experience matters

Fixoutlook.org is an orchestrated effort by the Email Standards Project, Campaign Monitor and Newism to help the user community send a unified message to Microsoft.

The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email. The project was formed out of frustration with the inconsistent rendering of HTML emails in major email clients.

Proactive, Focused

ESP works with MSFT and during beta testing of Outlook 2010 they were seeing the same poor standards support as 2007.  This was bad -there had been no improvements to the Word rendering engine and MSFT plans on keeping it that way. Faced with a challenging client situation, ESP plead their case but didn’t ask the client to take their words on the matter, they’re leveraging the volume of the user community.  ESP is saying to MSFT “we know your users better than you do, just listen.”

Transparent, Live, Uncontrolled

ESP laid out their story and asked users to give their opinion in an open-ended way.  They’re not leading with questions, not confining answers to limited options of a poll, they’re asking for any and all thoughts on the matter.

Aggregated, Organized

They’ve chosen twitter as the medium and given directions to include the site name as a tag for categorization.  It appears the common use of link shorteners has stunted this effort; nonetheless, “Outlook 2010″ is trending third on twitter behind #iranelection and Transformers2 (as of 11am CST).

The initial response to ESP’s effort is significant, but why didn’t Microsoft engage its community in the first place?  I see a lost opportunity for the Evil Empire to narrow the disconnect between its company and user community.

Last 5 posts by Anastasia Clarkson

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