I’ve been watching the development of Windows 7 pretty closely, mostly because Microsoft has been relatively forthcoming on their development of it via their Engineering Windows 7 blog. It was particularly interesting in the few months before the beta dropped, because they talked about certain aspects of Windows in the abstract — how critical the taskbar is to the OS, how many windows a typical user has open, etc. It was sort of a smattering of theory which you could only assume was being used by Microsoft to mold the next iteration of the OS — but you weren’t really sure.
Now that the beta has arrived, and talk of the RC is rampant, it is all too clear that they were definitely molding the next iteration — almost to a fault.
And so the question I’ve come to ask myself recently is: what is the best way to create a new feature? In Steven Sinofsky’s very strangely worded post recently, he puts it like this:
A quick story from years ago working on Office, many years ago before the development of telemetry and the internet deciding what features to put in a release of Office could really be best described as a battle. The battle took place in conference rooms where people would basically debate until one or more parties gave up from fatigue (mental or otherwise)—essentially adrenaline-based product development. […] Fast forward to the development of Windows 7 and we’re focused on using data to help inform decisions we make. This data takes many forms and helps in many ways. I know a lot of folks have questions about the data – is it representative, how does it help fix things people should be using but don’t, what about doing new things, and so on. Data is an important element of making decisions, but not a substitute for clear product goals, meaningful customer engagement, and working across the ecosystem to bring Windows 7 to customers.
I think the first part is very telling about why Microsoft has a reputation of creating illogical and painful UIs. Putting a bunch of software engineers — who aren’t exactly UI experts to begin with — in a box to fight over features & design is stupid.
But the second part begs the question, is using telemetry data to shape your features and UI any better?
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