Paul Thurrott is back at it again with part two of his interview with Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek (Longhorn Windows User Experience Team). This second part goes into more detail of how Microsoft is making the next Windows user experience the best if possible can.
Paul: This came up at the PDC. There is a lot of stuff you are doing [on the User Experience team] that people just don"t know about. It"s probably pretty accurate to say, if you go back before XP, that things were just kind of slapped together. You get the idea that whoever was working on Windows back then said, "hey, this dialog works, we"re done."
Hillel: Right. But I want to caution you about that. The system definitely wasn"t as involved as it is now, and frankly, since we have yet to ship, and prove that what we"re saying makes sense, I"d be loathe to claim credit for anything beyond what [Windows] used to do. That said, remember that in most of the industry, there are no resources for thoughts around testing ease-of-use. In the fact that, pre-XP, Microsoft had been making investments in usability for ten years.
Look, we"re the number one kid on the block. If that means we get a target painted on our back, that"s OK, we"ll bear that burden and not complain. But a surprising amount of thought went into [the user interface in pre-XP versions of Windows]. I was shocked when I came here because I was a Mac guy. And I was assuming that everyone up here was dopey, or didn"t care.