Delighting the user with the tiniest of details

Building software people love involves learning to read minds – or at least learning to think like your users. In the world of free, web-based software, there will always be 10 versions of every application: 10 different to-do lists, 10 different dictionaries, 10 different bookmark organizers. It’s not enough to meet users’ expectations about features; you’ve also got to delight them if you want to win market share. If you don’t think through every interaction and use case, you’re probably annoying the hell out of people without even knowing it.
That’s why it’s important to actually watch users in action with your application. It’s a maxim in user experience design circles that you, the programmer, are not the user. Sure, you should eat your own dog food, but remember that the experience of using software that you wrote – and whose every shortcoming and compromise you understand from the inside – isn’t the same as chancing upon that software in the wild and giving it a shot. Look at your software through the fresh eyes of users who didn’t write a single line of the code. That’s when you’ll actually learn what you’ve created and how to improve it.
… all of which proselytizing serves only to introduce one rant and one rave about free software I use every day. Neither of these are web applications, but both of them are tied directly to the ‘net.
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Being a Mac user, I do have a generally favorable impression of the Redmond efforts, I have a healthy background in their CMS system Sharepoint, and felt as long as you keep up to date on their latest and greatest (read beta) releases, you can almost forgive them for not being more mac-like. So armed with my copy of parallels, I installed versions of XP and Vista, and when my hard drive went belly up I decided to keep just the Vista version. Vista has a great deal of interesting abilities. I am a big fan of the voice dictation software/interface. In a quiet room, it is almost faster than typing. I think the paradigm of the ‘explorer bar’ is pretty well conceived mashup of a breadcrumb menu plus drop-downs. I’m surprised not to see a web version of this, since it really does have a fairly good affordance to the user of traversing a deep directory structure.
What really bothers me about the switch is the overall ‘blueness’ of the interface. It’s relentless, and of course being good web 2.0 citizens, they got their gradient on, so its basically blue gradients for miles. Now, giving them credit, aqua (mac os x’s first scheme) had the same problem, blue gradients for days, and the extraneous grey pinstripe thing, but yet it didn’t seem as gratuitous as Vista. This is coupled with the inability to ‘go grey’ as XP used to allow. So, by redecorating, vista has ‘painted’ itself into a corner, unless users are expected to select their own gradient mixes (yellow to orange, puce to purple) they are somewhat stuck with blue. Also knowing microsoft, these are just bitmaps, so no redecorating is possible without replacing a bunch of .BMP’s someplace deep in the WIN32 folder.
So, overall, why blue? If we look to web design, its pretty much the default color. It is hard to find a site that does not use blue as a background or decorative accent. Of course it is the ‘real’ clickable link color, and it is 




