Blog of Henry Jia (贾宏宇)

Feelings about Longhorn
I took a look at Longhorn today.

Besides the technologies (like the new .net framework) under it, Longhorn has a upgraded usability experience from XP. It shows a user centric solution. Here are some areas I noticed related to usability.

First, the information is organized in different groups for the user easy to access the information needed, especially for the large amount of information.

Second, the space is organized more efficiently. More and more windows can be hidden or shown or change their sizes according to the user's operation.

Third, easy for communication. The functions for contacts are greatly improved. You can easily find the needed people and communicate with them in your proposed way.

Fourth, the 'search' function is greatly improved. You can now search the files, emails and other information on the net in just a simple way.

Longhorn gives a good example to us developers to think about the usability. Besides the good/cool technologies, we also need good usability design to make a successful product. Avalon (together with WinFS, Indigo) is cool, the incentives to do so are cooler.