Bill Gates on Usability at Microsoft and Why It's Important to Fix the Little Things

Here's a link to a great blog entry on Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog. It's entitled "Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant."

Gates was trying to download Microsoft Movie Maker, which is a nice little piece of software that most people probably do not know exists. He runs into about 30 different usability problems, most of which would have caused a normal person to give up on the download.

I'm posting it here because it's a great illustration of what happens when you don't pay attention to the little things. I've been in a lot of meetings advocating for some small usability fix, only to have others decide that it's not worth fixing, not a big enough problem.

Here's an example. One of my clients has a trading screen, which we redesigned. The design included "buying power" at the top, because to trade, you really need to know how much money you have to buy a stock. Well, the developer moved buying power to the bottom of the screen at the last minute, because it was easier to calculate after the user included all of their trade info. But it's really of no use at the bottom. I requested that it be moved back to to the top, but my request seemed trivial, moving just one field, when everything else is fine, so it didn't happen. Now it's been like that for a month. Just a little problem, but if it's not fixed, it will be added in with all the other little problems, and you end up with something like what Bill Gates describes.