Last week I had a really cool opportunity.  The organizers of VSLive San Francisco invited IdentityMine to present their third day keynote.  We said yes, of course, and I ended up being the lucky guy on stage. 

I’ve had a number of opportunities to talk to people about WPF, but usually at a technical level in the context of a training or presenting a singular aspect of the platform.  The keynote was cool because it gave me a chance to step back a little and talk about WPF at a higher level and share some thoughts about the “why” of WPF instead of the “how.”

This had some pretty good convergence with some thinking that we’ve been doing at IdentityMine about how to communicate our thoughts about WPF and the software we build with it.  That resulted in our “Love Your Software” campaign (the manifestation of which is loveyoursoftware.com).  The convergence of the two resulted in the title of the keynote which was “Love Your Software: Real World Development Using WPF.”

We’ve been amazed by how many people have responded to the love your software concept.  In the past, we’ve talked about software that “wows” you, etc. but this never really captured the whole picture and it feels a little empty.  The best experiences are more than the exciting first impression.   Great software is about working, looking and feeling great over the long term.  While it’s true that there is an emotional component to great products of any kind, “wow” in the beginning is not going to be enough.  Especially when “wow” become “annoying” over time.

As I was building the slides for this, I wanted to quantify the elements one could consider when building software that people will love.  I wanted a list along the lines of: useful, intuitive, beautiful, etc.  I had a lot of adjectives, but the list felt like something was missing.  If design is communication + art, then I think it’s the art part of the equation that was difficult to nail down.  As I was trying to get my head around this, I came accross something that I thought was interesting. 

When I was at Microsoft I had a chance to be involved with some usability testing for new behaviors we introduced in a handful of the controls (bonus points to anyone who can find those).  It was a cool experience and I completely get the value.  It was great to confirm our suspicions about the particular issues we were considering and also change our thinking on some.  Overall, it was a pretty decent attempt to quantify the quality of that particular experience.  

I read (somewhere–couldn’t find where, so consider this an anecdote for now) that Apple doesn’t do that.  They don’t do usability testing on their software.  I don’t believe that Apple software is untouchable in terms of experience, but on the whole they build software that many many people really love (including my wife whose feelings toward her Macbook have some serious emotion behind them).  That must be where the art is.  It’s amazing that they have that kind of confidence about the experiences they create. 

I hesitate to leave the impression that building great software isn’t something that can be learned, though.  I think it can.  In fact, maybe it’s better to think about the art of creating great software as more of a craft, an applied art.  Every time I talk about to developers about WPF, I meet a handful of people in the group that really get excited about the potential.  A lot of these guys are designers in cocoon.  If that’s you, I hope you feel empowered by what WPF brings to the table and not initimidated. 

Well, the conference was great (even without the list).  It was great to finally get my thoughts down about how WPF fits into the UX equation, how it is that WPF really enables better experiences.  It was great to share my excitement about the platform and the opportunities it creates and also feel that excitement from the attendees.  Thanks to those of you who stuck around to talk afterward.

If you want, you can check out the slides here (the link works now!).  I left my notes in but I’m not sure if they are all in tact.  Hopefully you can follow along.  The demos I showed are also all available online: here’s a video of the Accurent real estate app, source for the healthcare app, and a download page for the Seattle PI reader. 

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