My first session at PDC 2005 was “Getting Users to Fall in Love with Your Software” by Hillel Cooperman. This session wasn’t really about Microsoft technology, but about ways to ensure that your users have a positive emotional reaction to your software. Unfortunately, there were no easy answers given here. Basically, you need to understand your customers, watch them in usability studies, anonymously instrument their use of the software, etc. Software products should be friendly, forgiving, and rock-solid.

Of course, there are other factors at play here, particularly the cost in time and money of doing all of that research and subsequent development. When retrofitting an existing software package, you also need to consider the amount of retraining that will be necessary.

The application that they developed to demonstrate these principles is a photo album application called Microsoft Max. If you’re curious, and dare install the WinFX September CTP, go check it out.

Basically, this session was a good reminder that we need to spend all of the time and money we can afford to eliminate the many negative emotional reactions that our products create in our users and actively strive toward a positive experience. Like most aspects of software development, there’s never a point where you’ve reached perfection, but most software teams should be spending more time in this area than they are.