In a post on the official Microsoft Engineering Windows 7 blog Ben Fathi vice president for core OS development indicated that the User Account Control system (UAC) will be refined with Windows 7 and there will be fewer but clearer prompts than in Windows Vista (Hurray!), users will also have more control about what type of prompt they see.

Fathi wrote: “Based on what we’ve learned from our data and feedback we need to address several key issues in Windows 7: reduce unnecessary or duplicated prompts in Windows and the ecosystem, such that critical prompts can be more easily identified; enable our customers to be more confident that they are in control of their systems; make prompts informative such that people can make more confident choices; and provide better and more obvious control over the mechanism,”

There’s also a big problem with users getting into the habit of simply clicking approval every time without reading the prompt. Fathi concedes “the dialogs in Vista aren’t easy to decipher and are often not memorable.” He points to company testing which found only 13% of people could understand what a particular UAC prompt means. However, a revised system for Windows 7 performed far better, with 83% being able to decipher the new messages, which are based on asking “a meaningful question”.

Fathi added: “As we evolve UAC for Windows 7 we will address the customer feedback and satisfaction issues with the prompts themselves. We’ve heard loud and clear that you are frustrated. You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience.”

He continued: “Firstly we will continue to give you control over the changes made to your system, but in Windows 7, we will also provide options such that when you use the system as an administrator you can determine the range of notifications that you receive. Secondly we will provide additional and more relevant information in the user interface. We will improve the dialog UI so that you can better understand and make more informed choices. We’ve already run new design concepts based on this principle through our in-house usability testing and we’ve seen very positive results”.
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