Day 1: Hillel Cooperman's presentation

Didn't get a chance to talk about all of Day 1's highlights yesterday, so I'll continue with those before I move on to today's stuff.

One neat session that I attended yesterday was presented by Hillel Cooperman. It was called "PRS223: Getting Users to Fall in Love with Your Software" and it was sort of meant to be a session on best practices for UI design.

Cooperman was very entertaining and he poked fun at Microsoft throughout the session for some of the silly things they have done with the UI over the years - things like poorly worded error dialogs, annoying incessant balloon popups and so on. However, by doing so, he was trying to illustrate an important point - the importance of good UI design. He acknowledged the mistakes that were made in the past and assured us that it's been a learning process. Project "Max" is a good example of an application that takes a nice approach to UI design, with friendlier, more informal messages in error dialogs, and layouts/designs that facilitate ease of use and ease of discovery. I've been noticing similar changes in recent Vista builds as well, and that's definitely a good sign. UI should not be an after-thought!



Tags: Vista, Longhorn, PDC05