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September 14, 2005
A Good Day To Be A Designer
So we had the new Macromedia Studio 8 ship yesterday and then today at PDC the Expression family of tools was released. Now I may be biased (I work at Microsoft now and I worked at Macromedia for several years) but I'd say Designers are getting a lot of love this week.
Because as fun as all these new tools are, that's not even the best thing I've seen this week for Graphic Designers, Interaction Designers, Usability experts, etc.
Yesterday, in the PDC keynote, I listened as Bill Gates told the 8,000+ developers, system architects, CTO's and CIO's to "Focus on the User Experience". This theme was further echoed during the presentation of Windows Vista, Office 12, the Expression tools, etc. Seeing a pattern? Now, you might not personally care what Bill Gates and Microsoft say but most corporations and influential individuals in the industry do. They pay very close attention to what Microsoft is saying and doing.
For Microsoft to make User Experience a main theme of its Professional Developer Conference is actually a pretty significant gain for those of us who make our living trying to improve the experience of using software and devices. This is good for the corporate reputation and perceived need of all types of designers and usability experts.
There are also some important reasons why you should care specifically about Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) and the Expression tools which I'll post later. I've got to run off to some sessions and designer focus groups...
Posted by bradbecker at 9:56 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 13, 2005
Old Dogs Learn New Tricks
I'm at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference today and watched Bill Gates unveil various products including recent builds of Windows Vista. But the big surprise (other than the great video featuring Bill Gates and Napolean Dynamite as roommates) was the new UI in Office 12.
Read my lips: no new menus.
Actually, there were no menus at all. I haven't had the chance to play with the new suite myself but the demos this morning showed a surprising new UI for Office that had replaced all application menus with graphical palettes.
I had expected to yawn through the presentation of Office 12. Instead, I was struck by a burning desire to play with it immediately. I have a healthy fear of pre-beta software though (learned the hard way) so I’ll settle for being one of the first in line for the beta.
In the meantime, I’m pondering the ramifications to users and wondering whether this will become a trend or not. These apps are some of the most widely used apps in the world and their last significant UI innovation (toolbars) was eight years ago—practically a lifetime in this industry. It'll be interesting to see what comes of this but either way, it's exciting to see what might be a widespread step forward in desktop software user experience.
You can read more about the rationale and research behind it here and, even better, check out hi-res images of each of the Office products.
Stay tuned tomorrow and Wednesday for more surprises.
Posted by bradbecker at 6:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack