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...