Vista UX details starting to arrive

As part of Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2005, the company has released more information on how to design user experiences for Windows Vista. I was the UX architect on Vista for a number of years, so it's good to see this information finally starting to coming into the light of day.

(As it turns out, Microsoft has created a remarkably poor user experience for reading their guidelines on user experience. You have to go to a section on Microsoft's MSDN developers site for the Windows Vista UX Guidelines. You need to go through some Windows verification foolishness, although I'm baffled why it matters what platform you're using to read the guidelines. You then need to download a ZIP file. This ZIP file turns out to contain... wait for it... a copy of a web site that describes how to design good user experiences. Oh, the irony. The byzantine reasons behind Microsoft's web site production process are not worth delving into. Let's just say I'm glad I now work at a tiny startup.)

Some of the Vista work I'm most excited to see deals with an effort to bring clarity to muddled dialog boxes and wizard pages. Vista offers OS support for a new "task dialog" style. This style—and the accompanying guidelines—call out a dialog's main question or instruction as a single sentence in clear, natural language. (The blurry example JPEG images below come straight from the guidelines; too bad they didn't offer lossless PNGs.)

This same task style is reflected in the new standard wizard template:

This wizard style is, in fact, an operating system feature designed specifically to make every piece of text count. Gone are the big pointless graphics that took up a third of the page, and a single piece of instruction text replaces the old stack of redundant headings. Hallelujah. It's gratifying to see the evolution of direct OS support for the inductive UI style I developed way back in the late 90s for Microsoft Money.

Some Vista UX guidelines are specific to Vista development, but many of them make just as much sense for products that ship on Windows XP, OS/X, or Linux. Worth a look.

Comments

[chucker]

Unfortunately, they still don't use verb-based buttons. The first screenshot ("Do you want to save [..]") shows that even with these "improved UX guidelines", the user is needlessly slowed down. Renaming the buttons to "Save", "Don't Save" and "Cancel", as two certain other major GUI systems (Aqua and GNOME) have done, would speed up the user's process, as reading the question becomes optional.

Users don't like reading dialogs, especially when they include a lot of text. I can only hope that Microsoft will reduce the amount of text ( http://album.wincustomize.com/image.axd?path=R43M9TfjxvHojPHKRls8at1CA94cTWSWe558f3hJlSblUD2IKPPfkA== , however, leads me to believe that that is *not* the case), at least.

[Jônatas Gardin]

So you're the guy who developed the Inductive User Interface.

Glad to meet you.

I've found this Guideline way back and using it as a through reference.

Keep the good things coming.

[Tjeerd Hoek]

Hi Jan, Thanks for bringing this to the attention of folks. Send us feedback or keep commenting in this blog. It seems you have some knowledge about these things, hahaha ;). Seriously, we appreciate the feedback hugely. Our goal is to make guidelines that are actually useful in explaining how to build great UX rather than just 'spec' it, but different audiences ask for different type of content and granularity. It will be a work in progress for a while. So let us know. The previous poster e.g. is 100% correct, that Save dialog is not to design/goal of explicit buttons (something we specifcally point out). And that dialog in the games experience is also something we need to fix still. Inappropriate use of command links and explanatory text (the reason why that team did this is relatively obscure but there is one).
In general this stuff is still in massive draft state. Especially artwork. We're still closing down on a lot of things. Oh and on the poor UX for reading them: this was for now the fastest and most efficient way; and also more of a barrier to reflect the DRAFT state. We will eventually have the full site on MSDN.

[Peter Gut,mann]

I mentioned the problem of obtaining the guidelines to an Apple-using friend of mine who commented:

>The same thing at Apple was - well - a one minute search.

I tried it myself, googling "apple user interface guidelines" takes you straight to the web page. Apple never asks you to prove you're a Mac OS X user, they just give you all the docs as printable PDFs (as well as HTML), not just a pile of crappy web pages. I'm now reading the Mac UI docs in place of the Microsoft ones...

[Jeff Paul Internet Business]

I find internet marketing the same as marketing a product in the real world. In real marketing one really has to go through different means to promote a brand and product. Same tasks are applied in internet marketing but this can also be done at the comfort of one’s bedroom.