User Experience (UX)

Published: February 16, 2006
By Adnan Hashmi

Perhaps never before had the anticipated release of an operating system stirred as much interest as that of Windows Vista. PC Users are accustomed to seeing the GUI of the Windows get better with every release since Windows 95, without any major difference in the way the Windows operating system is used. Not this time around. From the minute you first start using Windows Vista, you will realize that this new operating system is more about organizing and managing information easily than just a great and responsive GUI. From "Start" to "Turn Off", users would be witness to a host of features that are many times more powerful and flexible than those offered in previous Microsoft Windows' releases. Ironically, it makes going back to using its predecessors, including Windows XP, all the more difficult.

Microsoft Windows Vista offers significantly enhanced User Experience or UX which, in addition to a far superior look and feel aesthetics, also encompasses a new means of managing and searching for information stored on the hard-drive. This article would discuss some of the new and exciting features offered by the Windows Vista UX.

Windows Aero Theme

Aero stands for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective, and Open. Although these 4 words embody the essence of the Vista User Interface, I would not be doing justice if I leave it to that. The Aero Glass theme enables the typical steel looking windows to have transluscent frames. Computers that meet the minimum hardware requirements for Vista would still see the basic UX that has all the benefits Vista has to offer. However, aesthetic beauty (and freedom too) comes at a cost. While windows Vista can scale to the available hardware capabilities, the sophistication and responsiveness of the Aero theme does require hardware support in terms of graphic cards and video memory.

Better Organization and Easily Searchable

Any information presented to the user in Vista is much better organized, which also allows it to be easily searchable, or lookable so to speak. Navigating to 'All Programs' in the Start menu traditionally meant that the user browse through several slow cascading menus opening up all over the desktop screen, which took a lot of time as the number of installed programs increased. Vista's streamlined and faster Start menu lets you view all the menu items in one place as they all appear as a list within the same space on the desktop. The Quick Search box provided in the Start menu as well as in other windows, such as Control Panel and Windows Explorer, lets users search for a particular item depending on the context. This essentially means the ability to search for a text or phrase within the Start menu, or Control Panel, or the particular directory currently being viewed in the Windows Explorer. Each search, irrespective of the window is appears in, also provides the flexibility to search the computer or Internet for the term. The search experience is further elevated by the speed at which results appear, the results' list being populated as the user types in the search textbox.

Flexible and Powerful Explorers

Searching for a file would mostly be a nightmare if you forgot the name of the file or the directory you had saved it to in previous versions of Windows, and search results were listed in a separate window. Windows Explorer was previously used to browse the contents of a directory, providing little or no information about the content within the file, and the only means to group similar files was to put them in the same folder. The Windows Explorer in Vista provides users much more flexibility in terms of attaching more information or meta-data such as authors, keywords, and rating to files and folders, and grouping files in different folders together in vitual directories. This coupled with the Quick Search feature (discussed in previous section) allows files on a hard-drive to be far easier to search, not just by their names, but also the other meta-data attached to them.

Meta-data can be easily attached to files through the Preview pane at the bottom. The meta-data parameters also vary for various file types, such as album title, genre, and track number for a music file. Also, depending on the type of file selected in Windows Explorer, the Command Bar on the top re-adjusts and populates itself with context-sensitive task items. The provides a consistent way for working with files in Windows Vista, giving users more control in organizing and maintaining documents, images, and videos. Last, but not the least, icons can be scaled up or down by means of a slider control, which gives a great deal of size-adjustment facility according to user preferences.

Taskbar Thumbnails

You don't necessarily have to be a power user to open 10, 15, or even 25 windows at a time. Most users open upto that many windows while using the Internet, comprising Internet Explorer instances, and chat windows. In such cases, quickly finding the right window can also be extremely difficult since the items in the taskbar only display the Windows' title bar texts, and do not provide a glimpse of whats happening in those windows. In Windows Vista, each taskbar item comes alive when you rest the mouse pointer over them by displaying a live thumbnail of the activity taking place in that particular window. This not only applies to simple IE windows or once containing only static text or images, but also on the running videos that may be running in a a window instance. The thumbnail, unlike a simple tool-tip text, is not a stationary snapshot of the window, but is instead a live moving preview, giving users an exact idea of the processing taking place.

Windows Flip 3D

Switching from one window to another involves either clicking the appropriate item in the taskbar or pressing Alt+Tab on the keyboard. However, instead of just being provided a generic icon or the file name, the user would instead see a live preview of the windows (as described in the previous section), which makes it much easier to select the specific window the user wants to work with, as opposed to flipping through different windows of the same type to find a specific one. But thats not the end of it. Flip 3D is a completely new feature introduced for the first time ever in an operating system. Flip 3D is the ability to locate a window by flipping, using the wheel/scroller on the mouse, through a stack of open windows in 3D. This is a step ahead of the live thumbnail preview since it provides a view of the window in full-size and not a much smaller thumbnail.

Speech Recognition

Although not always touted as a UX feature, the Speech capability in Windows Vista is not an enhancement; its a unique whole new feature for controlling the desktop using voice commands and, to me, is the most exciting feature in Windows Vista. The fully integrated recognition capability improves over time as it adapts to the user's dialect and style of talking. Additionally, users are guided through a list of choice in case the user utterance is not recognized by the system. New software built utilizing Windows Vista Speech capabilities will also add a much more human sounding text-to-speech voice known as Microsoft Anna, which is far improved from the previous robot sounding Microsoft Sam and Mary voices in Windows XP.

The writer is a Windows SDK MVP, and an INETA (International .NET Association) Pakistan speaker. Read his blog at http://coredotnet.blogspot.com. He can be reached at adnan.hashmi@gmail.com