March 24, 2009

Discarded Windows 7 UI Changes

techradar.com has an interesting article on UI changes that were considered for Windows 7, but didn’t make it into the final product.

The next prototype, in February 2007, was called the Bat Signal; when you moved your mouse over an icon in the taskbar, the full window would pop up on screen, highlighted by beams of light (a little like the Batman signal projected over Gotham City).

Bat Signal made it easy to find the right window but it caused other problems: «sometimes people toss the mouse down to the bottom of the screen when they’re typing because they don’t care where the mouse is and the Bat Signal pops up and that’s really intrusive in their flow.»

The article also spends some time going into why some of the features were dropped and how Microsoft uses data to make user interface decisions.

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If you liked this, you'll love my book. It's called Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web. In it, I cover the whole design process, from user research and sketching to usability tests and A/B testing. But I don't just explain techniques, I also talk about concepts like discoverability, when and how to use animations, what we can learn from video games, and much more.

You can find out more about it (and order it directly, printed or as a DRM-free ebook) on the Pragmatic Programmers website.