Category Archives: Nadyne

Exchange, Nadyne, Office:Mac 2011, Outlook

looking forward to Exchange Connections

Amongst everything else that’s going on in the past few weeks, I realise that I’ve completely forgotten to mention that I’m speaking at the Exchange Connections conference!  I roped Bill Smith, one of the Outlook:Mac MVPs, into giving two talks with me: Administering Macs in an Exchange Environment, and Outlook:Mac 101.  Both talks are on Thursday morning.

Sadly, this is a super-busy week for me, so I’m not going to be able to spend as much time at the conference as I had originally planned.  If you’re there, say hi!  Feel free to email me, or just catch me on twitter for my current whereabouts.

Nadyne, travel

the window vs aisle debate

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I saw a link on Upgrade: Travel Better to a travel survey that attempts to understand the differences between those who sit in the window and those who sit in the aisle.  I’m firmly in the window camp — in fact, I vastly prefer the starboard window to the port window.  This is a result of an old injury to my right shoulder, sitting in the starboard window seat means that no-one can accidentally bang my shoulder.

Aside from protecting my bionic shoulder, I like the window because I like looking out the window (especially on evening flights returning home from Redmond — I love watching the sun set from the plane.)  The window seat is easier to nap in because I can lean on the window.  When I get aisle seats, I’m forever getting whacked in the head by someone who isn’t paying attention with their bag or their coat.  I’m even writing this blog post from seat 16F on Virgin America using their in-flight wifi.

For the most part, I match the aisle dweller much better than the window dweller:

  • I am married.
  • I have given a speech to more than 100 people (and I wonder how big my audience will be at Exchange Connections next week!).
  • I habitually check email — it’s a Big Deal if I turn off email sync on my iPhone.
  • I view “roughing it” as “staying in hotel that isn’t a very good Westin or W”.  I’m not sure that it would be possible to convince me to go camping.
  • I have subscriptions to Rolling Stone, Food and Wine, and Wine Spectator.
  • I have lots upon lots of books.  I’m currently reading Being Geek.
  • I’ve voted in every federal, state, and local election since I turned 18 (and filling out my California absentee ballot is on my to-do list for this weekend when I get home from this trip).
  • I have Premier status on United, and I’m a member of several other airline programmes (including my current favourite of Virgin America — love them!), and I have elite status with both Starwood and Hyatt hotels.
  • I don’t like camping, and I haven’t been on a cruise either.  The concept of a cruise mostly isn’t very attractive to me, although I would like to go on an Alaskan cruise.
  • Yes, I’ve eaten caviar, and will do so again.
  • I have a total of three college degrees, one of which is a MS.
  • I can’t stand Ikea.  I’ve been in Crate & Barrel lately, but all of their sofas are either tan, a slightly-padded rectangular box of boring, or a sectional (or all of the above), so I’m in the market for a brightly-coloured sofa that has a nice shape, is comfortable, and is emphatically not a sectional.
  • I mostly find New Yorkers fine, although I refuse to drive in Manhattan.  That’s not really about New Yorkers, though, but rather about being in a city with both useful public transit and lots of cabs everywhere.
  • I just got my passport renewed, and am headed to Sydney for the holidays so that it will get its first stamps.
  • I have two AmEx cards (one business, one personal).
  • I have a well-stocked bar, I have several Riedel glasses for different varietals.  On my last trip to Sydney, I brought back four cases of wine after a couple of days visiting wineries in the Hunter Valley.  I just finished the last bottle from one of those cases last week.
  • I’ve been on the internet since 1993 (and BBSes before that).

So where do I match up with my fellow window-seat lovers?  Well, I am female, and I’m 34 so I’m just barely still in the right age range.  I use a manual toothbrush.  I bake frequently (including peppermint-mocha cupcakes earlier this week).  I don’t wear a wristwatch, although I do admit to coveting a co-worker’s Lego watch.  The aisle profile is much closer to me, but I avoid the aisle if at all possible.

What about you?  Where do you fit into the great window/aisle debate?

Office:Mac 2011, user experience

the design of the new Office:Mac icons

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Along with all of the other changes, Office:Mac is sporting new icons for all of the applications.  We worked with Frog Design to create these visual elements.  Frog posted about redesigning an icon to talk about what went into creating the new app icons, and Fast Company Design has a discussion of it too: How Frog created the Mac icons for Microsoft Office 2011.

App icons are important.  They’re one of the first things that you see when you install an application.  They live in your Dock, and you see them every day.  It’s important to get ’em right, and I think that Frog did an awesome job.  I’m terribly biased, but I especially like that lovely goldenrod O that has been a constant companion in my Dock for months.

Office:Mac, user experience

TechFlash interview with Eric Wilfrid and Takeshi Numoto

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I just saw that my boss, Eric Wilfrid, and his boss, Takeshi Numoto, have an interview in TechFlash today: Mac and Windows: Microsoft’s two Office teams getting tighter.  I especially like Eric’s question about how MacBU manifests its independence:

The pride is absolutely there in tailoring an Office experience for the Mac and for what Mac customers would expect. In 2011, you’ve probably seen the full-screen view in Word. That’s an experience that my team came up with based on Mac customer needs and something that we could do really, really well on the Mac. I think that you can expect to see us continue to do that, where there’s an experience piece of Office that really makes sense on the Mac, whether it’s full-screen view or the way we do the ribbon or the new dynamic reorder. We’ll continue to have a different voice that matches our customer needs.

And that is exactly why I do what I do!

MacBU, Nadyne

user research at MacBU

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Inspired partially by yesterday’s post, which included a mention of how I imported all of my existing data into Outlook, I decided to clean up my oh-so-messy Documents folders. We won’t discuss how much stuff was in there that I haven’t needed in years.

In that folder, I found a presentation that I gave earlier this year at the San José State University student chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.  This presentation gives me an excuse to try out embedding a PowerPoint presentation that’s stored on SkyDrive in my blog, so here goes: