Jensen Harris, the Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience Team, gave a really compelling talk where he explained the work his team had done in crafting the UX for Windows 8. They knew they needed to shake things up and re-imagine some concepts that had become stale. They threw out the Start menu and built a cool new tiled interface.
He talked about how important it was to sweat the small stuff. For example, he talked about the herculean effort it was to eliminate a little blue flash in the boot sequence the first time you power on a device straight from the manufacturer. His point was that the seemingly small stuff REALLY matters when we're creating an experience for a user. A little bit of sand in my hamburger is going to spoil the whole experience.
I had to compare my own experience as a user of Windows 8 with the description I was hearing from Harris. I thought it still had a lot of rough edges and it was an uncomfortable melding of two paradigms that m…
He talked about how important it was to sweat the small stuff. For example, he talked about the herculean effort it was to eliminate a little blue flash in the boot sequence the first time you power on a device straight from the manufacturer. His point was that the seemingly small stuff REALLY matters when we're creating an experience for a user. A little bit of sand in my hamburger is going to spoil the whole experience.
I had to compare my own experience as a user of Windows 8 with the description I was hearing from Harris. I thought it still had a lot of rough edges and it was an uncomfortable melding of two paradigms that m…