Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines
The new family of Microsoft products - Windows Vista, Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008, IIS7, IE8 etc have very rich user interface and enhanced user experience. With the advent of rich development platforms like WPF, user experience & usability gets more importance.
There is significant user experience improvement in Windows Vista, with new features and enhancements for both end users & developers, and as we get ready to release the next operating system, establishing high quality and consistency for all Windows applications is very important.
There are many new UI improvements in Vista like, Task Dialogs
Aero Wizards
& Control Panels just to list a few
If you carefully observe all the above dialogs, there is a standard that we follow – be it the fonts or the spacing or the alignment of child controls and there are guidelines for designing a Vista based application. If you are a Windows app developer, to maintain UI consistency with Vista and upcoming OS, I suggest you read Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines
The UX guide is available for download too. It’s a 700+ page document but I think a must read / glance for all Windows app developers.
Some of the important – must read sections I think are Top Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience & Top Guidelines Violations
There could be some minor changes / additions to the guidelines with the release of Windows 7, but the core & crux would be the same.
