The Joy of Flex

Lots of other bloggers have the news today that Adobe has launched Acrobat.com with five great free knowledge worker applications in one integrated suite. As always, I want to talk about what it means for Buzzword.

Even before we started building Buzzword, we were pretty sure that its greatest and best destiny was not to be a standalone, one-act wonder. It’s nice to have a word processor on the web, but it’s a lot more powerful if it fits into a suite of applications that meet a broader set of needs. Today Buzzword takes a big step closer to that destiny: it’s no longer an island of word processing.

Today I want to talk about just one aspect of today’s launch: migration of your Buzzword account to an Adobe ID. One of the first things you’ll notice if you’ve used Buzzword before is that today when you sign in, we’ll ask you to sign up for an Adobe ID if you don’t already have one, or associate your Buzzword account with your Adobe ID if you already have one. This process may be a bit confusing, especially if you have no idea what an Adobe ID is. We worked incredibly hard on the design of this migration process to take something that would have been annoying, confusing, and disruptive and turn it into a minor bump that we hope few people will even notice.

What’s an Adobe ID? Put simply, it’s your email address and a password that you can use to sign into every* online service that Adobe offers. If you’ve bought fonts from Adobe, signed into Adobe’s customer support forums, or used Adobe’s pre-release software program, you’ve already got an Adobe ID. The first and most important integration we had to build as part of joining Adobe was to convert our existing customer base to Adobe IDs.

What was particularly challenging about the design of this migration process was to handle all the different cases of matching email addresses, and different email addresses, and all the exceptions to all those cases. Most people just have one email address, and despite the security risks many people use the same password with every online service. So we wanted to handle the relatively common case of converting your Buzzword email address and password to a existing matching Adobe ID and password with extra special grace. And in fact in that case, we silently migrate you as you sign in, prompting you only to accept the new service agreement and to verify your email address by clicking on a link in an email that we send you.

But for users who have no Adobe ID, we have to guide them through a new sign-up process, because Adobe IDs require more information than Buzzword IDs did. And what about users who have an Adobe ID that we can find, but they have forgotten their AdobeID’spassword? For them, we have to guide them through a password reset process and then back to the migration again.

Plus, the email address associated with an Adobe ID has to be verified, by sending an email to that address containing a link that the user has to click on to prove that they really control that email address. Buzzword’s sign-in system didn’t require verification, and we didn’t want to make this quite as onerous as it is in most web sites, so we came up with the idea of a “grace period” of three days during which you can sign in without having to verify your email address. This gives you time to use Acrobat.com if, for example, the verification message gets caught in a spam filter somewhere. But of course, the grace period adds further complexity, since we have to warn you for the next three days each time you sign in that you’re getting closer to the end of the grace period.

I’ve probably already bored you with too many details, and the funny thing is that the spec for this feature is like 18 pages long with six additional pages of flowcharts. But I really enjoyed building the user interface for this migration process, because it was one of those classic designs where you’re taking something that is incomprehensibly complex under the covers and making it as simple as humanly possible, but no simpler, for the user. That’s why we build software, after all. And the end result is making the user’s life a lot better with fewer accounts and passwords to remember. There’s a lot further we can do as an industry in this direction, to be sure, but this was an important and necessary first step.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s new in this release, so expect more posts on this subject. And now for something completely different, and hopefully a relief from all the technical details. This is really “true confessions” time, but I am a sucker for flashy marketing videos. Adobe made a really flashy marketing video about Acrobat.com, and if you like that sort of thing, you’ll love this one: visit http://www.adobe.com/acom/, wait for the animation to end, and then click on “Explore Acrobat.com”. There’s even music!

*OK, not quite every service, at least not yet. But eventually.