When we posted the new "inbox" desktop backgrouns, the reactions showed just how personal, personalization can be. Building on that theme of personalization (pun intended), we wanted to share some of the work we did on themes in Windows 7. We’ve shared data about customization in previous releases of...

The Windows Explorer has evolved by enabling you to find all sorts of content by searching for it. Many of you have used the search features in Windows Vista (based on our instrumented data) from the start menu or from the search box in Explorer. It has been a long time since most of us could remember...

Happy Birthday Windows! Given all the interest in the most used user-interface of Windows we thought it would be good to take a look back and see how we got to Windows 7. --Steven We were very excited to unveil elements of the Windows 7 desktop at this year’s Professional Developers Conference...

We’re back! We’ve had a pretty incredible couple of weeks at the PDC and WinHEC. Based on what we talked about you can imagine we are all rather busy as we transition from milestone 3 to beta. We trust many of you are enjoying 6801 (or perhaps we should say 6801+). Over the next few weeks we’re going...

There’s a lot of great discussion from the window arranging post. This really shows how important these details are to people. Being able to arrange how apps are shown on screen is key for productivity because it impacts almost every task. It’s also very personal – people want to be in control of their...

We’ve booted the machine, displayed stuff on the screen, launched programs, so next up we’re going to look at a pretty complex topic that sort of gets to the core role of the graphical user interface—managing windows. Dave Matthews is program manager on the core user experience team who will provide...

Lots of discussion on the taskbar and associated user interface. Chaitanya said he thought it would be a good idea to summarize some of the feedback and thoughts. --Steven We’d like to follow up on some themes raised in comments and email. This post looks at some observations on consistent feedback...

Where to Start? In this post, Chaitanya Sareen, a senior program manager on the Core User Experience team, sets the engineering context for the most frequently used user-interface elements in Windows – the Windows Taskbar. -- Steven It should come as no surprise that we receive lots of feedback about...