On the Left Hand: How Feature Prioritization Happens
An old blog entry continues to get requests for us to allow users to move their scroll bars to the left side of the screen. I’ve forwarded the suggestions on to the appropriate people, but, since I’m not on that team, I don’t actually know what will happen with the feature. That said, I figured this would be a good example to use in describing a huge part of software development: Feature Prioritization.
Fun vs Reality
To most engineers, the fun part is making stuff. The reality of our situation, though, is that we’re more constrained by what we can’t do than by what we can. Outside of software engineering, this is inherently obvious. No, these civil engineers aren’t going to make a building that’s a million feet tall. No, these automotive engineers aren’t going to make a car that gets a thousand miles per gallon. Boeing’s customers don’t go to their blog and say, “Why don’t you make a passenger plane that can fly across the Atlantic in ten minutes?”
I’m sure that most engineers don’t spend too much time thinking about this. When the answer to the question is, “It’s impossible with current technology,” there usually isn’t much room for debate. And, even when new technology is invented, people have been trained to expect it to take time to become available. You see some new technology in a concept car at an auto show and you know that it’ll take five to ten years before you’re able to buy a car with that technology in it. You also rarely expect updates in the things that most engineers build. “This house I bought was made of wood. But now they’ve got better composite materials. The builder should upgrade my house for me.”
On its surface, software engineering seems like it’s different. It’s rare that we software engineers get to use the, “I canna change the laws of physics, Captain!” excuse that our peers in other engineering fields have. Is there anything that makes it impossible to put the scroll bar on the left side? Nope. And, we’ve trained consumers to expect changes to take months, not years. Releasing seven major versions of Windows Mobile in the last seven years is kind of a double edged sword for us. On one hand, we can say, “Look at how much we’ve done.” On the other, you can say, “So why haven’t you done what I want yet?” And we software guys have trained you to expect upgrades. “XP SP2 was free. Why isn’t this?”
Software Constraints
Despite not being encumbered by many of the laws of physics, software engineering does have constraints. The trouble is, most of these constraints aren’t very obvious to most people. You all know that it’s hard to change a road, because you’ve witnessed it happening. You saw it take a lot of time. You saw a lot of people working on it. You probably swore under your breath at the traffic mess the work was causing. But even that congestion contributed to your understanding that it’s a big effort.
Making software that will be used by millions of people also takes a big effort. It’s just that few of you have seen this effort firsthand. And it’s not even apparent when seen after the fact. For example, in using one of our devices, it’s probably not obvious that any text you see needed to be translated into 24 languages. But that effort is part of the fun stuff. Making things is what we do. The real challenge isn’t in doing the features. The real challenge is in deciding which features to do.
Ironically, our largest constraint is a direct result of our being able to do just about anything. We can do anything, but we can’t do everything. Though the laws of space usually don’t apply to us, the laws of time do. And with only so much time, we can only do so much. Worse, unlike the automotive engineer who can just say, “Well, it’s impossible to make a car that can fly to the moon,” there’s little that naturally narrows down our list of possibilities.
Feature Prioritization
With an infinite set of features possible and finite time to do them in, we have to spend a lot of effort deciding which features to do and which not to do. Lacking natural constraints, we’ve had to come up with some other way to make these decisions. In a nutshell, our solution is to come up with a priority for each potential feature and then go through the list in priority order. Nothing earth shattering there. But, literally, every feature we do is a tradeoff against hundreds of others we won’t have time for. So prioritizing them is the only possible way to ever ship anything.
Prioritization isn’t an exact science, and a lot of pieces go into it. For instance, the more people who will benefit from the feature, the higher its priority is. On the other side, the longer it will take to implement the feature, the lower its priority will be. Sometimes it’s better to do five small features than one large one. We also look at the ability for our partners to implement the feature, giving higher prioritization to things only we can do than to things an ISV or OEM could do. We also look at the existence of other ways to accomplish the same task, giving higher priority to things that can’t be done any other way.
On The Left Hand
Again, I’m not part of the team that would work on the “let the user move the scroll bar to the left side” feature. I’m not part of the decision on that feature (other than to make sure that they know it’s something people have asked for). But here are the kinds of things that will probably go into the feature prioritization for it.
First, the feature description. With the scroll bar on the right side of the screen, it’s very hard for left handed users to use a stylus to scroll. While doing so, their hand covers the screen, and they can’t see what they’re trying to scroll. The feature would provide a control panel that enables the user to say that the scroll bar should be on the left side instead of the right. The feature would also make most or all of our built in apps move the scroll bar when the user changed the setting. Ideally, it would also work with third party apps.
Things that increase the priority:
Now, I believe that left handed people are roughly 10% of the world’s population. (Don’t send hate mail if I’ve got the number wrong. The people who decide these things for real will make sure to get the correct number.) We’ve got over 10 million users, so that’s potentially a million of them. A feature that benefits a million people is pretty significant.
Aside from something really esoteric, there’s really no way for an OEM or ISV to implement this feature. If it’s going to get done, it needs to be done by us.
Things that decrease the priority:
Now, this feature only matters on a device with a touch screen. I won’t give actual numbers on how many of those we sell, but for the sake of discussion let’s pretend they’re half of our devices. That potentially cuts the number of users who would benefit from this in half.
You’ll have to take my word for this, but the task is fairly large given the current system design. This could only be considered in a major revision. But, if we were to do a major reworking of the system design anyway, the cost of adding this in as well would be lessened.
From a functionality standpoint, every one of our devices has at least a Dpad, and many have a scroll wheel. So, even if a user can’t use a stylus to scroll, it will still be possible to interact with the device.
All together, this adds up to left hand scroll bars being a fairly compelling feature. So it would get added to the list with more compelling ones above it and less compelling ones below it. At that point, whether or not the feature gets implemented would depend on how much time we have for the appropriate release, and how far down the list that time allows us to go.
The List is Unending
Most of the controversy I’ve read here has been a result of people disagreeing with our prioritization of various features. This is the general method we use for figuring out which features to do. Although not perfect, it’s the best scheme we’ve been able to come up with. If you’ve got a better one, I’d love to hear about it.
I don’t know if you’ll get your left handed scroll bars or not. And, if you don’t, I don’t expect this explanation to make you any happier about it. But I hope I’ve at least given you a better understanding of how we go about making our decisions.
Mike Calligaro
Comments
Anonymous
June 05, 2007
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June 05, 2007
Epocrates (www.epocrates.com) has an option inside their software for left-hand scrolling and my physicians love it. I would like to see it as part of the standard OS, but at least some company figured out a way to do it in their software.Anonymous
June 05, 2007
Our company has traditionally prioritized new features in very similar way, I'm not convinced there is any magical method beyond what you described. We do consider a another key factor in addtion to the ones you outlined, I would assume you do this as well. Does the features requested align with our long-term roadmap/vision for our product? (you'll never be all things to all people) So you don't simply go mimic every iPhone feature, you have a vision where you're headed and weigh your prioritization decisions against that vision. One thing we will be rolling out soon is something similar to http://ideas.salesforce.com, by opening up your enhancement requests to your user community then the individual users can see that someone as already asked for left-hand scrollbars and add then "vote" to indicate their support for the feature. Your enhancement pipeline becauses self-sorting and you eliminate getting hundreds of duplicate requests or worse yet, not hearing from those to lazy or disenfranchised to submit a request. Instead they can browse around to see what others are thinking and they can comment on or vote for their favorite ideas.Anonymous
June 05, 2007
Alyosha, that's a pretty good equation. There are lots of other letters that can come into play when we need to break ties with just A,B, and C. For instance, for two features that had the same user value and cost to build, if an ISV solution already provides one feature but no existing solution provides the other feature, we're more likely to build the second one.Anonymous
June 05, 2007
Mike Calligaro posted a great write up on how feature prioritization happens at software companies. ThisAnonymous
June 05, 2007
Quantification is the key to getting others to do something. Show how an action will affect something the other person cares about (Sales, ROI, Marketing etc...) and sometimes that will lead them to action. I like word problems, so I've put this model together in about ten minutes: C((n/(b-a)) Let n = Number of users Let b = Number of users positively affected Let a = Number of users negatively affected Let C = Likely use percentage 10 total users, 7 users want a change, 2 will be negatively affected, with a 25% likely use ratio. .25((7-2)/10) = .125 It seems there would need to be further analysis for scheduling work hours and balancing that against the Effectiveness Ratio.Anonymous
June 05, 2007
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June 05, 2007
As a leftie, you can count me as one of the ones who've been hollering for this feature. I think we're actually something like 15% of the population. It's great to see some of the details of the process that goes into making the software. Thanks for sharing!Anonymous
June 05, 2007
When I first joined the corporate world of software engineering, one of the surprises was the way that (in addition to all of the points you make above), you only release what you can test. It is obvious when you think about it - who wants to release untested software? - but it is infuriating for a developer. You have identified a problem that your customers have, you know you can fix it, and you know you can do it in time for the next release... but even then, it won't happen if there isn't the manpower to test it. And testing properly is so expensive...Anonymous
June 05, 2007
Dale, Yes, being gated by test is hard for everyone involved (including test :-). For this article, I was lumping testing in with "How long it will take to do the feature." I may someday do an article that goes into more detail about that "doing the feature" part of the equation. MikeAnonymous
June 05, 2007
Two more quick points: a) As you said there often is a 3rd alternative. Note that iPhone has no scroll bars, you scroll with the touch of the screen; This would seeming solve the issue b) As to whether your marketing team would allow your user base (10M strong?) to comment openly on your product? Well you can't prevent it. It already happens in countless blogs and forums. Why not harness that power under your terms by hosting a site that gathers user feedback. Don't you think SalesForce has 100s of competitors in the CRM space? Do you really think Microsoft is voraciously reading every idea posted on SF's site, or monitoring SugarCRM's blogs for ideas? SF has always shown their product openly yet Oracle, SAP, and others have never been able to curb their growth. Apple has been successful with their proprietary, secretive, product culture but even Jobs admitted that his lack of openness has curbed their growth over the last few decades. I say create a idea forum for comments and suggestions. Surely a loyal user base that helps guide the product roadmap is preferably to scanning blog comments for suggestions that you then cut-n-paste into an email to the blackhole of the product mgmt group.Anonymous
June 05, 2007
Hey, like I said, I really like the idea. (-: MikeAnonymous
June 05, 2007
Of course, as a really old software GUI designer, my answer is: design the code in the first place so that allowing a lefthand scrollbar takes just a few lines. Yeah, yeah. Easy for me to say :-) It's something we're all running into these days... the lack of time to do it right the first time. Isn't being in software wonderful? I do agree with the poster about touchscreen gestures. How about an article showing us how to tap into the basic touch code and give fingertip scrolling and other "tip flicks" (Vista term) to Windows Mobile? We built a nice field app using IE6 under Windows CE and added the scrolling and page-turning in a few lines of javascript to each page. Unfortunately IE Mobile has no similiar way of capturing mouse events. As long as we have to struggle with p/invoke, please at least give us some fun factor stuff to help the users. Thanks, guys, I know it's a struggle!Anonymous
June 05, 2007
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June 05, 2007
Well, i think Bill Gates is left handed and if read this comments will move this feature up in to do lists of WM team :) I don't know whether if he involve him position in company in thath kind of disputes ?Anonymous
June 06, 2007
kdarling: Doing it the right way the first time is certainly preferrable. As you pointed out, though, what's right isn't always clear when you're doing it the first time. Bill: One of the other things we struggle with is that people both do and don't want us to release frequently. On one hand, the more frequently we do releases, the less time people have to wait for the features in those releases. On the other hand, the more often we release, the more often people who have the previous version are disappointed that they don't have the next. There are people who claim that they'd literally be happier if we hadn't released anything between WM2003 and WM6, since that would have given them time to get the new version after their contract ran out. And our lives would certainly be easier if we could slow down our releases. But we wouldn't be anywhere near as competitive in this market if we worked that slowly. Dreamsoft: Leaders from BillG on down can definitely wield a lot of influence. I myself am a manager, and I can push my people to do things the way I want them done. Not to quote Spiderman, but there's a responsibility that comes with that power. Executives tend to be careful to base their feedback on market realities. We definitely do reviews of our plans with various executives, including Bill. But they are more likely to say, "Strategically speaking, you're best off going after the business segment first," than, "You need to make it left handed, because that's how I use it." Also, while our executives are very smart people, we've made it a point to fill the company with strong and independent people who are also very smart. If an executive told us to do something that was actively bad for our business, we wouldn't stand for it. I've seen that happen in the past (both the attempted meddling and the failure to do so). But, yeah, if BillG said, "Make it work left handed or else," the feature would go up a few priority points. MikeAnonymous
June 06, 2007
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June 06, 2007
I think you have to be the market leader before you can be accused of trying to maintain a monopoly.Anonymous
June 06, 2007
Hey, I liked the way you wrote. Thanks.Anonymous
June 07, 2007
Matthew, I'm sorry for your frustration. Our success in this industry is heavilly tied to ISVs and OEMs doing well, and we do want you to be successful. If you can give technical details that explain how Active Sync is getting in your way, I'll file bugs against the sync team and try to get them fixed. If you're concerned about posting details in public, click the "Email" link at the top of this page and send them that way. Please include a way for us to contact you with questions. The more detail you can give, the better. For instance, you reported that you sync with your server outside of Active Sync but that Active Sync corrupts your data. There are a lot of data services on the device (pIE, Live Mail, VoIP) as well as a number of ISV email clients which are independent of AS and are able to transfer data. Are you doing something different than they are? I'm not claiming the problem is in your app. If you need to do something we don't expect you to do, and we're getting in the way as a result, we want to know about it. Please also give details regarding the kinds of files you're trying to transfer over sync that are getting converted. I frequently transfer a lot of different kinds of files to my device over desktop AS, including exes, wavs, wmas, mids, cabs, logs, and proprietary data format files that I use in the applications I write. AS never tries to convert any of them for me. If it's corrupting your files, we definitely want to know about it. Make sure you tell us which version of desktop AS you're using as well as which device and OS version you're syncing to. MikeAnonymous
June 07, 2007
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June 07, 2007
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June 08, 2007
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June 08, 2007
All the brouhaha over whether or not the iPhone will allow third party development is slightly amusing and mystifying to me. Amusing because, like my pal Mike over at [phone different](http://phonedifferent.com) I'm looking at the iPhone like a smartphone,Anonymous
June 08, 2007
ginswizzle: I think we're actually agreeing with each other. I just think we are using different meanings for the word "priority." I'm drawing a distinction between "priority" and "importance." By the definition I'm using, "priority" is the order you do things in. It incorporates a ton of factors, including importance. If 5 small features are deemed more important to do than one big feature and we do the five first, then the big feature has to have a lower "priority" by my definition. It sounds like you do the same thing, you just use a different word for it. (-: Sometimes we do scenarios, sometimes we do targeted fixes. If the release is a small AKU (they tend to have a total product cycle of 3 months) we really only have time for specific changes. But if it's a major release with a year or more behind it, we have time to plan out full end to end scenarios. Since large features don't fit into AKU cycles anyway, they tend to be more scenario driven. As for moving the release date back, Microsoft in general is pretty infamous for that. But because Windows Mobile has such a complicated set of partnerships (OEMs, MOs, etc) with heavy testing constraints (Carrier trials, etc), we generally don't have much room to slip our releases. ray: Thanks. As you point out, it's easier to catch flies with honey than vinegar. Nothing I do on this blog is part of my job. It's effectively done on my own time. And, yes, I'm human. So I'm more likely to go out of my way to help courteous people than ... others. MikeAnonymous
June 10, 2007
The Window Mobile Team has a great post on feature prioritization. On the Left Hand: How Feature PrioritizationAnonymous
June 11, 2007
Ray, I put them out in public so others know the obstacles that we've already found. No sense in making someone else waste their time if I already have. I have contacted Microsoft in the past about some things. The result is usually just "That is unsupported, we only support hello world apps in VB. We are keeping you $200 for the support ticket." There is an occasion in which we did actually get a solution, after attempts to tell us no and close th ticket on us, but with persistence we finally got a solution, and then so did the rest of the world (at our expense since we paid for the support ticket) when the general solution was posted on the ce_base blog. If there was a rating system, you could get rated down as tool.Anonymous
June 11, 2007
MikeCal, Here is another one. There is supposed to be this system for creating a custom password screen that comes up when the device is first turned on. This has been around for a long time. There is a demo called "LetMeIn" from 2002 that includes source for doing this. Basically, the thing should set a password in the system when its configured, and later the system will call into it at a predefined entry point to allow it to accept a password from the user before allowing access to the system. The functions used (SetPassword, SetPasswordActive, GetPasswordActive, PromptForPassword) are still documented, but with no warning this was broken by AKU2. If I try to use a program like this, including Microsoft's own sample, I get locked out forever because the wrong screen comes up. The configuration for the custom password comes up in the control panel, but once a password is set, the system default password prompt comes up when the device is woken from suspend rather than the custom prompt. We had something that was extensible and worked, but now its busted because the system ignores the setting in the registry and just uses always uses what it has. So, to do something like this I have to have a service that catches the condition, comes up full screen, disables menus, takes over all keys, forcibly hides all other windows that attempt to come up, etc until the user has authenticated.Anonymous
June 12, 2007
For passwords we moved to the LASS/LAP architecture. Here's an article on how to write a 3rd party LAP. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms926467.aspx And here's a description of the samples available in the SDK. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms936998.aspx MikeAnonymous
June 12, 2007
I thought that going to Start/Programs/ActiveSync Menu/Connections/When Cradled and unchecking 'Synchronize all PCs using this connection' with USB slected stopped ActiveSync from doing any synchronization over the USB. AFAIK it does on WM Phone Edition.Anonymous
June 13, 2007
What I'm wondering, is how MS decides to prioritize the removal of features? It seems to me that we see as much effort put into removing useful items as we do into adding value to the OS -- WiFi Sync, Category Sync (Which we've NEVER heard any explanation for the removal of), Bluetooth DUN, for example just to name a few. Maybe is the WM development team concentrated on adding functionality instead of constantly removing it we would see more of the users requests make it into a future release.Anonymous
June 13, 2007
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June 13, 2007
MikeCal, Thanks for the information on LASS and LAP. It looks like it will work, though is far more complicated, has unwanted side-effects I'll have to work around, and forces a divergence from the prior codebase or just dropping support for everything prior to Windows Mobile 5.0. I don't see a provision for supporting authentication only from StartUI while allowing other applications to fall through to some other authentication provider. For my purposes, all other applications will have to be an allows succeed or always fail (leaning towards the former so as not to break unknown apps) since their auth request means nothing to me. It would be good if the documentation for the old way were to note that it is not supported beyond PocketPC 2003. I find this is a general problem, in that the documentation says what version support was added but rarely what version support was removed. If there is something new to replace it, as there is in this case, the documentation for both the old and new should have links to each other or at least some mention of the relation.Anonymous
June 13, 2007
The MSDN document for LASS samples says there is a Windows Mobile specific example, but it is not present in my CE5 or CE6 platform builder directories. The other samples are all present in the specified paths. Is this sample reserved for Windows Mobile licensees only?Anonymous
June 13, 2007
¿Cuántos de los usuarios de dispositivos Windows Mobile son zurdos? Un debate sobre la posibilidad de cambiar al lado izquierdo la barra de desplazamiento en las aplicaciones para WM revela los criterios que aplican los desarrolladores de Microsoft parAnonymous
June 14, 2007
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June 17, 2007
Being right handed, I can only offer the conjecture of, "Does it end at moving the scroll bar?" Leonardo DaVinci was a famous left handed person, and as such all of his writings about his famous inventions were written right to left with the letters backwards in his notebooks. To read the text normally, one can hold a mirror and read the reflection to see the text normally. (I think your Supreme Boss owns the orginal, maybe he'll let you check it out!) Possibly there is a a solution somewhere in this illustration. What if you developed code that reversed the UI. In effect, putting the right side on the left, and vice-versa. Of course, you would keep the text normal, just reverse the display of the UI. Since most UI is designed for right-handed persons ease of use, would it not follow that the inverse would be usable by left-handed users. (Of course, after years of brain synapse development, it might take a awhile for left handers to adjust.)Anonymous
June 30, 2007
Blah Blah Blah! So stop writing about it Microsoft and just do it!!!!!!! Before Apple does!Anonymous
July 09, 2007
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July 22, 2007
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August 09, 2007
I would say that whatever new PDA/Smartphone device that claims to be "friendly" for left-handers would discover how their sales forecast is overexceeded. I'm left-handed and there are millions and millions of left handed people and people that, though right handed, usually uses has its PDA at its left side in their desk. We, as left handed have to accept this no friendly devices because there is no option. But if there is one sometime and is well adverstised, I tell you, that first device will be a success!.Anonymous
August 13, 2007
Hi, Does anyone know why stack tracing is not available in Windows Mobile? This caught me by surprise and is now causing me lots of problems. Thanks, StevenAnonymous
August 13, 2007
jtst, in the phone space, MS makes two products. By the previous naming scheme, they were "PocketPC" and "Smartphone." (Now they're called "Windows Mobile Professional" and "Windows Mobile Standard.") Every MS "Smartphone" is very friendly to left handers. I use mine interchangeably in my left and right hands and have no difficulty at all doing every function. It's only touch screen devices that have any handedness prefrence. We have generally not seen the effect you've described of left handed people causing smartphones to be a greater success, but there are a lot of factors at play. MikeAnonymous
August 13, 2007
Bill, "usability" is a pretty loaded term, made especially complicated by large numbers of users spread around the globe. What seems very usable to one person may seem completely unusable to another. Personally, I find EVERY touch screen device, the iPhone included, to be considerably less usable than non-touch screen devices. I find the usability of being able to navigate my device one handed by muscle memory (not needing to look at it) to be worth considerably more than any amount of graphical richness. And that's where we've been focusing our usability efforts. If, on your 5th WM device, you put the stylus away and try using the device without it, I think you'll find that we've done a lot of work there. When I use a PPC these days, it's rare that I use the stylus for anything. I'll pull it out to draw something, but for normal behavior, it's the far superior hardware navigation that I use. MikeAnonymous
August 13, 2007
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August 16, 2007
I consider the following keys be be necessary for navigation on a touch screen windows mobile device. DPAD Soft Keys Start Key Ok Key In WM6, I can navigate to almost everywhere using only those keys. I literally never pull my stylus out on devices that have those keys. Now, you're right about typing. If your device doesn't have a qwerty thumb board, you'll need to use the stylus to enter text. Personally, I type email on my devices all the time, so I consider some sort of thumb board to be a requirement. But I can understand that some people who don't enter much text might not want the extra size that a keyboard brings. Still, if you're entering text frequently, real keys beat even the best touch screens, no matter how well implemented. MikeAnonymous
August 21, 2007
Well, that's the point I was trying to get across. It's as though consumer focus groups were left out of WM development. How else do you explain the iPhone's finger friendly popularity? Why wasn't the Windows for PC model followed? From Win95 on up, I can resize Windows based on screen resolution. Seems Windows Mobile is a 1024x768 design that was simply reduced in size rather than adapted to small screens. Resizing capability was left out and that's a shame. Anyways, I appreciate the fact you're engaging users through this blog. This is as close as any of us insignificant consumers will ever get to comment and hopefully see improvements made based on them.Anonymous
August 22, 2007
Here's a link that describes why we didn't go with the desktop model for resolutions: http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2006/02/14/531972.aspx As for focus groups, we do a ton of them. Everything from those groups to our experience to comments here say that a strong majority of users prefer buttons to touching the screen with their fingers. Let's not confuse the two aspects: Touch vs Buttons Touch with Stylus vs Touch with Fingers If you're going to touch, I agree that having the targets large enough to hit with your fingers is better than having them small enough to require a stylus. However, I strongly believe that having the ability to hit physical buttons beats any kind of touch screen. We've been focusing our efforts on the latter, not the former. As for explaining the iPhone's finger pointing popularity, they haven't sold anywhere near enough phones to draw any conclusions yet. There are many phones on the market both by us and our competitors that have each sold considerably more units than the iPhone yet have no touch screen at all. It's dangerous to make business decisions based on perceived popularity. MikeAnonymous
August 24, 2007
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August 24, 2007
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August 26, 2007
The Datsun reference was meant to highlight North American car manufactures laughing and shrugging off Japanese cars catering to what they considered menial consumers. Sound familiar?Anonymous
August 27, 2007
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August 27, 2007
Great, I'll be back with a reminder should WM7 inexplicably become finger friendly. Meanwhile I'll keep sharpening the stylus until someone figures out how to get other phones working with the Company's Exchange server :)Anonymous
August 27, 2007
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August 27, 2007
Mike, you'd be my hero by convincing The Team to get to work on both buttons and finger friendliness :) CheersAnonymous
September 15, 2007
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September 16, 2007
Dale, you can definitely leave messages here but I'd also suggest dropping a mail in the outlook mobile blog mailbox: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook_mobile/contact.aspxAnonymous
September 16, 2007
Scott - I'll do that. Thanks very much!Anonymous
October 12, 2007
the annoying thing is that the bright guys who work for big companies are paid to do the things that others tell them to do and not to do anything else. Individual ideas are out of the question. That's sad. If you're part of the machine you're not more than a cogwheel. And the guy who is turning the steering wheel might not be the brightest one. I think thats where open source and hobby-programmers come into play. I suppose this would be like a 500kb software that a good programmer could write anytime. He would be praised by the 10 % of the pda using population :)) and that's something.Anonymous
October 12, 2007
Would you really want it to be different? If my customers tell me what my product needs to do, and I say, "Forget that, I'd rather it do this instead," would we really end up with a better product? I mean, yeah, it would be great if the developer happens to like what you do, but I'd rather meet the needs of the largest number of customers than have a few hundred developers all doing their own pet projects and hoping it results in something good. That said, I've been here a long time and I've never felt like a cog. There have certainly been features I wanted that didn't get into the product, but there have also been features I was able to convince people were important and that DID get into the product. Even you folks on this blog have influenced how our products are made. On multiple occasions, I've sent feedback from the blog to the appropriate developers and they've said, "Okay, I can make that happen." We don't get to pick the large scale features, but we developers have a lot of say in how the features we do implement get implemented. I think you'll find that this is how it works in every endeavor that involves a significant number of people working on something. MikeAnonymous
November 02, 2007
Good article and interesting comments. I am a left-handed person too and obviously I also find it extremely frustrating that I cannot switch the position of the scroll-bar in WM to the left-hand side. I can understand that you are concerned about breaking the existing apps that are not ready for the left-handed scroll-bar, but I cannot understand why it is not possible to make this configurable on per-app basis in the operating system? I have been a developer for 12 years do not see a reason why this would not be doable. The windowing system most likely provides support for left-handed scroll bars and if not, then add it. I guess that most left-handed people can live with a few 3rd party apps on their PDA using a right-handed scroll-bar knowing that these apps will catch up sooner or later. But unless you make the left-handed options available in the system and in the core WM apps, this will hardly ever happen. Just my two cents. Jan PS: Is there a page where left-handed people can vote on this feature? If so, could you pls post it here.Anonymous
January 24, 2008
Mike Said: Doing it the 'right' way the first time is certainly preferrable. well, at the issue at hand it would be more prefferable to do it the 'left' way... well, no hurt feelings, but consumers also have limited resources (money instead of time) and since i am left handed i would also prioritize stuff i will buy and would put those nice left hand mice of your competitor's (about half a dozen of them, one for each pc i use) a little higher that a windows mobile device which currently gives me limited functionality...Anonymous
January 25, 2008
To be honest, that's how I expect it to work so there's no hurt feelings. If our products don't meet your needs then by all means don't buy them. Telling us why you're not buying them is a bonus, so we appreciate that.Anonymous
March 24, 2008
The comment has been removedAnonymous
May 08, 2008
I'm using an I-Mate with WM6 - it supports a left scroll landscape option but still no left scroll portrait option. Why would you not implement for both?Anonymous
May 08, 2008
I'm using an I-Mate with WM6 - it supports a left scroll landscape option but still no left scroll portrait option. Why would you not implement for both?Anonymous
August 11, 2008
Forgive me if someone has already stated this, I did not read all of the posts above. I definately understand the need to prioritize features. I don't know if the 10% numbers thrown out at the top of this article are accurate or not. I am right handed when it comes to writing/using the stylus on my touch device. Having said that I naturally hold the device in my left hand so having scrolling available on the left would enable me to use this device much easier with one hand, which I'm guessing a lot of people would agree with.Anonymous
February 03, 2009
I hope someday they implement options for left-handed layout. That, or maybe just force all right-handers to use a left scroll bar lay out for a couple days to put the hassle and misery of left-handers into perspective for the other 85% of the right-handed world ;)Anonymous
June 14, 2009
Hey, Im relatively new to the wm world and as a whole am pleased with wm6.1 on a samsung i760. I am a leftie and would be grateful for left handed features. for me to solve browsing the web left handed I download skyfire and opera wich let u scroll on the page without scroll bars. but they are limited compared to IE: for 1 they use a lot more memory and more often than not they crash my phone when loading. I don't code professionaly but I understand how frustrating adding features or debugging is on such a large "kernal". I was disappointed to find out hat MS didn't impliment that in since MS has added ( personally ) feature less important to my daily use of the phone, while they did think of many features that make me proud to own a wm device. I've used the iphone and I am disappointed with there inability to run multiple apps ( excluding the music player ). also the on screen keyboard is a pain to use while predictive type is even worse, apple did hit a small market but few businesses would have the intigration that MS has with desktops and mobile none the less severs! I was amazed to see domain enroll and other remote features added to wm and I have used a couple that programs that older users we "jealous" of. On the manufacture's part I bevieve they jip us in power and ram on these devices: my phone has roughly 440Mz processeser with something like 8-16 Mb of ram, I can only run half the programs I want because of this. note I am not blaming MS. I wish that a future release could address the left handed "issue". Scot I apperciate this chance to be able to discuss what we think and like/dislike about wm.