So if you watched the video we put up yesterday on YouTube, you know that we are pretty passionate about making your experience with AuthAnvil amazing. Out of the box, we want it to be easy to use, yet powerful enough to deliver the strong authentication and identity assurance solutions that you deserve in your small business, something the enterprise have enjoyed for the last two decades.
BTW, if you didn't see that video, you can check it out below.
Last night John Bristowe, Senior Developer Evangelist for Microsoft, caught up with me and we talked a bit about our design decisions. How we used the proper MSI framework as a stub, to deliver a WPF based installation experience that looks awesome, and yet functions well. Several months ago I actually tapped into the braintrust at Microsoft as we were architecting this, and John was great in providing some interesting feedback which we used as we were developing the new installer. I had to laugh when I saw John tweet this last night:
"The back story to the AuthAnvil v3.5 installer" /by @danaepp: http://bit.ly/9fqZSK Writing an installer? Prepare to take notes.
Thanks John. :-)
This morning I just got off the phone with a partner that wanted to know how we took information in the field to apply it to the installer. Well, that was just a whole lot of hard work. Install surveys. Customer interviews. Listening. Learning. Shutting up and actually watching what people were doing.
Once we had that worked out, we went through our Customer Service cases, listing the items that kept coming up. Like people not knowing how to set up SQL. Or how to apply SSL certificates properly. Or how to manage their passwords on service accounts. This was all stuff we could take care of for them. Programmatically. So we started by writing lots of scripts to do that for our clients. Many of those scripts are publicly available at www.scorpionsoft.com/support/diagnostics/.
Once we knew the problems we started to lay out the steps that needed to be done. Before we even wrote a single line of code, we mocked up the experience and took it back to customers who had problems to see what they thought of the new design. And based on their feed back, we went back to the drawing board. Several times.
So how did we mock it up? Well, we used Expression Blend with Sketchflow. This was a tool John introduced to me earlier this year, and I have to say... it rocks. It allowed us to prototype the screen layout without getting bogged down in colours, widget placement etc. Instead, it allowed us to get the "concepts" and "flow" of the installer down, without wasting time nitpicking about absolute layout. You can see what that looked like from a pic I took on my phone back then:
We could mock up the text, the steps in the installer, and the general flow WITHOUT fretting about the graphics. Or the widget set. Or what technology we would use.
This made it easy to move things around.
It was rather funny during our design meetings, as we would lay out all the screens on the board room table and move the steps around. And then debate. And consolidate. And then reword things so it made sense. Express Blend was amazingly efficient at that. Here is an early prototype of the installation selection menu:
As you can see, we could get the concepts of the flow, without the rigidness of a mockup that uses real widgets. Customers didn't get bogged down in the layout, and could instead focus on the "steps", allowing us to really ferret out what we needed to do. The "sketch" was never questioned as a final layout... just a "design in progress".
What's funny is the final dialog, after several iterations with clients ended up being worded much more clearly:
So to answer that partner who called this morning, this was the process we used. Interviews, combined with mockups, to allow us to design an entirely new way to deliver our installation experience.
We hope you like it.
