Searching for Yoldash

Forrest shows off

When Peter P. joined the Windows 7 team as a user experience designer, he was given an opportunity most designers can only dream about. There are more than 1 billion PCs in use today, over 90% of them running Windows. If you are looking to change the way people interact with the products in their lives, this is heady stuff.

Just don’t let it go to your head.

There are so many places in Windows 7 for a UX designer to make an impact, from the touchscreen experience to the new ribbons in Paint. But as Peter explained to me at a recent tweetup, users have made one thing very clear: Don’t mess with Notepad.

Turns out, people value the lowly text editing program not for its features, but for its lack of features. The top use of Notepad, especially among developers, is to strip out formatting. The last thing a Notepad user wants to see  is change in the name of improvement.

This is not simply a case of leaving well enough alone. When we watch how people really use products before determining the next feature set and put aside preconceived notions of how a product is supposed to be used, we develop better products. The same principle that has preserved the simplicity of Notepad for nearly 25 years led to significant enhancements to Excel early on when it was discovered that people used their number crunching software to organize text. This is why the very word processing features that have been kept out of Notepad all these years have been added, release after release, to Excel. 

If we look around us with an eye to how products are “misused” today, we can get a sense of where things are going. My son Nick doesn’t have an iPod, so he downloads music onto his digital camera. Considering the storage capacity of his camera, and the mediocre quality of the camera on my iPhone, I think he may be onto something.

Two weeks ago, our verrückten German friends took care of the chickens while we were away in Montana for Thanksgiving. Before long we got a link to a Facebook page with a picture of Forrest riding a skateboard. I’m pretty sure a pair of 8-year-old girls put Forrest up to it, but it is pretty interesting.  I’m not saying that chickens are the next big thing in children’s entertainment, or that sports are the next big thing in chicken entertainment. But just in case, I’m keeping a lookout for skateboarding chickens.