PUBLIC MARKS with tags usability & microsoft

Be prepared to turn off Vista's new UAC to fix problems when Vista is released. Touted as one of the best security features's of Vista, it will leave a lot of users thinking that it causes more problems than it solves.

Games User Research at Microsoft Game Studios

A lot of us are fans of tabbed browsing. It's one of the most useful changes in window and document management since the Task Bar on Windows. People who like to work with multiple documents like quick, convenient access to them. It's part of the reason Microsoft moved Office to a SDI model. That said, Firefox is a browser for everybody, and a lot of people don't use a lot of windows. In one of the PDC videos released a month or so back, a Microsoft representative said that they had done studies that showed that users generally had no more than 5 windows open at a time. This surprised them because they, like most of us, were used to browsing with tens of windows. The challenges that face us building the Firefox UI is how to make Tabbed Browsing useful to those who want it, discoverable to those whose lives would be made easier by it, and transparent to those who don't need it.

Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future.