http://www.officeformac.com/ms/blog <p>Office 2008 is out in the field, and we're carefully watching the early data. Yes, that's right, we're watching what you're doing.</p> <p>'WHAT?!' I can hear the cries echoing 'round the world. When you install Office 2008, one of the last screens during the installation process asks whether you'd like to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). (The name leaves something to be desired!) If you opt in, anonymous non-traceable data about how you use Office is occasionally uploaded to us in the background. And if you're wondering what happens to that data, well, I'm looking at it right now.</p> <p>This data tells us some fantastically useful and interesting things about what happens when real users use our apps in their real-world settings. Jensen Harris from the Windows Office team talked about <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/10/31/487247.aspx">his team's experience with CEIP</a>. As a result of his post, I bet that somewhere, someone has added a new question to a trivia game: what is the most commonly-used command in Microsoft Office? It's through the CEIP that the Windows Office team learned that paste is the most-used command in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (accounting for 11%, 15%, and 12% (respectively) of all commands issued in each application).</p> <p>What do we do with the data we collect through the CEIP? It helps us shape our future work. If we learn through this data that a particular feature isn't used very frequently, we have to find out why. It could be that the feature isn't discoverable (that is, you want to use the feature, but you can't figure out where it is or how to use it), or it could be that the feature isn't as useful as it once was. If we learn that people tend to use a given sequence of commands, then we have to figure out what action they're trying to perform and whether there's any way that we can streamline it. This data is hugely useful to us as we start our work on the next version of Office.</p> <p>If you didn't enable it when you installed Office, you can do so at any time in any of our apps by going to Preferences -&gt; Feedback and selecting &#147;Yes, I want to participate ... &#147;. This is one of the ways that you can help us to help you.</p> <p><a href="http://www.officeformac.com/blog/What-s-New-on-Mactopia--Tell-Us-What-You-Think">Courtney&#146;s post</a> gives you another way to give us directed feedback about our apps and what you'd like to do with them. And I'd be remiss if I didn&#146;t add in a plug for the usability studies that are conducted by my team -- <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/mac/usability.mspx">sign up for them</a>, and if we're in your neck of the woods (most of our studies are conducted at our labs in Redmond, Washington, and Mountain View, California, but we do travel to meet our users elsewhere), you might get a call from one of us asking you if you can spend some time checking out our latest work.</p> <p>Help us help you. We want to better meet your needs, and giving us data to help us is one way to make that happen.</p> Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:07:10 GMT Web Crossing(r) Unix-v6.4 built Jan 14 2010 18:50:13 (source:1372 2010-01-14 15:39:31 -0800)/Unix-6.4 (http://webcrossing.com/) http://backend.userland.com/rss