Microsoft has put a lot of emphasis in recent years on usability studies – throughout the development process for our products, we make sure to bring customers in to see how well they’re able to accomplish various tasks. We give them a computer and a list of common activities users need to do every day with Windows Live Mail – setup a new email account, read email, search for old emails, etc… We then see if the user can successfully accomplish the tasks without help and use that information to help point out ways to improve our product. Usability studies are just part of how we ensure that we’re building software that’s usable by both advanced and beginner users – we try and think about how to make products that are easy to use from the initial conception all the way to release.  A good example of how this can change a product is email account setup.

Back when we were first creating Windows Live Mail, it became obvious to our team that setting up email accounts can be a difficult task for people. In order to set up an email account you need to know a couple pieces of information that consumers normally don’t need to think about and that are hard to remember – to use a classic example, my mom doesn’t know what a POP or IMAP server is, nor should she have to. In usability studies where users have to set up new email accounts and they need to do detailed setup involving detailed server settings like this, many, many people failed to successfully set up the account without detailed and exact instructions of what to do. So, our team added a feature that we call Autodiscovery.

What is Autodiscovery?

Autodiscovery is a part of the email account setup process – when you start to add a new email account, we ask you only for your email address and password, and from that, we can often automatically setup your new email account without entering any more information. This is great, because everyone knows their email address and password (hopefully – if you’ve forgotten your password you have bigger problems :), so setting up an email account is simple – no changing your IMAP port or figuring out whether you need to enable SSL.  If the user’s server isn’t in our list of known servers, we just let them go through the normal setup process they would have gone through before. It’s a real win for users because email account setup is easy and accomplished quickly.

So how does this work?

The Windows Live Mail team has compiled a list of commonly used email servers from ISPs around the world and the email settings to make them work. When you enter your email address, we compare the domain name in that address to the domain names in our list. If we find a match, we then use those server settings.  From time to time, we update this list of email servers by looking at the major ISPs in countries around the world.

Stephen Sisk

Program Manager, Windows Live Mail