User Experience talk at the PDC and Hillel Cooperman's blog
I just went to excellent presentation about building “software that users would love”. It was a great overview of where we are as developers tend to confuse or even insult the users of our applications. It was not a talk that gave answers to how you can solve the problem of having to support total novices and at the same time giving power users what they want. The Hillel Cooperman who presented the session was excellent and it was on the best set of presentations slides I have seen in term of presenting concepts.
It was also clear that Aero is not simply an application built using the Avalon APIs but takes advantage of all the WinFx APIs to build a user experience. It seems that the idea of one look and feel is appropriate for all users is going away and he talked more about a “UI Cookbook” where the guidelines for a number of different scenarios would be presented. For example, a games player would expect a different user experience from say a musician or a business man.
You can find the start looking at some of their initial ideas at http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/understanding/ux/default.aspx
Hillel has a blog which looks like it will be worth looking at. The url is http://www.themicrosoftexperience.com but there is no rss feed.