There was a great session this morning that was dedicated on how to improve the user experience of applications: Get users to fall in love with your Software. There was an essential message underlying the talk:
Success is not about making your application look good, it is about making your user feel good
The thesis is that current PC software often makes people feel bad or stupid. Even if the software is correct and accurate, it is not necessarily useful. A simple language use example is that 'File Open: Access Denied' scares people, and that 'the file is protected and cannot be opened' makes the user feel less of a violator.
What you would like to achieve is the 'new car feeling' where people are proud of what they have bought, feel good about their purchase, and will take care of it to a great extend. We need to get the same experiences from software. There are many aspects to achieving this , but it requires a different mindset about how we develop our applications. One of things to realize is that user will likely use your application for more than an hour, maybe even for years, so how can you assure that in a year from now the user experience is still good. Actually the experience should get better over time.
The talk centered around four trade-offs:
There was more talk about how to structure applications such that they expose application functionality more effectively. Among others based on the anecdote that
Many of the top ten requests of functionally to be added to outlook, are for functionality that already is in outlook.
In the future a lot of this discussion will take place through a site Hillel Cooperman is running at www.themicrosoftexperience.com
Posted by Werner Vogels at October 29, 2003 03:30 PM