David Pogue looks at Vista. A few key points.
Windows Vista is beautiful. Microsoft has never taken elegance so seriously before.
If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh, well, you’re right. You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”
The visual and feature upgrades are nice, but for Microsoft, security was an even more important goal.
As a result, Vista has something of a multiple-personality disorder. Links for common tasks sometimes appear at the left side of a window, sometimes the right and sometimes across the top. In wizards (step-by-step “interview” screens), the Back button is sometimes at the lower-left corner of the dialog box, sometimes at the upper-left. Microsoft has hidden the traditional menu bar in some programs (you can summon it by tapping the Alt key), but not in others.
Pretty much precisely what NewMexiKen has noticed in my limited use of Vista (mostly on a Mac).
Makes sense; MS has less than NO clue when it comes to usability/UX. I designed the layouts (and built templates) for a couple of their sites in 2003/2004, and that was by far the biggest frustration in working with them. We’d send concepts for approval, revisions would come back, and I’d go through them with my jaw scraping the floor. “Guys, if I remove that button, how will the user return to the tutorial???” Every day, explaining UX to them as if they were first-graders or … um … programmers. 😐
Here’s what I wrote two months ago: