5 ms·

As a member of the VS team (but not one who is in charge of making these decisions) I can't comment in any official capacity. I can say I am not a fan of the AL

As a member of the VS team (but not one who is in charge of making these decisions) I can't comment in any official capacity. I can say I am not a fan of the ALL CAPS menus, but, strangely enough, my personal opinion doesn't drive decisions in a multi-million dollar product unit :). I will however just leave this here: http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-studio-2012-all.html http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-s.... This is of course not officially supported and my being a VS team member does not imply a contract for this registry key to exist for all time or on any specific SKU.

tseabrooks 14y ago
Wow, that all caps menu is ugly. I hadn't seen that before. As the only person I can talk to working on VS team.. I hold you personally responsible. "Fix It!"
- ryanmolden 14y ago
  Feedback was given in that general direction before the public release. I guess it goes to show that while our feedback was viewed as...less than representative, they (UX)got the general idea when the public feedback was...mostly identical :) NOTE: The previous rambling statement was in regards to general UX treatment in the Beta/RC timeframes, not on the ALL CAPS menus in particular, but feedback has definetly been given (by myself and others, internal and external) on that topic. They certainly are aware of the feedback.
  - barrkel 14y ago
    I'm very surprised to learn that all caps menus were intentional. I thought it was for some other reason - maybe something along the lines of what we at Borland called "egging", i.e. using odd international characters to test for internationalization errors; in other words, maybe it was testing for UI spacing or something.
pbz 14y ago
What I find strange (not sure how true) is what I hear from random MS employees that customer feedback is more valuable, or weighs more, than the feedback from MS employees. To me, this shows a low level of trust from management in their own employees' ability to gauge the market. Another thing I can't wrap my mind around is how can it be possible to have one thousand of your customers yelling at you they don't like something -- that can be easily changed -- and have the management respond with "Oh well, we're still going to do what we want. What ya gonna do about it?!"
- ryanmolden 14y ago
  >What I find strange (not sure how true) is what I hear from random MS employees that customer feedback is more valuable, or weighs more, than the feedback from MS employees. In my experience it is the classic (and often correct) "You aren't the target audience". For instance, I could write code on the Excel team (I don't). I am not a heavy Excel user, so my feelings on how Excel should be set up or operate likely do not represent the actual users of Excel and thus my feedback should be weighted lower than real (paying) customer feedback. Talk is cheap, people exchanging money for a product should be listened to above whiny devs (the 'whiny dev' label is intended to apply only to me and my feedback. External customers giving feedback are not whiny devs, at least not in my eyes :)). Visual Studio is somewhat of an exception to this general rule because us oddball developer types (who don't represent the mainstream customer of most any product) actually do represent (mostly) the mainstream customer of our product. >Another thing I can't wrap my mind around is how can it be possible to have one thousand of your customers yelling at you they don't like something -- that can be easily changed -- and have the management respond with "Oh well, we're still going to do what we want. What ya gonna do about it?!" thousands << millions. The user base of Visual Studio is large, I don't know exact install numbers (I am sure I could find out, I just have never been curious enough to pester someone in marketing or the PM org) but I know it is definitely in the millions. It isn't clearly incorrect to argue that 1000 people playing with the beta may be a different group and have different beliefs than the millions of eventual users. I am not saying it is true or not, I haven't done the market research, but it isn't implausible.
  - 14y ago

tseabrooks 14y ago

Wow, that all caps menu is ugly. I hadn't seen that before. As the only person I can talk to working on VS team.. I hold you personally responsible. "Fix It!"

ryanmolden 14y ago
Feedback was given in that general direction before the public release. I guess it goes to show that while our feedback was viewed as...less than representative, they (UX)got the general idea when the public feedback was...mostly identical :) NOTE: The previous rambling statement was in regards to general UX treatment in the Beta/RC timeframes, not on the ALL CAPS menus in particular, but feedback has definetly been given (by myself and others, internal and external) on that topic. They certainly are aware of the feedback.
- barrkel 14y ago
  I'm very surprised to learn that all caps menus were intentional. I thought it was for some other reason - maybe something along the lines of what we at Borland called "egging", i.e. using odd international characters to test for internationalization errors; in other words, maybe it was testing for UI spacing or something.

pbz 14y ago

What I find strange (not sure how true) is what I hear from random MS employees that customer feedback is more valuable, or weighs more, than the feedback from MS employees. To me, this shows a low level of trust from management in their own employees' ability to gauge the market. Another thing I can't wrap my mind around is how can it be possible to have one thousand of your customers yelling at you they don't like something -- that can be easily changed -- and have the management respond with "Oh well, we're still going to do what we want. What ya gonna do about it?!"

ryanmolden 14y ago
>What I find strange (not sure how true) is what I hear from random MS employees that customer feedback is more valuable, or weighs more, than the feedback from MS employees. In my experience it is the classic (and often correct) "You aren't the target audience". For instance, I could write code on the Excel team (I don't). I am not a heavy Excel user, so my feelings on how Excel should be set up or operate likely do not represent the actual users of Excel and thus my feedback should be weighted lower than real (paying) customer feedback. Talk is cheap, people exchanging money for a product should be listened to above whiny devs (the 'whiny dev' label is intended to apply only to me and my feedback. External customers giving feedback are not whiny devs, at least not in my eyes :)). Visual Studio is somewhat of an exception to this general rule because us oddball developer types (who don't represent the mainstream customer of most any product) actually do represent (mostly) the mainstream customer of our product. >Another thing I can't wrap my mind around is how can it be possible to have one thousand of your customers yelling at you they don't like something -- that can be easily changed -- and have the management respond with "Oh well, we're still going to do what we want. What ya gonna do about it?!" thousands << millions. The user base of Visual Studio is large, I don't know exact install numbers (I am sure I could find out, I just have never been curious enough to pester someone in marketing or the PM org) but I know it is definitely in the millions. It isn't clearly incorrect to argue that 1000 people playing with the beta may be a different group and have different beliefs than the millions of eventual users. I am not saying it is true or not, I haven't done the market research, but it isn't implausible.
- 14y ago