Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft Has a Design Culture? They're Starting To...

"Past success in software and computing didn't require a diligent focus on user experience. Sure, it happened from time to time, but in the big scheme of things it was a novelty or an aberration that wasn't tied to market performance or product success in most cases. Even computers and software that defined their markets and were delightful to use simply didn' t capture the consumer imagination enough to become standards. These simple facts have made computers and software downright unpleasant to use over the years. Nowhere has this been more prevalent than in the enterprise. People may sing the praises of the functional performance of enterprise software, but rarely do you hear comments about how "fun" it is to use. Rarer still is to hear praise from a development team about how "easy" enterprise software is to implement or configure. This was chalked up to the fact that computers were too primitive to adapt to us and the context in which they were used by us. Constraints of the day required that we adapted to computers and not the other way around. In short, it was the cost of doing business. We all paid for it—but there’s good news."



If you're at all into user design and user experience at the software level, this is a Microsoft site you really should take a look at. In many ways, the opening page is more of a manifesto about Microsoft's slow but steady change toward being a design-driven culture. Some people may think that user interface is all "eye candy" but those are the 0.000001% of the population that thought DOS was easy enough to use...so let's just ignore them.

Design matters. User experience matters. With Vista, Microsoft put a lot of effort into improving the experience of using Windows, and I think it shows (driver pains aside). I've been using Vista full time now for about four months and the other day I booted up my last remaining XP computer (my 17" laptop) and I was amazed at how...crude much of it was. Too many clicks - too many things hidden. Design matters. I should point out, on the other hand, that said laptop was incredibly fast and snappy - and that matters as well. How I long for instantly matured Vista drivers!