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Usability at the PDC

Graeme Mott, a colleague of mine in the Visual Studio Usability group will be at the PDC next week. He's planning a few interesting activities:

  • He'll be walking around the conference with a video camera giving attendees thirty seconds of 'air-time' to provide their feedback to the Visual Studio product team.
  • He'll also be running usability studies on various features of the product, including some of the new features around data access etc.

Graeme will be hanging around the Microsoft booth wearing a 'Usability' t-shirt and he'd love for you to introduce yourself to him and let him know what you think.

I wanted to make sure that you knew about this ahead of time so that you can take some time to think about the feedback you'd like to give Graeme and the rest of the Visual Studio team.

Also, feel free to make fun of his t-shirt...

Published Friday, October 24, 2003 5:32 PM by stevencl
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# RE: Usability at the PDC

Perhaps you could pass this on to Graeme. Why doesn't the VS.NET IDE team leverage the usability the Office team must have done on the Task Pane idea that has become quite prevalent in the Office apps? I have seen prototypes of removing the start page and place the recent projects list on the VS.NET IDE workspace. I hate the idea because the workspace quickly gets covered up. I think IDE team should consider using the Task Pane and have it start up docked left and defaulted to the "Gettting Started" set of tasks. This view typically lists the most recent projects as well as allows you to open/create a new project. The cool thing is that there could be other views on this task pane besides Getting Started. Help contents, search, index, search results could all go on this task pane (as different views that is). You could even do wizard things as in the new project wizard could be hosted inside this task pane. Just take a look at the Mail Merge view on the Word 2003 task pane. It is basically a wizard.
Tuesday, November 04, 2003 1:34 PM by Keith Hill

# RE: Usability at the PDC

Thanks Keith, I'll pass your comments on to the team.
Wednesday, November 05, 2003 12:35 AM by Steven Clarke
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