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We spend a lot of time studying how people manage their email. We know that people use a variety of tools to find messages, file messages, and navigate through all their mail. But some tools are used more commonly than others.
Of course, every tool has a certain learning curve that each person needs to go through to understand how it works. Some tools are simple, and might even feel as though you’ve used them a thousand times before (like sorting), and some tools are pretty complex to understand and configure (like rules, or custom keyboard shortcuts).
We’ve found that tools that require more time and effort to learn upfront tend to get used by fewer people. A tool that only a few people adopt might still be super handy for some folks – not to mention creative, clever, and cool. It’s just that there’s a converse correlation over time between the personal upfront time investment required to use any particular inbox management mechanism and the prevalence of its usage.
Source: Internal Microsoft data
We tend to geek out on technology here at the Mountain View, CA, facility where we build and manage Windows Live Hotmail. But as much as we like using ourselves as our own little focus group, we know that not everyone has the time or interest to invest in tinkering with complex features—no matter how handy or creative we think they are. Many people – maybe even most people – just want to get in and out of their email quickly and get done what they need to do.
That's why minimizing the upfront personal investment for our customers is one of the central engineering principles guiding our current work on Hotmail. Our goal is to make any new tool as discoverable as possible, as intuitive as possible, and as efficient as possible. We don’t always nail it right out of the gate for every new feature, but we try – and we iterate based on the feedback we get from you until we’ve gotten the job done.
Dick Craddock Group Program Manager Windows Live Hotmail
When we looked into how people used email, we found some interesting patterns. It turns out that there are generally three types of people when it comes to email: pilers, filers, and purgers.
Which are you?
Different strokes for different folks. It’s a fun engineering challenge to build an email service that works well for all three types of folks.
Here’s a bit of data on how pilers, filers, and purgers tend to manage the email in their accounts.
Source: Microsoft internal
And a chart that will give you a sense as to what percentage of people are like you.
Coming up next – did you know that Hotmail has keyboard shortcuts? Did you know that you can choose between Outlook shortcuts and Gmail-compatible shortcuts? Pretty geeky, huh? I’ll talk next about how we think about those features that we geeks love and that most people never use.
Dick Craddock Group Program Manager, Windows Live Hotmail
On the Windows Live Hotmail team, we spend a lot of time talking to people about email. It’s one of the ways we figure out what people want, what their pain points are, and what we can build that might delight them. Even though we’re the most widely used email service in the world with over 369 million people actively using Hotmail, and have been providing the Hotmail service to consumers since 1997, and even though we work closely with the Microsoft Exchange folks who have been providing email for corporations since 1996 – there’s always more to learn. And things change, so it’s important to keep in touch with the people who use our service so that we’re not operating on past assumptions.
Recently, we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail – 500 people for each service. Here’s a bit of what they shared with us.
Here’s some other data you might find interesting.
Lots of reasons – people are busy in their inboxes!
It’s frequent.
The results are pretty balanced although you can see that if it’s a more serious conversation it tends to land in email.
On average, the overlap is well under 50% - the majority of people who you’ve befriended or connected with on your social network of choice are not the same contacts that you have in your email address book – and vice versa. Social networking and email are pretty distinct.
These are just a few things that we’ve learned about the ways in which you’re using your email accounts today. We’re learning all the time and applying what we’ve learned to make the product better and better. We’ll share a few more tidbits over the next few days, so stay tuned, and keep using Hotmail!
Windows Live Messenger is both a powerful and fun communications tool for staying in touch with your friends, family and co-workers. It is a semi-enclosed environment where you can freely interact with the people you know and trust – the people in your network. Unfortunately, over the last couple of months, we've been monitoring an increase in spammers and malware distributors trying to work their way into our customers’ networks of trusted Messenger contacts.
First the spammer identifies potential targets. They do this by searching for public Spaces, by acquiring lists of valid Hotmail accounts, and by trading with other spammers. Second, the spammers set up a number of Windows Live ID accounts and use these accounts to send invitations to their potential targets.
A typical invitation looks like this:
If you accept a spammer's invitation, they can then download your list of friends to find new people to target, and send messages to you and your friends trying to attract you to spam, phishing, or malware websites. See my previous blog post on URL reputation to learn about the protections that SmartScreen® provides if you do end up clicking one of these links.
We’re working on delivering several technologies to help us reduce these bogus invitations. In fact, starting this week we are deploying a number of immediate new steps to block and root out these spammers, and to limit the number of invitations they can send.
You can take steps to protect yourself too. One thing you can do is click the View profile link in the invitation, to try to figure out if it is from a spammer or an old friend. Viewing the profile won’t hurt you or your computer, and it won’t add the spammer to your network, so it is always a good first step. This is like what you might do at home, if someone came knocking at your door unexpectedly. You'd probably look through the peep hole before deciding whether or not to let them in.
If you still don’t recognize this person, and think they really might be a spammer, then don’t answer the door -- and let us know by clicking the check boxes to block them and report them as spammers.
And don’t worry about reporting abuse. Even if you accidentally report a long lost friend as a spammer, we won’t shut down anyone’s account based on one piece of feedback. In this world, it's better to be safe than sorry. You might also find these 10 tips for safe instant messaging useful.
As with all service abuse scenarios, this is another arms race. We know abusers are motivated, and will attempt to react every time we add new protections, but we're motivated too. We’re continually working to protect everyone on the network from these types of attacks.
John Scarrow General Manager - Safety Services
PS. If you think you may have already fallen victim to a phishing scam, check out these tools for removing malware and preventing further issues.
As we look at usage patterns for people who use Windows Live Photos, Messenger, and other online services, we've seen the emergence of a broad pattern that has been shaping our thinking as we work on new versions of our products. What we see is an explosion of sharing – and of its natural consequence, users struggling to keep up with all the content being shared. This new emphasis on sharing seems as fundamental to us now as the original advent of the Internet and the first communication tools – email, IM, blogs. Call it Sharing 2.0.
As engineers of Windows Live, it is our job is to make Windows a valuable tool that helps people connect to the data and services they care about. We see some great opportunities to create new technologies that can help users manage the chaos, both incoming and outgoing.
This post is about the trend as we see it. We’ll be following this up with some of our ideas about where this is heading, and what role we hope Windows Live can play.
People store their stuff across the web, their PCs and their mobile phones, leading to fragmented access and fragmented sharing. Take the example of photo-sharing. A study we ran in September 2009 showed that people stored their photos across up to 15 different types of technologies. Here are the major ones:
It would be nice, not only to have everything in one location, but also to be able to access all this stuff and share from wherever you may be, especially from mobile phones and PCs that you may not own.
It seems like our appetite for using technology to connect with each other is bottomless, whether it be directed communications with the people we love (email, IM), sharing with groups of friends (email, social networking), or full-on public broadcasting (blogs, micro-blogs, photo & video dedicated sites, etc.)
Whenever a new medium emerges, it doesn’t replace the previous ones – it adds to it. That is, people today are sending email and IM and updating their status on social networks and uploading photos everywhere. They're sharing their thoughts and their memories to stay in touch with each other. Sharing and consuming shared data has become the primary internet activity for many of our customers, right up there with shopping and reading news.
Maybe surprisingly, this trend cuts across all demographics – it is not a teen or a US phenomenon – it is largely true for people of all ages in all countries. For example, did you know that 44% of people who use Facebook are over 35? (ComScore Media Metrix, December 2009, Worldwide).
A further multiplier effect is that even within a given medium, there are multiple providers available – and most people sign up for more than one of them. Windows Live Hotmail, or Yahoo! Mail, or Gmail? Why not all three? Messenger, or AIM, or Skype? Facebook, or Twitter, or MySpace, or Blogger? SkyDrive, or Flickr, or PhotoBucket? YouTube, or Flickr, or Vimeo?
Increasingly, people are replacing "or" with “and” in reply to these questions, and using several competing services together. Just as an example, the average photo user uploads 22 photos at a time, and uploads them to 2.4 different sites (Microsoft study, August 2009).
But categorizing services as being about photo-sharing or social networking or email alone is a bit misleading. Of the 11% of US users who upload at least one video a month, 46% are using Facebook and 35% MySpace, with YouTube coming in 3rd at 16% (Microsoft study, August 2009). So maybe Facebook and MySpace should be counted as video sharing sites? Messenger users exchange over a billion status updates per month. Isn’t that really a form of micro-blogging or social-networking?
As Internet services have grown and matured, they have naturally branched out from their original focus and started overlapping. Flickr started as a photo sharing site but then added video. Facebook started as a pure social network, but added photos.
We see users cherry-picking among services and creating custom solutions that exploit the best features of each. I myself use SkyDrive for family photos, occasionally play around with Flickr, keep in touch with my closest friends using Hotmail and Messenger, and use Facebook for the rest. Occasionally I use Twitter for more public-facing updates. But come to think of it, I have a blog on Blogger and another one on Spaces. And this is now quite normal, even for non tech-enthusiasts.
(ComScore Media Metrix, December 2009, Worldwide)
The darker side of this sharing explosion is how hard it has become to keep up with everything.
I know which services I use. But keeping up with my friends’ services is increasingly difficult. Maybe I forgot to check Twitter this morning. Maybe one of my friends posted a review on Yelp, but that’s not a service I use. Maybe there’s a very important email message waiting for me on Hotmail, or maybe it went to my Yahoo account. Or was it in Facebook? We call it “social overload.”
As the social networking train gathers momentum, some riders are getting off. Their reasons run the gamut from being besieged by online "friends" who aren't really friends to lingering concerns over where their messages and photos might materialize. If there's a common theme to their exodus, it's the nagging sense that a time-sucking habit was taking the "real" out of life.
(Marco R. Della Cava in “Some ditch social networks to reclaim time, privacy,” USA Today)
Microsoft provides services in almost every communication category. And we want all of these services to be best in class for quality, speed, and security. We hope you'll choose us where it makes sense. But it would be unrealistic to assume that we will meet all your communication needs, and be better than every competitor in every category. And even if we did, you would still have hundreds of friends on other services.
This fundamental insight is shaping our approach to designing and building Windows Live.
This is why we've built in the ability to aggregate your GMail, Yahoo! Mail, and other accounts into Hotmail and access them all in one place. And this is why we let you add Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and dozens of other services to your "what's new" feed in Messenger. It is also a driving force for many of the features we’ll be unveiling soon across all our websites and client software.
As engineers, we see great potential in building technology that can simplify all the social sharing clutter. We want to help Windows users bring everything together, but in a focused way – bringing you closer to your most important people.
- Piero Sierra Group Program Manager Windows Live Messenger and Mail