Find the feeling. At Microsoft, the developers were invited to visit the usability testing lab. There, from behind a one-way mirror, they could watch real users struggling with their programs. It made all the difference. The test lab manager says that when developers see a user live, “Twenty ideas just immediately come to mind. First of all, you immediately empathize with the person. The usual nonsense answers—‘Well, they can just look in the manual if they don’t know how to use it,’ or ‘My idea is brilliant; you just found six stupid people’ … that kind of stuff just goes out the door.”
