This article was supposed to be longer, but I hit “Publish” too fast. Mea culpa.

Because once again, I’ve turned into a giant Microsoft shill now that I work there, I thought I’d try Live Mesh, Microsoft’s new file sharing/storage service; especially since they now have a Mac Beta. After using it for a few weeks, I can now definitely say that it’s a pretty well-written piece of software, and that’s not a compliment I give out lightly.

Good UI sucks to write

Good UI execution is hard for two big reasons. It’s hard because you’ll build a UI based on how the underlying code is set up, you’ll sit down to use it, and then you’ll find it completely unusable – programmers are bad at design because their entire mindset is to build it right the first time. Contrast this to Industrial / Product Designers, who from the very beginning of school are taught, “come up with 50 ideas for the same project and turn them in”. Making good UI is a process that requires a lot of iteration and experimentation, and a willingness to come up with 25 ideas and throw away 23 of them.

In design, iteration is made to be very cheap – you’ve got a pencil and a piece of paper, and you draw it all out; coming up with those 50 ideas doesn’t involve tertiary work, 100% of your efforts are moving your ideas forward. With making UI, it’s not so easy – even with tools like Expression Blend trying to make UI work easier, it’s still a ton of effort to create all of the little interactions that make a UI great. Writing a UI is difficult, and writing a great UI is difficulty multiplied.

So why is Live Mesh’s UI so good? No modal dialogs!

One reason that I like Live Mesh is, unlike a lot of other software products (mostly ones written by Microsoft), I’ve never seen Live Mesh pop up a message box forcing me to answer some question when it wasn’t prompted by me. That last part is important, because it touches on the concept of user intent. When I click on “Send/Receive mail” and it needs my password, it’s okay to pop up a dialog to ask it, because I asked the program to do something. When apps pop a dialog on their own, imagine someone suddenly walking up to you in the middle of a conversation with someone else – impolite at best.