Andrew McGlinchey iStartedsomething: Who is he and what does he do?
If you recently heard about Andrew McGlinchey and you don't know who he is exactly, then you should know that he is the program manager who is working on the new Vista control panel. Who is he exactly? Well, Andrew McGlinchey iStartedsomething has been working for Microsoft for about three and a half years and he has only taken the Vista Project, meaning that the changes you are going to see in your Vista control panel will be because of his work.
More about Andrew McGlinchey
He is a part of a group called the Natural User Interface and what his team and he are trying to do is make sure that everyone who will use a computer that has Windows Vista installed will be able to use their computers just by stating what they want either by typing words or by speaking. There are many things they have been able to do until this point, like perfecting the Vista Speech Recognition and many others.
The fact is that there are millions of users who are using his work and not all of them will get to be happy with everything he and his team will do. It's a scary but also exhilarating though, the fact that he can help so many people have a pleasant experience when using their computers. The majority of changes made belong to the category pages and home page of the control panel. But Andrew McGlinchey Vista Control is only one man from a team full of usability engineers, writers, testers, developers, designers and translators who contribute to the project and also Guided Help.
His work
The work they do needs to always be of the same quality and they need to make the changes in similar fashion that in the past proved the fact that users are happy with what they're getting and don't post comments on Vista's forums about changes they hate or that aren't useful to them at all. For the team it's hard work, for they always need to take a look at features they changed and redesign them, make them more functional and basically, change them, but keep them the same!
These are very tight constraints for Andrew McGlinchey Google and his tea, but they have learned that the only way they can really satisfy the hundreds of millions of users out there is if they work as hard as before and follow the same strategies they followed in the past.
Changes made
In the new Vista version it seems that the number of icons users will find in the control panel will be doubled compare to those found in Windows XP, but you as a user don't have to worry about it. There is a search function implemented so you can easily find what you are looking for.
The category view has also been redesigned and even if there were many users who were still used to the classic view, because they memorized it, there were some things that were just not scalable in the new Windows Vista using that view. But users don't have to worry, because there are sub-links under the categories and under the icons inside categories. This will improve the efficiency of finding what you need and doing it fast.
It seems that Andrew McGlinchey and his team really did a good job with the new Vista control panel. If you didn't really test it out yet (but I bet you did already) how about you will give it a try and see how it feels, especially if you're coming from Windows XP?
More about Andrew McGlinchey
He is a part of a group called the Natural User Interface and what his team and he are trying to do is make sure that everyone who will use a computer that has Windows Vista installed will be able to use their computers just by stating what they want either by typing words or by speaking. There are many things they have been able to do until this point, like perfecting the Vista Speech Recognition and many others.
The fact is that there are millions of users who are using his work and not all of them will get to be happy with everything he and his team will do. It's a scary but also exhilarating though, the fact that he can help so many people have a pleasant experience when using their computers. The majority of changes made belong to the category pages and home page of the control panel. But Andrew McGlinchey Vista Control is only one man from a team full of usability engineers, writers, testers, developers, designers and translators who contribute to the project and also Guided Help.
His work
The work they do needs to always be of the same quality and they need to make the changes in similar fashion that in the past proved the fact that users are happy with what they're getting and don't post comments on Vista's forums about changes they hate or that aren't useful to them at all. For the team it's hard work, for they always need to take a look at features they changed and redesign them, make them more functional and basically, change them, but keep them the same!
These are very tight constraints for Andrew McGlinchey Google and his tea, but they have learned that the only way they can really satisfy the hundreds of millions of users out there is if they work as hard as before and follow the same strategies they followed in the past.
Changes made
In the new Vista version it seems that the number of icons users will find in the control panel will be doubled compare to those found in Windows XP, but you as a user don't have to worry about it. There is a search function implemented so you can easily find what you are looking for.
The category view has also been redesigned and even if there were many users who were still used to the classic view, because they memorized it, there were some things that were just not scalable in the new Windows Vista using that view. But users don't have to worry, because there are sub-links under the categories and under the icons inside categories. This will improve the efficiency of finding what you need and doing it fast.
It seems that Andrew McGlinchey and his team really did a good job with the new Vista control panel. If you didn't really test it out yet (but I bet you did already) how about you will give it a try and see how it feels, especially if you're coming from Windows XP?