Alex Hopmann’s Blog

Coding Horror writes about the Uncanny Valley and User Interface. They illustrate this with a web-based mail client Zimbra, but of course the first example with this was the Exchange 2000 version of Outlook Web Access.

Back in 1999 this was one of the most difficult decisions that we needed to make as a team. Using DHTML we knew we could make a version of Outlook Web Access that looked and worked a lot more like Outlook did on Windows but should we? There was a strong argument made that we should instead design a new user interface that was much more web-like.

From a purist point of view, going with the web-like user interface might have been the right approach. But one of the things that the Exchange team has always had as a real strength is the direct communication channel with our enterprise customers so we asked a bunch of them. The response was unanimous and strong- they all wanted us to make it look as close to the full Outlook as possible. Even with explaining the drawbacks (the browser’s menu bar would be inconsistent, there would be this strange forward, backward and reload buttons), the enterprise IT managers who make the purchase and deployment decisions all felt that as much consistency with Outlook as possible would minimize their training costs and make it much easier for them to adopt the new technology.

The decision was wrenching for our team- at the time it felt like it was maybe one of those times to not listen to your customers and it was very frustrating to limit our design flexibility to copying the existing elements from Outlook. But in retrospect it seems like the decision paid off- that version launched Outlook Web Access into being a major part of the Exchange business and the customer reactions were very positive. In addition I’d say that some of the “uncanny valley” drawbacks have diminished over time- browsers have evolved, getting rid of their own menu bars and other unnecessary UI that was causing some of the problems. Also the OWA team has done a great job improving the product to just work much more smoothly than it did back then and performance has increased, decreasing some of the uncanny effects (like slow responses to right-click and drag and drop).

So in the end, it depends. For many web applications building a new web-like user interface is absolutely the right thing to do. But if your application is really the partner to an existing one, consistency can be very valuable and can be worth some of the drawbacks. As both platforms have evolved over time they continue to converge making the whole issue less of a big deal.

Finally I’d argue that the classic “uncanny valley” effect is also mostly a gut-feel thing, and doesn’t really apply in this case. Yes, the usability of a web application that tries to work like a Windows one might not be great, but it doesn’t have that same sub-conscious uncanny effect the same way certain almost life-like computer graphics do.

My apologies if you have left a comment recently, but I’ve deleted all unapproved comments. I had been neglecting my comment approval and the level of comment spam had gotten to an uncontrollable level- the WordPress web pages were failing to load and I ended up having to go manually issue SQL delete statements to get rid of it all. All existing approved comments should still be fine and I did try to check for anything real, but if I lost something, sorry!

ASP.net has this great feature when you are creating web services that it will create a nice HTML form that you can use to test your web-service without constructing a SOAP client. The catch is that by default it only runs for requests from the local machine and I always forget how to turn it on for remote requests.

Here is the trick- add this to your web.config inside the system.web section-

<webServices>
<protocols>
<add name="HttpGet"/>
<add name="HttpPost"/>
</protocols>
</webServices>

Early benchmarks on the new Core i7 server chips (Xeon 5570) show it running about 35% faster on SAP benchmarks than same clock speed 54xx series chips. This could be a really interesting factor in designing our data centers for the Sharepoint Grid services- its always nice to take advantage of the latest hardware trends when you can.

The only possible catch- part of the boost is the new hyperthreading support so an 2×4 core system has 16 threads. Lots of software has problems scaling cleanly with more threads, and I’m interested in seeing how well SharePoint does.

I’ve been needing to finally get around to posting this. I’m back at Microsoft, working on the Sharepoint team to help deliver our grid (hosted cloud) service.

Hopefully I’ll have lots more fun stuff to say about this soon. But I need to get this post out because I’ve been meaning to for weeks and until I actually get around to hitting the “Publish” button all kinds of other things I’ve wanted to post are blocked up behind it. A classic case of when your thought process behind a blog post becomes too complicated for the medium.