Scott Hanselman spoke at TechEd about how developers, often given to griping, can improve what comes out of Microsoft by giving honest, constructive feedback. Here’s my shot at that.

My desktop recently burned up and I got some sweet new components and rebuilt the machine on Wednesday. I realized as I was combing through paragraphs of text, looking for the right software to install, that the user experience was frustrating at best. Let’s be honest, this is development software for developers. Maybe the thought is that developers are smart enough to figure it out but finding and installing the right software is always a nightmare for me.

I have six computers: a desktop, a linux server, a netbook, two laptops and my work computer. I frequently am installing software on one or more to keep them all in sync. Every minute I spend installing software is a minute less that I can spend writing code so it’s important to me that the process be painless.

With that in mind, here is a user-experience redesign of the WP7 toolkit installation process. While this is obviously targeted at the WP7 toolkit, this is a baseline set of expectations for what the experience should be like when installing anything. Note that you can click images for a larger view.

You want to develop for WP7? You start at the AppHub.

 

This page is very good and there is a button loud and clear that demos how to get started:

 

Clicking that button takes you to this page:

We just went from average-user-land to unfriendly-developer-tools land.

  1. The first thing your eye is drawn to is the “download the SDK” icon and text. But it’s not clickable so you have to read a bunch of text.
  2. The first paragraph is all about the Beta tools. While this is valuable information, it should be secondary to the current stable release.
  3. The second paragraph, the actual tools I’m looking for, has a large volume of links in it. Not one of these links mentions Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone, which is a core part of what you need if you are a fresh developer who may be migrating from iPhone or Android development.
  4. The installation process itself is convoluted. It’s actually three separate installs, four if you count Visual Studio itself.

 

This is what that page should look like:

  1. The first thing you see is a great, big, clickable button that will download the complete package with a wrapper installer that fetches and installs everything you need to get started. Including the correct Visual Studio Express version, which is optional.
  2. The paragraph with individual links is still there but now it’s on top and the process is clearly bulleted out.
  3. The beta tools are still there and the paragraph is basically unchanged.

 

If anyone at Microsoft takes the time to read this, I sincerely appreciate it. I also really appreciate the wonderful tools that Microsoft has provided to the community. This is by no means a rant. I hope this can be taken as constructive feedback that will improve the development process and bring new developers from other platforms.

Thanks for reading.