From the API usability labs

I went down to the usability labs with Steven Clarke for while yesterday to watch as we tested a recent build of Indigo, Avalon and .NET Framework working together… Over the course of a week or so we are bringing in 10-15 C# and VB developers for 2 two hour sessions of application building. All the while we are taping the experience to show and learn from later and bringing in a parade of folks from the product team to watch from one side of a two way mirror. In case you are interested the app involves calling an indigo based webservice that returns album information (tile, tracks information, etc) and databinding its results to an Avalon form written in Xaml and C#\VB.

Overall the feedback has been good, but there are certainly some areas for us to learn from. At the end of one of the sessions the participant told Steven something like: “I feel like such a dope for it taking so long to get just this far on the app”… Steven’s response was classic and it sums up in general how we feel about the platform in general: “Oh, no, we want to make a platform that is easy to use so we are the dope for making this task too complicated.”

So, if you think we have been a dope anywhere, let us know and give us a chance to fix it.

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 30, 2004
  Good to see that you guys at MS take usability seriously enough to have a dedicated usability lab.
  
  I've never actually seen one with a two-way mirror, that sounds great. I rely on video evidence, which also works well.
• Anonymous
  November 30, 2004
  Did you read this from Wes Moise?
  http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2004/11/api_usability.html