>I've heard you say this before. MS probably spends more time and money on Ux than any other company. Their research showed ease of use improvements over older versions.
>
>>The UI has been simplified for them (MS); not for the users. Thank you.

Hi Craig

Lots of companies spend lots of money, but few get it right. Too many programmers say they have something users love, yet they have never once sat with the users and tried to dig out what they really needed. I've seen product development focus groups. The users are not interviewed so much as they are interrogated - forced into accepting the product design as shown. It's a very few interviewers that can solicit the users' desires.

Everything from voidtools - can do nothing but search filenames really quickly. That's it. No inside files, no date ranges. So while many things might be "no brainer" - which is just another way to say stupid - I know from actually interviewing rather than interrogating users - what they can handle and grow to love because they are empowered, rather than hamstrung in the long run as the MS search still does.

Google's single textbox search - another "no-brainer" - only works because Google has a design which may be seen as a single column table. That is not the appropriate thing for a multi-column search. Google themselves prove the single textbox search is inadequate in GMail by incredibly and not at all obviously - has the users typing a query string...

From: SoAndSo Is:Unread Has:Attachments.

They have a dialog to assist with building this query but all such dialogs eventually become like the cockpit of a jumbo-jet - they make your eyes go crossed.

There has to be a way to go from simple to advanced invisibly and smoothly.