Channeling Cupertino (Will Parker) has a nice piece up in the last read period titled
Mac Office 2004: How to Learn From Mistakes, Part 1. It's a nice high level view of some of the efforts of the Macintosh Business Unit of MSFT in their design of the very-initial-user-experience of the Office product suite -- the packaging.
Having been through a couple rounds of packaging decisions for products, I only wish we'd been able to spend as much time focusing on the total experience, instead of what seemed to be a keen (and ultimately largely unused) set of packaging. But it did look cool, and it pulled through the logo...
Sitting back on the customer side of the desk, I've learned that rolling up a product for a demanding customer is hard and demands a lot of detail focus, something too often missed despite best intentions (and something I believe we didn't lock down when we focussed on the box). That it goes well beyond the package (though first impressions certainly count) to the errata, virtual hand-holding, and all the rest. As products increase in complexity (we can't all just drag Foo.app to our /Applications folder...), the catches, checking and verification becomes quite intense.
