Manish Jethani's Blog » December 27th, 2005

According to ZDNet (via Nate Dunlap), Microsoft has hired UI guru Bill Buxton to work on product design. The article quotes the new Microsoft employee: "There are more designers at Microsoft on any single team as there were, not too long ago, in the entire company." I got a similar sense from Ray Ozzie's year-end recap post. Indeed, Office 12 contains a number of UI enhancements.

A number of innovations in both desktop and web user experience will become widely available in 2006.

Jakob Nielsen points at the demographic shift in internet usage over the years: we now have one billion people online, 36% of whom are in Asia, while 24% are in Europe and 23% in North America. Usability on Indian websites currently sucks (have you seen IRCTC?). I wonder if it's really ever going to change, considering that we have bad roads and a low standard of living too (as compared with our North American and European counterparts). i.e. is usability just a western world thing? I hope not. At least on the web, it shouldn't matter where you are.