Comment by m_mueller
10 years ago
My main question here is whether this kind of rigorous user lab testing - at a time when things could still be changed - was also applied to Windows 8. That thing seemed such a top down dictated hot mess to me.
IMO the issue of productivity and discoverability has still not been solved on touch based UI, even with our post-iPhone interfaces. Shame that Microsoft didn't go back to these roots and innovated on exactly these issues.
I don't think anybody does that type of user testing anymore. The last project I've seen a good write-up about was Office 2007, and that's a decade old at this point. Which is a shame.
Just using most web-based UIs shows that there's almost zero usability testing going on in that field, and since more and more apps are web-based, well.
You'd think that MS would want to replicate their success with Win95. The task bar and start menu is easily the most iconic UI to ever come out from them and made them jump ahead of MacOS in terms of usability - and apparently it can all be traced back to this lab. The people responsible should all have been promoted to A level where their lab becomes the equivalent of a Steve Jobs product curator.
But it seems like MS at some point got on the high horse and started thinking that they can just shove anything down user's throat anyways. When they lost the entire segment of the fastest growing computing market, a competent CEO would have gone back and study why their 95 UI was so successful that everyone wanted to buy their product instead of being forced to.