Did Microsoft designers got their butts kicked 3 years ago?
- by John Conwell
This is something I've been wondering about for about a year now. Microsoft has a history of creating very useful products, with lots of useful features. But useful does not mean usable. A lot of stuff coming out of Redmond the past 10 years don't really seem to have been well thought out from a user design point of view. Lots of extra steps, lots of popup windows...very little innovative thinking going on about the user experience of these products.But about a year ago I started seeing changes in the new products coming out of Microsoft. Windows 7 is a good example of a big change. They really got their asses handed to them on Vista, so they had to make a change. But it looks like this change in philosophy has bled over to other areas. The new Office (2010) lineup has a lot of changes in it to make it way more usable. Given that big changes like this take about 3 years to go from start to actually shipping product, I'm curious what happened internally at Microsoft that really drove this change in product design. I think that Microsoft got so focused on just adding new functionality for so long, they forgot about the little things that can really make or break a product. Office 2010 is full of these little things that make it much nicer to use. I just hope its not too late for them.
