Usability decisions

I've been a voluntary Reese's Monkey in enough IT focus groups to learn a thing or two about human processes and usability. I've participated in several such endeavors for Microsoft, having gotten to use desktop sharing software that would eventually become Live Meeting, giving honest feedback on everything from the menu layout for Visual Studio, control nomenclature, and the syntax coloring scheme applied to T-SQL in Query Analyzer.

So I've grokked a few things about top-of-mind awareness and user psychographics. Today I ran a draft layout for a new project we're working on in-house, and observing the reactions to the layout of the controls and the logical flow of things. It's interesting feedback, and we always approach such design by considering the combined feedback of internal resources, our beta user community, and plain common sense.

Funny how simple stuff like this stalls the much more complex task programming a lot longer.