Are you a GPGPU developer? Participate in our UX study

Sat, July 31, 2010, 02:12 PM under GPGPU | ParallelComputing | UserInterfaceDesign

You know that I work on the parallel debugger in Visual Studio and I've talked about GPGPU before and I have also mentioned UX. Below is a request from my UX colleagues that pulls all of it together.

If you write and debug parallel code that uses GPUs for non-graphical, computationally intensive operations keep reading. The Microsoft Visual Studio Parallel Computing team is seeking developers for a 90-minute research study. The study will take place via LiveMeeting or at a usability lab in Redmond, depending on your preference.

We will walk you through an example of debugging GPGPU code in Visual Studio with you giving us step-by-step feedback. ("Is this what you would you expect?", "Are we showing you the things that would help you?", "How would you improve this")

The walkthrough utilizes a “paper” version of our current design. After the walkthrough, we would then show you some additional design ideas and seek your input on various design tradeoffs.

Are you interested or know someone who might be a good fit? Let us know at this address: devur@microsoft.com. Those who participate (and those who referred them), will receive a gratuity item from a list of current Microsoft products.


User eXperience

Sat, July 31, 2010, 02:09 PM under Links | UserInterfaceDesign

The last few months I have been spending a lot of time designing (and help design) the developer experience for the areas I contribute to (in future versions of Visual Studio).

As a technical person who defines feature sets, it is easy to get engulfed in the pure technical side of things and ignore the details that ultimately make users "love" using the product to achieve their goal, instead of just "having to use" it. Engaging in UX design helps me escape that trap.

In case you are also interested in the UX side of development, I thought I'd share an interesting site I came across: UX myths. In particular, I recommend reading myths 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 21.

Let me know if there are other UX resources you recommend…