don't forget - sign up to participate in usability studies!

It's the end of year, which means that lots of people are on vacation right now. I'm in the office this week, gearing up for a series of usability studies that my team will be conducting after MWSF in January. Which means that it's time to put out my standard plea: please sign up to participate in usability studies. I've got a lot of work to do in the upcoming months, and I can't do it without you!

What is my team working on? We've got some studies to wrap-up our work on Office 2008. In these kind of studies, we want to measure how well we succeeded against our goals for Office 2008. This will help us determine what our goals will be for the next version. We also are continuing our work on the next version of Office (I've been travelling for months conducting research for the next version already), so now I'm narrowing down my priorities and should start to look at early designs in the next few months.

What's in it for you? The most important thing is that you help shape the future of Office. When you come in to one of our usability studies, you get to spend about two hours in a one-on-one setting with one of us. You have the opportunity to see what we're thinking about and give us your feedback about it. To thank you for your time, you get to take home a Microsoft product with you: one of our Mac products (getting Office 2008 for free is a great thing!), Windows or a Windows app (to install in Boot Camp or VMWare, of course), hardware (including our Mac-only desktop set, although all of the desktop sets work fine with your Mac), or even Xbox games (Halo 3, anyone?).

The majority of our studies are conducted in Redmond, WA, and Mountain View, CA, so readers in the Puget Sound or San Francisco Bay Area are highly encouraged to sign up (and please make sure you fill out the form -- I really care which apps you use!). As I mentioned earlier, we do travel to meet our users as well, so those of y'all who live elsewhere should also fill in the form. I've been trying to come up with a good reason to convince my manager to send me to Hawaii, or Brazil, or Italy, or ...