I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing.
— Plato
Using Windows Vista this week has been a new thing for me; and in some ways has been old hat since I come from an OS X background. What always impresses me most about each new release of an OS from both Microsoft and Apple is in the little UI improvements that they make. It is in these areas that we see how they view usability and the needs of the end user.
The first thing that struck me was the fluid user experience that occurs with fading windows. When you open, close, minimize, and restore windows, they fade. Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users wrote about the fluid and dog-ear approaches to interface design recently after she saw the Apple iPhone presentation.
The second thing that really grabbed me was that the folder icons display content of folder. I have a folder that contains a number of images, the folder thumbnail is an open folder with a few sheets of paper inside, each of which is a perfect thumbnail of the images within.
It’s in the little things that we find ways to make the user feel good about using the software and fulfill an emotional need. Fulfilling an emotional need is at the heart of all user interface experience.
An Aside: Can someone tell me how to create a draft post without it showing up in the published areas?
