A handful of weeks ago, the team in charge of Microsoft Internet Explorer’s Web Developer Tools requested feedback from users on Reddit about what they could do to improve their tools.

Not many companies reach out to users like that, so it was great to see.

Needless to say, I made sure to put in my two cents!

Michael Haberle: Looks like I’m a little late to this, but…

I would love if the navigation for the dev tools was redone.

I preferred IE10’s. It was uglier (no icons — just menus and tabs at the top of the pane), but it was very fast to use and everything was accessible immediately rather than having to scroll through a list of icons. For me, utility > beauty in this case. The regular user won’t see the pane anyway, so it shouldn’t matter.

Yes, it saves only a handful of seconds, but those seconds add up fast when you’re going back and forth.

Thanks!

To my surprise, I received a response shortly after!

IEDevTools: Thanks, we’ve heard this as feedback a few times. But I’ll add it to the list so we know more users are wanting it.

I thought to myself “Well, if it is only a few times, then it probably won’t happen. Oh well. It was worth a shot!”

20 days later, they followed up with me (which in itself, is very nice).

IEDevTools: What do you think? http://i.imgur.com/rUc561N.png

Needless to say, I am ecstatic! The design looks significantly improved and as if it was built with user experience in mind. Hopefully this version of the web dev tools come to fruition.