141–150 of 402 posts
Actually the original article by Kent (NOT Kevin) Sullivan is still available here: http://prior.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/...
I still have a soft spot for vanilla HTML. When I can hit view source and read the whole article (minus images) without much difficulty, I'm glad.
"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…
How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?
Especially older people have problems with their motor skills so instead clicking on a file they often perform drag & drop instead (they can't hold the mouse steady enough, so the system recognizes movement and at the same time their "click" is too slow, so OS recognizes it as holding the button down)
"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…
That would save SO MUCH HASSLE. Great idea.
Copy the Mac OS but make it crappier.
In early UI we can see a Wastebasket, which ended up being changed to the Recycle Bin. As a user I would say that Recycle Bin is a misleading name because it has nothing to do with recycling a file / folder. However it has a more positive sounding than the weird Wastebasket. Meanwhile classic Mac OS already had a Trash. Simple, clear and short. I wonder why Windows could not simply name it Trash? Could it be that the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The term "folder" already annoys me. It's a (filesystem) directory... You don't like the metaphor of a folder, but you'll accept the metaphor of what goes into a folder?
The places where the metaphor gets stretched can be frustrating, especially in Windows. You can put Folders on the Desktop, but there's also a "Computer" icon on the desktop which allows you to browse into other folders.. including the desktop? Then there's your Personal folders.. which are in fact collections of other folders themselves, but appear transparently to be folders- but somewhere on the file system they a…
That's a specific failing of Windows, not something inherent to the folder metaphor, though.
It's one of those absurd things that happen when nobody pays any attention to coherence. That particular thing has driven me BATS for years.
I'm encouraged, though, that my Win10 machine here doesn't seem to continue this foolishness. WinExp used to always show the Desktop as the "root" of everything, but it doesn't now. The quick access pane shows This PC as the root, with quick links below it for Desktop, Documents, etc. It's almost like MSFT is learning.
Ah, remembering Win95 makes me yearn for a simple, clean GUI again. All of the major operating systems have been in a downward slide in terms of UI/UX since the early 2000s. As far as UI/UX is concerned: Windows peaked with Windows 2000. MacOS with OS9 (Why didn't they just throw the classic GUI on top of Darwin)? At least with *nix you have choices and can go with one of the several variants of Gnome 2 (Xfce, et al)…
Just curious: why Windows 2000 and not Windows 7? Win7 was still internally consistent (as opposed to the newer tablet / mobile / pc / washing machine UIs of later versions) and provided few additional UI enhancements over 2k.
I spent a lot of time with Windows 2000 back in the day. Windows 2000 was the first OS I bought retail -- my new PC came with Windows ME and it was so terrible I ran out and actually paid for an OS ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Running the latest version of 10 it still feels very unfinished which I hope Microsoft intend to do something about. Might depend on what particular parts of the OS you come across. I use Win10 on my work notebook [1] and besides the long startup times [2], I haven't noticed anything "unfinished". In fact, Windows very subjectively feels more polished than macOS which I used before (until December). Then again, I d…
Pretty sure he is referring to the configuration structure. You get this fancy 8.1 sidebar configuration screens that may solve 80% of a average users tasks, but once you start digging you'll find configuration Windows in the style of W7, and if you dig even harder you'll even find stuff that looks straight out of 98. I am a linux users myself, configuration inconsistency gives me nightmares.
Yes. And another really mind-boggling example is the Control Panel. There's actually two of them (or more, depending on how you see things). We have both the old Control Panel and the new Settings user interfaces for configuring various settings in the operating system. Some configuration options are in Control Panel and Settings, and some options are only available in one of the interfaces. That's a UX fk up if you ask me.
Imagine that situation in macOS, there being two System Preferences apps with completely different looks. They would both have some commonalities, but many options would only show up in one of the apps. Would. Not. Happen.
I think it's beautiful. And, compared to Windows 10, Windows 95 was at least somewhat consistent design wise. After 12 years of macOS I recently got a Windows 10 machine. There's plenty of Windows 10 bling on top of the OS, but you don't have to dig deep before you encounter the embarrassing remnants from very early versions of Windows. Running the latest version of 10 it still feels very unfinished which I hope Micr…
But I think the biggest thing I miss is the start menu being just a view of a folder hierarchy. The Windows 10 Start Menu is tied into the appstore and uses some kind of database that can easily get corrupted and cause it to stop working seemingly randomly. Sometimes performing the right voodoo magic can fix it, but usually it means an in-place upgrade (aka reinstall). Go on, look for "Windows 10 start button doesn't work" on google. Fun reads.
It's an example of how complexity meant to make things easier often just makes them rigid and unfixable when shit inevitably goes wrong. The original start menu was so stupidly simple that it was almost impossible for anything to go wrong in the first place, and if it did, it was easy to reason about because it was simple. I miss that kind of design in my software.
In early UI we can see a Wastebasket, which ended up being changed to the Recycle Bin. As a user I would say that Recycle Bin is a misleading name because it has nothing to do with recycling a file / folder. However it has a more positive sounding than the weird Wastebasket. Meanwhile classic Mac OS already had a Trash. Simple, clear and short. I wonder why Windows could not simply name it Trash? Could it be that the…