Nudges - Microsoft Outlook
Using nudges to encourage desired behavior(s) is both good and bad. Reflections of the almost forced migration to the new Outlook and thoughts
Where I work, we are a Microsoft O365 house, and for the most part I am fine with it. 99GB email (yay, no more need to be filing and filtering to PST’s to conserve space) and frankly, the Sharepoint-based collaboration works well (I will admit that I have never been a fan of Google Docs, and I think that an enterprise would be insane to *trust* Google to not peek. Yes that is irrational, but …) and I love having the full application on my laptop to work natively versus via the web.
As a Mac user, it took a long time for Outlook to come to the modern Mac OS, but it works well. A couple years ago there was a “New” version, but it was pretty feature poor, so while I dabbled with it, I quickly went back (mainly because it didn’t support the plug-in for WebEx meetings, and it didn’t support PST files, so I was cut off of my large archive.
And I left it there for years.
Until this Monday. I logged in, and there was a banner (that I didn’t screen cap) that was making it clear that I needed to move to the new version.
This is the “nudge”. Was it driven by Microsoft, wanting to end support for the legacy application? Was it driven by our desktop support team to simplify their support motion? I have no idea. It really doesn’t matter.
But I did push hesitantly the button to move to the new experience.
Hoo-boy. It is a “cleaner” UI, clearly something that feels tablet native (I would bet that this was built around the Microsoft Surface paradigm). Clearly the controls are meant to be easier to use with a touch interface.
However, I am using it on my Mac Book Pro, and it feels toy-like, with lots of not well utilized space.
It did allow me to add my PST files, but holy cow, it took a full 48 hours to finally move them (I have to assume that much of that time was to index for searching). I honestly thought that the process broke, and I had lost access to that archived mail. Win, I guess.
Finally, late Wednesday I was fully operational. It works, and I can find things when I need them, so “yay” I guess.
That said, there is no going back. This is a one way only migration. And I just don’t like how “cute” Microsoft is trying to be with this redesign.
But you might ask: “Geoff, how else were we going to get you to use it?” and there I have no answer. The nudge worked.
Not going to lie, I wish I hadn’t pushed the button.
