We recently had a chance to sit down with Kevin Flick, part of the development team for Microsoft's new SideWinder Gaming Mouse. We asked him some of our own questions along with a few we formulated from your response to the first part of our review. Here's the transcript:

Stu: I thought this would be a good time to ask you some questions about how this mouse came to be and the thought process that went into it. Tell me a bit of the back story about how this radical and extreme design came into existence.

KFlick: We started from scratch. Our design process depends on iterations of design and testing. Early on, we decided that we wanted a visual departure from our productivity line and from our competitors. We weren’t so much concerned about the first reaction so long as it was coupled with a curiosity to try it out. The rock solid criteria for success was that once the gamer tried it for a while they should find it comfortable and very well suited for gaming. I’ll be sure to post some pictures of our early prototypes (non-functional plaster blobs and hand filed foam chunks) to my blog so that people can have a look at where we started.


Stu: I for one was doubtful of the side buttons, but once I used them I actually found them more comfortable than alternate layouts. Whose idea was this and how did it come to be?

KFlick: Well, it is hard to pinpoint the exact moment we came up with that idea. The drive was to make side buttons that worked for the full range of hand sizes, that were easy to press, and that were hard to accidentally press. We’ve tested these buttons with gamers whose hands range in size from 5th to 95th percentile (nearly every possible hand size) and all have found them easy to use.

Stu: While in New York, you mentioned having worked with a professional team or two. Who were they and what was their response?

KFlick: Very early on in the process we worked with United 5 to set the performance specs. They helped us define the performance bars for foot friction, weight, tracking performance, and the button and wheel characteristics. We know that the bulk of our mice will go to non-professional gamers (just because there are so many more of them…) but we knew that the performance had to be on par with pro-gamer expectations.