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• API Usability
• Usability

• Help us learn about how you work

  We want to make better products. One way of doing that would be to design a product that we would like to use and then hope that others outside of Microsoft would also like to use it. Sometimes that approach works, other times it doesn't. Not everybody Read More... Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 3:24 PM by stevencl | 3 Comments

• Waterfall conference

  This conference looks interesting... :-) In particular, this workshop looks like it might have some good content. (Thanks to Frank Wales for posting this to the PPIG discussion list) Read More... Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 3:13 PM by stevencl | 1 Comments

• Using CDs to design a new programming language

  I came across an interesting Master's thesis the other day. Chad Austin developed a functional shading language and used the cognitive dimensions framework to guide and evaluate the design of the language. I'd be really interested in hearing more about Read More... Posted Friday, December 02, 2005 10:05 AM by stevencl | 0 Comments

• Studying design patterns

  The Channel 9 video prompted some interesting questions. One question asked about common patterns and design guidelines. Seemed like a good opportunity to mention that we're currently lucky enough to have Jeff Stylos from Carnegie Mellon University working Read More... Posted Wednesday, November 30, 2005 5:11 PM by stevencl | 1 Comments

• Usability study video

  In October, James Conard made a video of one of the usability sessions we ran on the Windows Workflow API. The video is now up on Channel 9 . Somebody asked if the results of studies like these are generalised beyond the specific APIs being tested. The Read More... Posted Wednesday, November 30, 2005 4:46 PM by stevencl | 1 Comments

• Maintaining state in an Indigo service

  I've been working on usability studies for Indigo for the last 12 months now and have been learning a lot. I just learned another very valuable lesson this week, thanks to Steve Swartz. During a study I was running last week, participants worked with Read More... Posted Friday, August 26, 2005 9:39 AM by stevencl | 4 Comments

• HOWTO: Analyze the data collected in a usability study

  I just realised that I never got around to finishing off a series of posts on how to design and run an API usability study. After designing and running the study, the fun part begins - making sense of all the data that you have collected. The first thing Read More... Posted Monday, July 11, 2005 10:39 AM by stevencl | 1 Comments

• PPIG 2005 and blogging

  I attended the Psychology of Programming Interest Group workshop at the end of June in Brighton. It was a really interesting workshop, finished off nicely by a keynote from Marc Eisenstadt. He encouraged all attendees at the workshop to consider starting Read More... Posted Monday, July 11, 2005 10:24 AM by stevencl | 2 Comments

• Factory design pattern and usability

  Luke Church watched the API usability presentation and contacted me with a question about a point I made regarding the factory design pattern and usability. One thing that I probably didn’t make clear in the presentation is that the difficulties with Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005 2:29 PM by stevencl | 6 Comments

• We're hiring

  We have several open positions in the Visual Studio user experience team. One of those positions is for somebody to work with me on the API usability efforts. We've got lots of exciting ideas about research projects that we'd like to work on to provide Read More... Posted Wednesday, June 08, 2005 6:13 PM by stevencl | 0 Comments

• API usability evaluation

  Christopher Oezbek is keeping notes about an API usability evaluation he is doing using the cognitive dimensions. Read More... Posted Thursday, May 05, 2005 3:53 PM by stevencl | 0 Comments Filed under: API Usability

• HOWTO: Run an API usability study

  With the task list in place and participants recruited, it's time to run the study. My experience has been that running an API usability study is really no different from running any other type of study. Here's a description of what I do. The day before Read More... Posted Thursday, May 05, 2005 11:31 AM by stevencl | 4 Comments Filed under: Usability, API Usability

• HOWTO: Design a task list for an API usability study

  In my previous post I talked about setting up an API usability study. In this post, I'll talk about how I design the tasks that participants work on in a study. After getting some level of familiarity with the API, I tend to start designing a task list Read More... Posted Tuesday, April 19, 2005 4:33 PM by stevencl | 3 Comments

• HOWTO: Design and run an API usability study

  A few people have asked me about how I design and run API usability studies. I'm running an Indigo study this week so I thought I would describe the steps that went into setting this study up. The study is a follow up to the Indigo study we ran in October Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 29, 2005 12:26 PM by stevencl | 6 Comments Filed under: API Usability

• API usability talk available on MSDN from tomorrow

  The API usability portion of the Designing .NET Class Libraries class will be available from tomorrow. Apologies in advance if my Scottish accent makes it difficult to understand me! Let me know if there is anything that I need to translate... Read More... Posted Thursday, February 17, 2005 4:30 PM by stevencl | 9 Comments Filed under: API Usability