in that reasoning).
However, as we work up strategies and ideas for them based on real user-centred design, the vision gets clearer and they begin to understand both the opportunity for them and the shape of the solution. With this, we are starting to see real work from real enterprises come through.
One of the very positive things that is potentially the biggest opportunity, is at the same time, potentially the biggest threat; and that is simply that there is a significant body of early deployments out there already. This is great from the perspective of helping people understand the paradigm and the opportunity. However, many of these are early ‘toe in the water’ deployments. This means they are done quickly, with the primary objective of a customer getting to market before their competition. Thus they rely heavily on the novelty of the interaction and the device. They may have great visual and interaction design, but of course because of the timeframe of development, they are limited in their functionality.
The biggest opportunity therefore, is to build on those early apps to now start delivering more long-term value. To integrate them into the other systems that run a business, and to make them part of a joined-up, total experience in data terms as well as brand terms. The concern of course is that the novelty wears thin before we’ve had a chance to really make them sing and dance from a user and business perspective and that this colours people’s perception of the device.
This is why I’m excited that the first three Surface projects that we here at EMC Conchango in London can talk about were not at all what I expected them to be. I fully expected to do retail apps like the excellent Snowboard demo from Identity Mine, or to kit out UK hotels with apps very much like the, again excellent, Concierge app that comes with Microsoft Surface’s Application Suite.
However – one is a customer research tool to facilitate better and faster customer research. Another integrates enterprise search to allow real data stores in remote locations to be explored through a NUI. And the last one helps you do agile (scrum) planning and estimation!
None of these are in the target sectors we expected, and all came together, or are coming together, incredibly fast.
And from a Surface purist perspective, they all hold up. They are collaborative, they have seamless interactions, they use gestures and natural interactions (although we still have the odd button or two that we’re trying to get rid of!), they all look fantastic, impact emotionally on their users, and all operate in 360 degrees.
So, although I’d still love to be showing off a Microsoft Surface app in a consumer context at a launch event in some glamorous location, I’m very happy that we’re doing some amazing projects that are moving Surface on as a technology, and there just hasn’t been time yet to kick off a project of that kind of scale. Who knows, maybe there is one in the offing at EMC Conchango, but we just can’t talk about it yet!
What I hope the apps we’re talking about today bring is even more credibility to the Microsoft Surface platform, that will allow us to go on to build on the success of the early deployments by moving them on to become very hard working digital experiences that transact and search (without the box obviously) but still in ways that delight.
So, for the record, here’s some detail on two of those apps I mentioned:
“The FAST app with no name”
FAST, is the search technology bought by Microsoft in recent months. We’ve been working with FAST for a long time, so when they mashed themselves up with Microsoft, we wanted to take that mash-up a step further. This Surface app is a demo, yes. But it works. It really does. No smoke and mirrors here. It takes all its data from remote data sources, and uses the FAST search engine for real. It’s true that it’s an exploration into what Surface might do for search, in taking it ‘out of the box’ (the search text box that is). Who knows if anyone wants it today or not? I guess we’ll find out soon enough, seeing as it’s working today!
We designed and developed this in London, and it was presented at FAST Forward ‘09 where it won the overall User Experience award for the conference.
Flynnie’s quick backgrounder:
http://blogs.conchango.com/michelleflynn/archive/2009/01/16/more-about-fastforward-09.aspx
And video here: http://blogs.conchango.com/michelleflynn/archive/2009/02/12/video-of-microsoft-surface-enterprise-search-demo.aspx
“Surface Scrum Poker”
“Woah, that makes it worth the £8,500 straight off” : this was how someone from the BBC described Stuart Harris and Felix Corke’s planning poker application, such was the difference they thought it would make to the monthly chore of Sprint Planning.
In the Scrum agile development method, the game of ‘poker’ is used to help team members come up with estimations of how complex something is to build without being overly influenced by other team members’ estimations.
Having looked at an item of functionality from the ‘backlog’ usually a card, printed off from a spreadsheet or out of our Scrum For Team System plug-in. Then each team member plays some cards face down on the table. Once everyone has laid down, they turn over the cards to reveal the complexity scores they gave the item of functionality. After a bit of negotiation some might change their minds, and eventually the total score is tallied up and used later in the planning process.
So, how does this differ on Surface?
The beauty of this app, is that it doesn’t! The mechanisms are exactly the same. People read items on the table from the backlog, they play cards, it’s the same!
OK, I hear you cry, why bother doing it on Surface then?
Well, actually, it takes away some of the pain points of planning poker. Printing cards with backlog items generally takes someone half a day. Tallying up the points and keeping them accurate even if they’re modified later is also a pain point and generally occupies someone enough to keep them out of the process. The Surface version gets its backlog items straight from Visual Studio, and puts them back there with the scores when you’re done!
But also.. because it was so easy to do! Stuart Harris was working on the Scrum For Team System project and asked if he could use the development Surface device. Within two or three days he had the application working. With a bit of magic from Felix, it then began to look pretty good and work very well indeed.
Now all we need are some of these Scrum poker cards pre-printed with byte tags on and we’re ready to go!
For me this really sums up a good Surface app; natural interactions, seamless merging of the physical with the digital, a seamless and stateless experience. Nothing in here is contrived or struggled to fit. It’s real world, direct manipulation, no metaphors or indirect interactions here at all.
So simple in its conception that it was also fast and easy to build, and there’s very little to go wrong. Perfect blend of left brain and right brain!
I don’t know what we’re planning to do with this yet. I’d like to see it go out there and get people using it… but we’ll have a word with the IP owners here first to see… hopefully they’re feeling charitable! :)
So, no more than a screenshot for now, although that will have to wait until Stu sends me one, or we’ll get the video camera out this week and film it maybe…
So that’s it for now. Just a quick glimpse at some of the public work we’re doing on Microsoft Surface. More from the retail, travel and banking sectors soon, where there is some very interesting consumer-facing stuff. But as we said earlier, that stuff is taking time, so hold on patiently and I’ll show you at the glamorous launch events when they all go live!
As always, if you want to see Microsoft Surface in action in London, drop us a line…