Microsoft Hires GUI 'Design Guru'

overpayd writes "ZDnet is reporting that Microsoft has hired 'user interface guru' Bill Buxton to work as a senior researcher. Will this move help focus the design teams for Vista, Office, etc? From the article: 'My sense is that Microsoft is in transition from an engineering-led company to as much a design-led company ... There are more designers at Microsoft on any single team as there were, not too long ago, in the entire company. It's a wonderful change.'"

Comments

bad slashdot!

[Coneasfast]

title: Microsoft Hires GUI 'Design Guru'

slashdot misleads again.
he is not a GUI design guru, he is a human-machine interaction guru.
this article has no direct relation to GUIs.

i can handle the dupes, but it's very bad practice to post misleading information
(hint to Zonk: READ the article before posting).

Re:bad slashdot!

[covertbadger]

No, it was not because of HCI work. No more than MII work (musical instrument interaction). Musicians have flexible equipment that is designed by musicians not MIIs. They have some of the most ergonomic devices, and I have never studied those in any ergonomics class. Musicians have to be able to play their equipment quickly and easily. A few milliseconds of stutter screws up the whole thing. Failure is not an option.

You've wandered away from the point. The use of the XCV keys for cut/copy/paste is an example of HCI. It's a way that a human interacts with the computer, and has become the standard because it's a fast and convenient way to access the functionality, with some cursory mnemonics (C for copy, X looks a bit like scissors) thrown in too. It might not have been invented by someone in a nice suit with a design doctorate, but it's still HCI, and it's a complete fallacy to claim that the XCV layout somehow irritates HCI experts because of some perceived logic vs aesthetics issue. In the same way, all those punchy little easy-to-type unix commands like cp, rm, mv, cd etc are examples of HCI. Here's a little experiment - create aliases for those commands along the lines of copy-file, copy-files-recursively, remove-file, remove-files-recursively etc etc and see how long it takes to drive you mad. That's why HCI is important.

You compared HCI to interior design and then dismissed it as "something that looks nice, but its fluff beyond that", and that is the point I disagree with (it's also incredibly blinkered to dismiss the entire field of interior design as 'fluff', but I won't go into that).

If HCI were so important, why do some programs place so many "drop down" items that they fill the screen, go forward and backward across the edges of the screen? I'm thinking of a common interface item that is used by millions of people every day that is labeled "Start". The same place you go to turn the computer off. Stop, and logout.

Way to dismiss the entire field just because Microsoft have made a few howlers. Hey, Matrix Revolutions had some shitty effects, let's make blanket claims that all movies look like crap.

Then a familiar silly sound, probably designed by another HCI guy, that goes something like duh de de duh, annoys everyone else in the otherwise quiet area.

You know as well as I do that a shutdown jingle has absolutely nothing to do with HCI. You seem to be labouring under the impression that HCI is solely concerned with making things look nice, at the expense of usability. In fact it's the opposite - it's about making computers easy to use, and aesthetics only enters the picture where it directly improves the usability of the system. It may be the case that most software is a pain to use, but that's because of *bad* HCI, not because of HCI itself.

More informative articles about Bill Buxton

[eltoyoboyo]

TFA is remarkably uninformative. Do not bother with it, if it becomes slashdotted.

This article (PC or people--who's the boss?) has an interview with him today.

Bill Addresses his Microsoft transition on his home page: http://www.billbuxton.com/

He is cited in the Wikipedia article about Human-computer interaction.

Re:Why now?

[WordODD]

No, they aren't in public beta, but usually by the time they reach that stage all the major design decisions have been long since made. The current CTP of Vista released in early December is probably the 4th or 5th offical release that has more or less had the same GUI so I get the feeling that he won't have much of an impact on that. Office 12 is considered to be pre-beta so its interface may still be up for discussion, however one of the major changes in this version is how menus and toolbars are grouped and arranged, and I doubt he had any input on that. If you haven't seen the release check out some screen shots, it is a radical departure from every previous version.

Re:Very Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey or how about this...just use Apple?