Reflections on the modern Microsoft user experience

I received an email from Microsoft asking me to take a Customer and Partner Experience survey. The last question was about what Microsoft is doing wrong and what it is doing right. I focused on the former. My comments follow, slightly enhanced. The survey concluded ‘Thank you for helping us improve this survey experience’. I hope the help will be useful.

I will note I have great respect for Microsoft and have many colleagues who work for it, more on the Research side.

Create a macOS tool which connects contacts, tasks, calendars, notes and email (or messages more generally) in a seamless way, as Palm Desktop did (though not for email or messages).

Work out how to help users understand the connection between local documents and their shared ‘cloud’ versions, so we know how to work with others on documents. Google Docs started online and everyone knows the master document is in the ‘cloud’; offline editing was a later feature. Microsoft has the problem users see documents as being local, or at least on a local server, thus it has to work harder to educate users. And this involves in part better using design to communicate what’s possible and how to use the product/service.

LinkedIn has a poor user experience and has barely improved in years. Try responding post hoc to a connection request with a message: one has two go through at least two more screens in a non-intuitive way! And what was the justification for removing the option to download vCards for contacts?

In Yammer one sees the effect of this when one clicks through from a daily email summary and various logins are performed. One doesn’t even end up at the right screen to view the original message and has to go back to re-activate the original link. And try copying a bookmark for the message!