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Here are some brief design tips.
List what the product needs to do, and how it's going to do that. Develop a spec. Get people from different departments involved.
Experiment with screen design up front. Build prototypes. Do it before coding begins. You don't need to be a VB or Delphi programmer. Do it in Flash. Do it in PowerPoint. Do it in pencil sketches. Reorganize screen shots by using cut and paste in your favorite Paint program.
Get users of various experience to look at your prototypes and record their reactions. Take it small steps. Focus on just a few tasks and a few users each day. Try not to lead the tester but offer help if needed. Have someone else from the team record video or take notes.
You will be surprised at the results you get. Often we are too close to a design and oblivious to the design flaws.
Ask your users for feedback. Again, we can be completely blind to design flaws until some user says "it took me hours to find out how to do xyz". Talk to your users.
Microsoft designers now talk in scenarios. For example: I may say I want some feature. The MS guys will say to me "give me some scenarios demonstrating of how you would use this feature".
It is another useful way we can be User Centric in our design.
Refine your design. If the UI is not easily discoverable, consider adding descriptive headings and embedding UA directly into the screen. Break complex screens down into simpler tasks (all the stuff we talked about over the previous pages). It's an iterative process. Run the usability tests again.
Recently, Microsoft decided to make their processes and people more visible to the world. Over the last few months, interviews with Microsoft people have been popping up everywhere on the web. Some of them are very revealing and give us a great insight into how Microsoft carries out design and usability testing.
Paul
Thurrott's (WinSuperSite.com) interviews with Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek from
the Longhorn User Experience team (formally known as the Shell team). This two-page interview is a great read.
WinSuperSite: Interview with Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek (User Experience team)
Another favorite site is the new channel9.msdn.com. Here the people behind the various Microsoft technologies are interviewed informally using a small DV camera. You then have a chance to contribute to the resulting forum.
Channel9
Interviews
Kam Vebdbart - What influencesed the visual design in Longhorn?
Scott Swanson - How do you come up with new features for Help in Visual Studio?
Programmers and Help authors will need to work more closely. Get actively involved with design in the very early stages of your product before coding begins.
What if I want to stick with CHMs for now? That's not a problem. HTML Help 1.x is fully supported under Longhorn, but you won't have the deeper integration with Longhorn Aero UX. WinHelp files are missing from the Longhorn landscape, but Longhorn still supports WinHelp files at least for the time being.
Well, that's a small glimpse of what's happening in design as we move toward Longhorn. Keep an eye on Microsoft & Longhorn developments. And keep reading those web articles.
Rob Chandler
(Many thanks to Char James-Tanny fellow Help MVP for assistance with editing this article)
The article is also published at http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/LHChangesUA1.asp
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