RSSA case study in improving software: What Office 2010 can learn from Notion 3
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published November 25, 2009, 12:08 PM
On the surface, this is a review of a music composition product entitled Notion 3, from Notion Software, priced at $249 suggested retail, born out of the original VirtuosoWorks product produced in 2005 by music professor Dr. Jack Jarrett, and which produces realistic orchestral sound from precisely notated sheet music on a standard Windows-based PC or Mac. But if you've never composed music before, and even if you don't plan on doing so in the future, I urge you to read on anyway, because this is about the business that we are all engaged in.
This is a story about a software company managing the process of starting all over again, putting its past behind it and crafting a completely new product. Notion 3 is billed as an upgrade (Notion 2 owners can purchase it for $8), but it is entirely new.
When Microsoft first announced the tremendous changes it had planned for Office 2007, including the premiere of the innovative ribbon, it was turning its back on over a decade of adherence to the spirit -- though typically not the letter -- of the Common User Access guidelines. This meant retraining millions of users on a completely new way of working -- a process that is still going on in many enterprises, even now. Microsoft knew that to embrace the future, it needed to change. But managing the transition, to this day, has been difficult.
Notion is not the dominant music composition product -- though market studies have yet to be made official, it's probably the #3 product in its category. The top two are bona fide professional music composition market leaders -- Sibelius and Finale -- trading off with one another like Coke and Pepsi. By contrast, the original Notion had been positioned as a beginner's product, a step up from something called "Music Printer Plus" that seemed about as likely to dethrone one or the other market leader as Print Shop Deluxe was to knocking off QuarkXPress.
What Notion had going for it was two things: a surprisingly agile sound reproduction system that reproduced a respectable sounding studio orchestra, and a front end that was not only easy to learn, but educational for those who wouldn't know a fermata from a marcato. But against these two giants -- the proton and neutron of the composer's world -- Notion 2's market penetration had pretty much run its course by the middle of this year.
Thus the bold decision to redo everything. Notion Music would replace the sound system and the user interface, and both would have to be worlds better. "It was a hard decision, to tell you the truth, that we didn't take lightly," said Lubo Astinov, Notion Music's product manager, in an interview with Betanews. "We pondered on it for a few months before we finally decided to go ahead and switch. But basically, we decided in one swift move to go to a new code base...and take everything that we could from Notion 2 in features, rebuild them onto the new code base, and on top of them, build an abundance of new features. We tell people that Notion 3 is indeed a new product; it's not an update, it's a new piece of software."
With Notion 3 only having been released late in September, the jury is still out as to whether the product has even begun to achieve the market penetration it needed. So it's premature to talk about the Notion 3 "success story." But just as the recent evolution of Microsoft Office has been about pulling off a successful remodeling job while keeping all its users comfortable -- a process which isn't over yet -- the Notion 3 story is about rethinking everything, and challenging old "notions" about how a very complex piece of software should work.
The people leading the discussion for Notion were musicians first who became developers later. Astinov is a studio guitarist skilled in many styles, including jazz and flamenco, though he's also composed production music for PBS programs. He was a graduate of the Berklee College of Music where Dr. Jarrett taught.
"Mostly the discussion was driven by, 'Where do we need to be?'" Astinov told us. "We had to lay out a plan of not only, 'How do we get there?' but, 'In what time can we get there?' We realized that those were the goals that we set two years ago...that we needed to embrace a code base that is more flexible, easily updatable, and easily manageable."
Lesson 1: Rebuild the code base to be taken apart
Years ago, a point release for software suggested a completely replaced code base. But as the "engines" of applications became precious intellectual property for their publishers, point releases eventually became new life support systems for old code. Sure, there were new feature sets, and sometimes a revised and updated look and feel. But under the hood, you'd often find a living, breathing, single-threaded creature of the pre-OO era, not so much a component as a mashup.
"We needed to have a more general way of controlling elements, a more...well, [Notion 2] was object-oriented before, but [we needed to] really utilize the power of generalized object-oriented languages to their extreme, making sure everything is nicely structured, utilizing best software development practices, to create an architecture that is easily updatable, easily changeable."
Sometimes, the problem with the "engine" mentality in a development shop is that it creates an artificial barrier between what can be changed and what cannot be touched, lest the ghost of past developers haunt their sleep. In the new reality of software, even past the RTM date, problems and bugs crop up that deserve to be addressed immediately. If those problems exist within an untouchable zone of software sanctity, customers come to view them as defects endemic to the code base rather than as unforeseen circumstances curable with minor surgery.
"Although we had a brilliant team working on Notion 2, and it achieved what it set out to achieve, developing a software product is always a learning in progress," remarked Astinov. "You learn as you do it, and a couple of months later, you come back and you say, 'You know, I wish we coded that differently.' Then little by little, we came to the realization that, it would be harder to update the Notion 2 code base, fix all the problems -- whether they're design problems or coding problems in the software -- and get to where we want to be at the same time with allowing us to quickly enhance the software for future features."
Next: Building the user experience down...
Microsoft rewrote the Office application engines in 1999/2000.
They coverted the context of the engine technology to handle XML then and to be very extensible engine concepts. This allows them to keep adding features without breaking the engine or even the need for an engine revamp because of this extensible model.
Do people forget this?
The whole UI in Office 2007 and forward is a reflection of work done by MS Research and is based on some very sound and tested ideas. Menus are a BAD BAD idea, and were a kludge for GUIs, because menus are just 'word lists' - which is very much NON-GUI, but was a quick and easy way to add a massive amount of commands and functions to a GUI without using 'codes/keystroke' memorization.
However the downfall of Menus is that with too many features, things get lost quickly and modern software could literally have 100s or even 1000s of menu items if they were all enabled. (Office 2003 for example, if you enable all the available Menu options in Advanced, the Menus would be insanely long listings of commands.)
Menus also have the disadvantage of being textual, which almost all studies show people do not remember as easily as 'visual cues'.
The approach of Office 2007 and Vista and Windows7 is to eliminate Menus as much as possible since the technology is now available and computers can easily handle these tasks.
So Office 2007 starts off with ripping out menus and toolbars and replacing them all in ONE single construct (notice in older versions of Office, toolbars and menus were redundant interface items for the same things).
Next Office 2007 builds on previous ideas of contextual interface, so that if you are editing text, the drawing formatting tools are not in your way on the toolbar all time or a 'flying' toolbar getting in your way as 'context' changes.
The smart and dynamic previews, suggestions and other things the ribbon brings are just examples of where a UNIFIED UI concept takes the user instead of having thing scattered in Menus, Toolbars, and Dialogs as previous versions of Office did and 99% of all other similar software. The UI 'unification' is what is really important, more than if it is a ribbon or how the ribbon works.
Vista and Win7 also use these ideas, even without the Ribbon, as Explorer is by default Menuless (Hitting Alt makes it appear, so power users can still get there without having to turn it on full time.) Instead of the Menu, the simple Button Bar is very contextual, and the whole concept of working with files and documents has been restructured so that all the commands you will ever need 99.9% of the time appear as needed.
These are 'smart' directions in terms of pushing the 'old geeks' and expreienced users via an easy way to rethink how to work with their OS, Wordprocessor, etc. These UI concepts are also many times easier for new users that haven't been tainted by older UI concepts. Microsoft literally had to shove users with 'docu-centric' ideas that are still under-used with Win95's UI with later version 'forcing' users to keep their documents in a folder that was not in the Winword folder. (And many people today see that as insane, even though people kicked and screamed about the move then too.)
I don't think Microsoft needs 'lessons' on Office or development, especially when they are still ahead of the industry and trying to push people forward as fast as they can without people hating the product because it is too different, even if it is better.
(I'm sure Notion is brilliant, but the author doesn't 'get' what Microsoft is doing, why, and where they are headed.)
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|"Do people forget this?"
No. In fact there was a recent story about them being sued for it. :)
Re: The new toolbar: I had always thought it was due to the onslaught of Touchscreens. word-lists don't cut it for finger-pointing in most cases, but the larger "buttons" on the ribbon seem like they would be much better suited to a touch interface.
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|" I had always thought it was due to the onslaught of Touchscreens. word-lists don't cut it for finger-pointing in most cases, but the larger "buttons" on the ribbon seem like they would be much better suited to a touch interface."
There is a correlation to the interface changes and the upcoming evolution of computer interaction methods. This is all transitional though if you follow Microsoft Research, all of this is planned out several years in advance with alternative outcomes based on the migration of technology.
If you look at what is available now, Microsoft already has the technology for proper Voice, Tablet/Ink, and Touch concepts in place (the framework technologies). It is just about evolving all software to be more conducive to these technologies and moving them from traditional input mediums.
As the rest of the industry catches up and Microsoft continues to shove, the inferface and input mediums will further evolve to be significantly different than what we use today.
Imagine Word with gesture concepts beyond what people in general even realize exist today, and you will see where things are headed.
I think the 'unification' of UI in both Vista, Win7, and Office 2007 was something that outside of a few engineers and people at Microsoft has been missed and it is too important to the structure of software and why the changes happened, and why with a little poking people find they do like it better.
The unified interface lends itself to touch well as you assume, but also tablet/ink, and also voice as well as video and other input methods that are alive at Microsoft, but not something the public is even thinking about too much yet.
With the jump in UI, it leaves the door open for Microsoft to continue to evolve Office and Windows to interfaces that would be too different if they made the change from XP and Office 2003 in one leap.
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|Here's a rational discussion why it is not better: http://www.dexodesign.co...microsofts-ribbon-sucks/ The Ribbon is essentually large toolbar buttons grouped by a different criteria than menus. But when we had menus, we also had small customizable toolbar buttons that could all be viewed at the same time (1 click away), didn't require switching across tabs (ribbon commands are not 1 click away) and the menus too could be browsed through by hovering the mouse. Plus it all took less vertical space than the ribbon. MS took away the customizability in 2007 only to bring it back for the ribbon this time in 2010. Again why we then need to pay? Why doesn't MS backport the customizable ribbon to Office 2007?
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|Every one's comments sum up what M/S have done with the new Office in that it's virtually a softer and pretty look to match the image of Win7,nothing to scare the children then.
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|It all happened because of Julie Larson Green (http://www.telegraph.co....dows-7-was-my-idea.html) who was responsible for the Office interface and the dumbed down Windows 7 taskbar (http://en.wikipedia.org/...ed_in_Windows_7#Taskbar)
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|I'm very much disappointed with the Office 2010 Beta as well. It's an upgrade just for the sake of an upgrade. How does it compel users to upgrade?
The File menu is not well thought out, and badly implemented on top of that.
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|Rewriting Office from the ground-up is a sure fire why to ensure no large enterprises buy the software. It'd be revenue suicide.
Most companies have extensive Office document libraries and scripts that work with them that depend on exact functionality already in Office. The "ground-up rewrite" perspective would scare off virtually every potential corporate customer, because it's code for "there will be teething pains, there will be missing features, there will be changed behaviour, and you will suffer".
A horrid idea.
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|Rewrite doesn't have to mean incompatible.
It could be as simple as replacing poorly written, or just extremely old code with optimized code that accomplishes the same tasks, but with less waste.
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|I think it's fair to say that any version of Office that presented itself as a ground-up rewrite that was completely different from its past edition, would scare customers away. Certainly the ribbon in Office 2007 was scary enough. So yes, Microsoft's in a somewhat different situation. However, a lot of that has to do with presentation -- how the product is marketed to its customer, more so than what it is. At some point, there will be an overwhelming amount of unimplemented functionality that Office will simply have to bite the bullet and embrace. The trick will be to embrace both the new and old ways of working simultaneously, and here, I believe Microsoft can learn many lessons from little ol' Notion.
-SF3
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