I have been using two pieces of software a lot lately: the zune client, and Win7. And today I found myself having two very different but still highly emotional reactions to both pieces of software. One was like an instant huge crush-on-first-sight, the other was like a slow-burning love affair that grows...

I was playing around with photos.live.com, added some photos… and clicked on the very nice large bolded “Upload” word twice before realizing that it was simply happy text, trying to guide me towards the upload button. Aghhh.

I was trying to paypal some money to my sister a minute ago, and I sat at the payment page wondering what I’d done wrong. A one minute task suddenly took five minutes as I scratched my head and clicked around to see what I’d missed. Here’s what I saw – can you figure out why I thought something was wrong...

I had a discussion with someone today who said something like "It's amazing how much of the process of software development isn't about software, it's just about communication and cross-group collaboration". My response was that "Actually that's not amazing to me - what's amazing to me is how many people...

The Seattle PI recently posted about recent changes in the numbers of unique visitors for the major email services such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail, QQ, etc. According to that data, hotmail lost some users. From the first comment: I can't say I'm surprised. I have email accounts with hotmail, yahoo and...

Raymond's recent blog on strange things that happen when you let people choose their own name (part 3) reminded me to check if my favorite old email address, kclemson5 AT exchange.microsoft.com was still working: yep, still there. As to the history of why I can be reached via that email address, it goes...

Dare's post about human nature touches on UAC in Vista: How do you design a dialog prompt to warn users about the potential risk of an action they are about to take if they are so intent on clicking OK and getting the job done that they forget that there was even a warning dialog afterwards? There are...

Dare has some good points on the debate around the scalability of twitter , relating it to some similar challenges Exchange has faced over the years. Another related issue is that in a single-instance model where you have a pointer to the content, this increases the number of read I/Os necessary to retrieve...

Try this. Open up word, make sure automatic spellchecking is on, and type in the names of some star wars characters:       I love it. They're in the dictionary... except, for some reason, for Leia. For the ones it does know, it even capitalizes the first letter for you if you type it lower...

I ordered it a few weeks ago, but they're behind on production, so it took until yesterday to ship (and supposedly is arriving today - hurrah for online up-to-the-minute package tracking!). At first, I was cynical and gave a lot of weight to the negative reviews of the Kindle... DRM, usability problems...

Is a nice read , covering a lot of interesting topics, some of the more meaningful points as I see them: The most valuable course he ever took was the one he dropped after one lecture. It was valuable because it convinced him he shouldn't go to grad school for CS. I had a similar experience myself...

You know how there's a warning tag on hairdryers that says not to use it while showering? I've always figured that the reason for those stupid warnings is that someone somewhere did use it while showering, and then the relatives of the deceased then sued the hairdryer company who agreed to put warnings...

Well, I'll tell you one way to not do it, which is to measure against user expectations without any sort of normalization or attempt to figure out what those expectations are. Take for example this survey from a hotel I stayed at this past weekend: As it turns out, I was expecting quality... and...

A coworker recently forwarded around this article from the New Yorker that talks about feature creep and consumer behavior: You might think, then, that companies could avoid feature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that’s where the trouble begins, because although...

So last year, LisaB rolled out the "myMicrosoft" initiative, and over the last year the various improvements have been rolled out (I don't even like coffee but man those machines make goo oooo od hot chocolate), including upgrades to many of our conference rooms. In these new conference rooms we got...

Saveen pointed me at these blogs about product development at Adobe. Pretty interesting reads, sounds a lot like things around here: How Adobe products are built How features are added to Illustrator The note at the end of the second one (" In reality, what it all comes down to is testing...

It's a tradition with most major product releases that there's a ship gift for the product team and a select group of key partners involved in designing, developing, testing and shipping the product. Jon Avner recently blogged about past ship gifts for Exchange on EHLO . For Exchange 2007 RTM, we...

A while ago, I mentioned that I am now the User Experience manager for Exchange, over the design & usability teams. One of the things my team does is run focus groups and usability studies, and we ran a focus group with eight IT pros/exchange admins in December to explore some of the areas we're...

We RTM'd last Friday. Awww yeah! As some of us were discussing on friday, "RTM day" is really a unique milestone in the life of many microsoft employees. I've been here 9 years and shipped 5 products that were all on 2-3 year cycles, so such a day just doesn't come around very often in the products...

As I hinted a few weeks ago , I'm changing jobs again. My last role change was over a year ago , that's almost a record for me. My new job is being the UX Manager for the next release of Exchange. I will be leading a team of designers and researchers on the UX (User Experience) team. The UX team played...

Today is the third anniversary of my first blog post . A whole lot has happened (and been blogged) in those years, including events such as: I changed jobs I started the Exchange blog (2 million hits a month later...) I helped release the custom quota service & its source I got Larry...

On the windows mobile team's blog . I hope that whoever is quoted in this eweek article saying that public folder access to OWA "must be like just 20 lines of code" reads it.

Vista is doing some really sweet stuff, visually... there's http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista which is just stunning, and now this ad on the front of microsoft.com which just kicks ass: How cool is that? The answer: very. I wrote an article for TechNet a few years ago called " Top Ten Tasks...

Sheesh, you might as well just not even display this dialog, or maybe put a picture of a boogie man or a 'hazardous waste' icon on it: It's amusing enough that the software in question has an error case due to an incorrect peripheral cable termination... but even more amusing to think that it is...

In Exchange, you can configure a distribution list so that only certain users have access to send mail to it (and if only that feature had been used in the Bedlam days ...). This is handy for DLs such as "Microsoft All Employees", where only a few people at the company should ever need to send to it...