Windows 7 Blog Shares Windows Feedback Data
By Jin Nan Goto
Over the past month there has been a very interesting series of post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog written by Microsoft employees who are active in the development of the upcoming Windows 7. Starting September 10 the Engineering Windows 7 blog team started writing posts based on data they had collected through the Windows Feedback Program. While the posts are not unveiling exciting new features, they give a lot of insight into the decisions and considerations being made when designing Windows 7.
The Windows Feedback Program collected data from volunteer users of Windows XP and Windows Vista in order to collect raw data on how these volunteers use their Windows computers. The data was then aggregated and used to improve the features on Windows.
These posts, written by various members of the Windows 7 team, share a lot of the conclusions from the data gathered (complete with graphs and charts). Some of the data is very interesting. One thing they found was that, as display resolution on monitors increased, many users were adjusting the screen resolution down so that text and other elements on the screen would be larger.
“We have found that a large percentage of our program participants lower their display resolution from the highest usable for their display. Looking at the data coming from the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program to compare to, and noticed a similar trend: over 50% of customers with 1600×1200 screen resolution displays are adjusting their resolution down to 1024×768, likely because they find it uncomfortable to read the tiny text on high resolution displays. The negative effect of this resolution change is the loss of fidelity to the point where reading text in editors and web browsers is difficult.”
In this case the data showed the Windows 7 team that they needed to spend time to find a way to accommodate those users who lower their resolution for visibility reasons, while at the same time allow them to make full use of their high resolution monitors.
These posts are quite interesting. Here is a list of all the ones released to date (although it seems like there are more coming).
- Engineering Windows 7 blog
- The Windows Feedback Program
- Follow-up on High DPI resolution
- More Follow up to discussion about High DPI
- User Interface: Starting, Launching, and Switching
- Follow-up: Starting, Launching, and Switching
- User Interface: Managing Windows windows
