Jenny Lam - Designing Experiences at Microsoft | WM_IN

Zeo
Channel 9 :)

Scoble and Charles.... This interview with Jenny is another great video and while I understand that this isn't directly part of the WM-IN video series...why can't C9 just tack on the questions about women in technology to every women that is interviewed by C9. Jenny is really smart and this interview was a lot of fun. I'm sure anyone who finds the WM_IN series from google would miss this great interview...

As a proposed solution could you tag all future videos with women as [tag]MS Woman[tag]?

Charles
Welcome Change

Most of the time our interviews are not well thought out in terms of what we are going to ask (even the WM_IN ones, though we certainly maintain a theme there...). These are just real-time conversations (thus our distaste for editing and preparing interviewees) with interesting people doing interesting things, really.

C

steamy

i find it interesting that she said its a reason why the taskbar and the sidebar are black, while we start to see a white sidebar...
I liked the white taskbar of the older versions better, and by the way i liked the rainbow multicolor explorer thing. i'm already tired of the blue-green. i hope they do a lot of fit and finish with the common controls and the glass itself, because right now the glass is horrible (it needs a lot more blur than it has at the moment)

SlackmasterK
I write my OWN blogging engines

RE: Widgets

Regarding the desktop 'toys' that were discussed, I hope these will either be programs the user can launch or, if an applet, hidden and/or disabled by default. Anything that interferes with productivity and efficiency is going to annoy alot of people. Features are good, be they big or small, but we don't all want some of them in our face all the time.

Zeo
Channel 9 :)

Jenny,
Having been to several PDCs and haven asked Tjreed about the UI concepts he showed at PDC 05 he told me that huge changes were underway for a revolutionary UI for VISTA(not the pearl which has been settled on), Vedbrat even mentioned a UI without a start bar much like the famed Neptune UI. When I talked with Pablo from the Avalon team he mentioned that Microsoft projects were well underway using Sparkle that will continue to excite Windows Users for the next decade.

Given that Vista's UI doesn't seem to jump out and excite me....much like what I was expecting from Tjreed, Vedbrat, and Pablo...plus what's posted over here: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=154429#154429,

Can you just talk about your feelings about the design future of Windows....are your ideas embraced or does it always feel like the cool ideas die in commiting because Microsoft has to make safe business decisions?

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

Well, that's interesting. Vista default icons won't be vectorized. Maybe MS should invent a new hinting system for icons, eh?

It's interesting that Robert brought up realism in games. To get linear "realism" in games, you have to spend exponentially. So, all this eye candy in Vista isn't for free. What can MS do to supply developers with quality graphics that fit in w/ Vista's new level of design?

No one wants to see 32x32x16 icons in Vista, do they?

BTW, what is this emo-ti-ons and feel-ings of which you spoke about in the video Robert?

dentaku

It's the little things that count and that's what I like about what Jenny and her co-workers do. They can't rely on FLASHy things, it's all about colours and a few pixels.
It's almost like going back to my old Amiga where you drew (or crafted) stuff in EA Deluxe Paint one pixel at a time. We where pixel pokers way back in the 80's.

Many builds ago people believed that Vista was going to have stuff swishing in and out everywhere but if you think about it you will realize that it's the first thing that most people will turn off because animation happens over time. Of course this means waiting and nobody wants to wait for their OS, they want things to just pop.

Just make sure that for us people who don't want huge icons, which Chris Pirillo calls it elephantitis and huge text that we can still run our interface that way.
I hate wasting space and I have 2 monitors.

dentaku

The first time I saw Gnome vector icons I was happy Smiley

I hope MS doesn't stop people who want to use completely vector icons from doing it if they want to. I know it's limiting creatively because I work in Illustrator all the time, but I know it must be possible to do what they did with Gnome in Vista.

smidley
Music Freak

Good video. Someone should tell her that we need higher resolution wallpapers for people like me with 24" widescreen monitors! I need more 1920x1200 content!