Tjeerd talks Vista UX at Designertopia

Dear Tjeerd stalking diary, today I found pictures of Tjeerd’s presentation slides from Microsoft’s Designertopia event in London from earlier this month. Special thanks to Darren Straight, a Microsoft Student Partner who attended the event and uploaded his photos.

This is possibly the 4th presentation I’ve seen Tjeerd give under the name of “Windows Vista User Experience Design”, but this presentation in particular contained a few things of interest.


One slide to make. One slide to rule them all.


Mmmmm. Legacy icons-licious.


What happened between 2003 and 2004 can only be described with a broken arrow.


Apparently they had this (pretty slick) portal to test and assess various aspects of the UX experience. And not so slick machines for users to test on.


It looks like they have a few published articles on user-experience feedback under the title of the “Customer Love Project”. Looks really cool with slick illustrations and charts, love to get my hands on them.


People sent feedback about the UX through the “Send a smile” program which allowed you to comment on what you liked or don’t like along with a screenshot of desktop.


Visual language, or something like that.


A desktop user-interface concept during design exploration.


Defining AERO just one more time.

Quite an interesting presentation for sure, but we’re never going to see who slides in full-fidelity without a weird camera angle. Hopefully, the next presentation Tjeerd gives will be under the title of “Windows 7 User Experience Design”, and somehow the Powerpoint will be available for download. I am dream, can’t I?

4 insightful thoughts

  1. I think you mean “I can dream” and yes I would love to get my hands on that presentation as well.

  2. Thanks for this, Long.

    It is really interesting how different the design goals between the Windows and Office UX teams were. If you have read Jensen Harris’ blog, you know that the Office team started by using paper UI prototypes. The Windows team seems to use stock photos with strange phrases (“beauty is eyecatching”) and perfect drawed concepts to start with.

    Windows Vista is really beautyful on some areas but it is so inconsistant in many ways. Especially the usability between Vista and Office is extremly different. Or why can’t we close those new menus in Explorer by clicking on the same button for the second time? In Office 2007 it is even possible to double click on a radio button to choose that option and close the dialog with only one action! That is beauty in UX design for me ;P

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