User Centered

When you need a question answered about something like "should the keyboard up arrow increase my numbers, or decrease them?" you should undoubtedly go to the tape. But last I checked, I haven't seen a major news correspondent that covers these matters, so Dan at Infrandom.com (a long time friend of mine) posed this very question to me directly in regards to the Visual Studio IDE (an integrated development environment...still nothing? ummm...its for programming).

IDEs are a bit different though. They are built by programmers for programmers. Usability guys try to fight against programmers putting their techie mindset into the end user products, but of course, in this case, the end user is going to be a techie too- so (in theory) it should be fine. But Dan is a programmer, and he's got an annoyance with his IDE/