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Hey, finally I can report that Microsoft is doing one thing right for a change. Recognizing that a consistent user experience is (usually) a good user experience, the IE development team have decided to standardize and use the same icon as Firefox for RSS in the upcoming release of IE7. How cool is that? I admire Microsoft for being able to admit that this was a good idea and Mozilla for allowing the use of their icon. As you can see in a previous post on the IE blog, not all of the icon concepts were good ones. Firefox already had a very obvious and straightforward icon, so MS went with it. Cool.

Another piece of good news on the Microsoft/Usability front is that the new UIs for the next version of Office look really good. From what I’ve heard, usability has been a big deal in this upcoming version, and they’re trying hard to hide all of the bloaty features and only show users the relevant buttons and commands to their current actions. One problem that has been identified with Office in the past is that users don’t know what it can do because there are so many options buried throughout the program. By bringing salient choices to the user’s attention in the new Office UIs, MS will help users use all of the powerful features that were previously hidden away. Also, the new versions just look really pretty.

Finally, on a more random note, I’ve just started using Pandora today. Pandora is a Flash-based music player in which you build personal “radio stations” by suggesting various artists and giving feedback on likes or dislikes. Pandora uses something called the Music Genome Project, which seems to be a very large database of music with faceted metadata on all sorts of musical attributes (syncopation, minor/major key, acoustic/electric, subtle vocal harmonies, etc.) Whoever spent time compiling all of that information gets huge props (it appears that it was done specifically for/by Pandora.) If they decide to open up an API to this database… wow. Some very interesting applications would come out of that. Also, Pandora is REALLY GOOD at playing me things that I like, and finding new things that are also surprisingly good. I’m having a really good time. The quality is good, it’s free, … what more could you ask for. Try it out.