I was sitting in the library earlier today when I noticed someone sitting in front of me with her computer on. While laptops in the library are commonplace these days, what was especially interesting about her computer was that it was running Vista. So out of curiosity, I decided to watch Jane Doe for a few minutes to see what her experience with Vista was like (Yes I’m nosy, but this is for an educational experiment. 
And if you’re the person who I was watching, I apologize. Don’t worry, I was too far to see anything meaningful! 
).
Jane had a Sony laptop running Vista Premium. Let’s see what she was doing while I was watching:
1. Getting Connected
Shi Da (師大) has a wireless network across campus. The first thing I saw Jane do was try to get connected to the wireless network. She stayed on the wireless network dialog for a while (probably a good 2 minutes), which I’m guessing because the connection wasn’t connecting.
2. Media Player
After getting connected, she restored an already open Windows Media Player window which means she was listening to music. I noticed headphones on so that seemed like a valid assumption.
3. Messenger
Of course who doesn’t use IM these days? She popped open MSN messenger next to check on who’s online… well that was the original intention at least. The window stopped functioning during login and then the crashed dialog opened up showing the window had stopped functioning. I couldn’t see which option she clicked, but the progress bar started going afterwards.
4. Browser
Jane opened up an Internet Explorer window, but unfortunately this one also stopped functioning. She typed, clicked on the window without any response. Then the crashed dialog opened up showing the window stopped accepting input from the user. She clicked it and the progress bar started again.
5. Waiting
She went back to her studies while waiting for the close dialog to turn off. About 3 minutes later they finally closed. She opened up another browser window and this time no crashes. She typed in Facebook’s URL and started checking someone’s profile (couldn’t see from where I was sitting).
6. Torrents
She opened up another browser and this time opened up a torrent tracking site. She downloaded a torrent and started downloading some file (once again, couldn’t see exactly from where I was sitting).
7. Switching back and forth
For the next few minutes, Jane switched back from Facebook, to Media Player, torrent status, and back to Facebook.
8. Back to networking
About 5 minutes later, the browser stopped loading web pages. So she went back to the wireless network dialog to check on the network status. About 30 seconds later, the network was back up so she went back to Facebook.
At this point, I stopped watching as she was just browsing Facebook now.
One question comes into mind: did she use any of the “new” features of Vista? Absolutely not. Everything that I watched her do on her computer, XP could have handled perfectly if not better than the Vista equivalents. For example, the sidebar was left in the default state with the picture and clock gadget. The sidebar was left uncustomized and was just sitting there taking up screen real estate. Flip3D? Might as well not exist as she used the task bar to change windows.
So what did I learn from watching this random computer user using her computer running Vista for a couple of minutes? I learned that the flashy Vista or the new UI means nothing to the user. The user only wants to be able to accomplish a task: chat, read web sites, listen to music, …. While I learned this lesson previously through my past work experience, watching this random user today just reinforced this idea in my mind. I believe all software developers should watch a user use a computer before programming professionally. Of course I mean a “typical” user, not your project partner who’s hacking away at a bash script. 
Watching a user gives a lot of insight into how to design software for the user and not for the programmer.