Windows 7 Design Team’s 8 Guiding Principles
Ran across this at Tom’s Guide and it’s fascinating. Apparently the Windows 7 Designers had a list of 8 guiding principles they used when making decisions about Windows 7 Design -
- Reduce concepts… Increase confidence. Thoughts: Confusing.
- Solve distractions not discoverability. Thoughts: This is very good.
- UX before knobs and questions.
- Personalization not customization.
- Lifecycle of the experience.
- Small bad and good things matter. Thoughts: Another really good principle.
- Be great at “look” and “do”.
- Building for mobile people. Thoughts: This is really important and glad that MS is finally looking at this.
Another really interesting data point was this -
With millions of users signed up to the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program, designers had a lot of information to work with. With 90% of users having up to 14 windows open at once (and the majority using between 6 and 9 windows), it was clear something needed to be done about the Windows taskbar and its window management tools.
That’s a good area to prioritize, and in Windows 7 the new taskbar, aero peek, etc. do make it much easier to switch between windows and work with multiple windows.
My favorite design features in Windows 7 would be -
- Jump Lists.
- Aero Peek.
- One combined task bar - the new superbar.
It does take a little time to get used to the new features – However, they’ve had a positive impact on my productivity.
I love playing around with AeroShake because its just a really cool looking feature – however, it doesn’t get used as much as something like Jump Lists.
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Filed under: Windows7