Chapter 29. How Usable Are Your APIs?

—Steven Clarke

In November 1999, I started working as a user experience researcher on the user experience team for Visual Studio. I was excited to be part of a team that designed the product I had used in my previous job. While working as a software developer at Motorola, I had always wanted to be able to make big improvements to the user experience of Visual Studio, and now I had my chance. But, although it seems obvious now, it took me almost a year to figure out that the way to improve the developer’s user experience wasn’t necessarily to focus exclusively on the development tools.