Lots of people ask about UX guidelines for Vista and in general how to make their apps look more like Vista. UX Guidelines has been one of the areas where Microsoft has sort of lost our way in past years. We made a really big push for this in the Windows 95 timeframe, but since then all we have done is make the occasional updated style guides, icon guides, etc.
This is really a shame, because we at Microsoft actually have a huge amount of data about what works and what doesn't work in UI. More people use Windows every day than just about any other single product on Earth. We do a lot of our own usability, plus we have great data from customers who participate in the questionably-named "Customer Improvement Program" (what, are we improving our customers???). We also of course have all of the data that comes from the product support lines, blogs, newsgroups, and so on.
For Vista, we have been making a concerted effort to make sure that this information is organized and distilled into a clear and useful form for all of you software developers out there. We are not done yet, but you can follow along with the work in progress at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/uxguide
We update pretty frequently.
In the future, the guidelines will be expanded to include things like sample code for how to correctly code various UI, and links to the usability data/gut instinct/blind guess that each particular guideline is based on. We will also be creating a new Windows UX Guidelines book – the last one has been out of print and out of date for some time now.
So – follow along with the UX Guide progress. If you have any questions of the UX Guide itself, or the proper application of a guideline to your specific product, you can send us email and get an answer from our local experts:
winui@microsoft.com
(But remember that this email address is only for questions, comments, and complaints about the UX Guidelines themselves, not for other issues like Fit & Finish,how you get RC1, why Windows suxs, etc. )