I spent the week at the ACM CHI conference in Montreal . I love attending CHI and seeing all the great stuff happening in research, academia, and product development. This year I presented an Experience report with my close compriate Donna Wallace. We...

If you want to check out our ppt deck, or the demo code, check out Brad's blog. Cheers, Rick

This was the title of the talk that I did with Brad Abrams yesterday at Mix06. This was one of the most fun days I have had at a conference. I met a lot of really neat people with different perspectives and ideas. Plus, there were several parties with...

Hi all. This week I am attending the Mix06 conference. More to the point, I have not been working in the developer division for the past eight months or so. Instead, I am working at my new(er) job as group Ux managmer for Windows Live Local . I'm starting...

I just ran a usability study with 9 participants where we asked them to build two forms, one a WinForm and one a Web Form, that had a drop down list that drove the contents of a grid below it. The participants had to figure out how to fill the drop down...

Today I'm sitting in an MVP event and taking notes. I sent my notes to the PM team and they remarked on how many more notes I captured then anyone else who was taking notes. The secret? When users are talking, write down everything they say. Just transcribe...

Hi all, Keep the feedback on the debugger usability problems coming. I've seen a few that have Whidbey solutions, and a few that don't. I'll capture all this feedback and make sure we use it. Cheers, Rick

I've gotten some good and interesting feedback on the post about doing usability for Generics. The question on some people's minds is, “Did the language design team really listen to us when they designed how we will use Generics in C#, or were they...

Yesterday I posted about how we think the typical C# user users the debugger. This posting talks about some of the usability problems that we observed, and also discusses how some of the new Whideby debugger features address those problems. Users Work...

Over the past couple of years the debugger team invested heavily in understanding how our different user groups debug, and use the debugger. It turns out that debugging and using the debugger is not the same thing because a significant number of our users...

Hi. Thanks for all the feedback on my last Blog entry. The C# team did a lot of work trying to understand our users, and it’s great to see where you all do and don’t agree with our conclusions. I thought it might be interesting for you all...

The Typical C# User? My name is Rick Spencer, and I am a Usability Specialist on Visual Studio. Over the past couple of years a large portion of my job has been supporting the Visual C# team, which has been one of the most rewarding experiences of...