In web design, everything easy is hard again

> the desktop experience

To me, the whole "desktop experience" was based on some nonsense from Xerox PARC, that (1) the screen should be a metaphor for a traditional desk with several sheets of paper, (2) what was on the screen were representations of various objects that a user would manipulate directly using the pointing device, and (3) how the screen UI (user interface) worked should not be explained or documented but should be intuitively obvious, as obvious a sheet of paper on a real desk, and otherwise easy enough to learn just by experimentation.

Well, for a very well designed UI for, say, a microwave oven, it worked, yet my microwave oven did come with a nice user manual.

But for the goal of all of computing, IMHO, the Xerox PARC model and assumptions are a huge pain in the back side.

E.g., for Microsoft's Windows Media Player 12 with Windows 10, I tried for hours, clicking, and clicking, basically enumerating and traversing all the UI before I finally resorted to my old favorite -- just put the mouse pointer, trial by trial, at nearly every point on the screen and there do four things, left click, right click, double left click, double right click, and see what happens. Don't look for any links, push buttons, controls and, instead, just throw clicks at the screen, exhaustively. Finally via such meaningless clicking, I was able to get some new options and, eventually, play an old audio CD but was not able to play a movie DVD. Some "user experience".

To me, the situation is similar for a lot of common desktop software -- the UI is not described, documented, or obvious, and too often a LOT of experimentation is needed to figure out what the heck was going on.

My UI Excedrin headache #948,223,594,667 was just last week with Outlook from Microsoft's Office.

So, I wanted to use the old Microsoft command XCOPY, with some carefully selected options in a script in Rexx, to back up the directory tree that contains all of MY (not Microsoft's or HP's ) data on the computer, copy the directory tree to an external disk drive connected via USB (universal serial bus). So, I started the backup and in the morning discovered that the backup had failed.

Failed? The computer and the external disk drive are quite new, and XCOPY and the options I was using are quite old and long perfect, so what the heck could have failed? I've been doing XCOPY backup and restores for 10+ years back to Windows 2000. Before that I was doing similar operations with similar software on OS/2 and then Prime computers.

So, the last few lines on the screen explained the problem: The PST (personal storage or some such?) file that I have Outlook using was "locked". The actual message was the dreaded (from what can see via Google)

File creation error - The process cannot access the file because another process has locked a portion of the file.

So, but the only program that could have that file "locked" was Outlook, and as far as I knew it was not running. Then I looked at the output of the latest version of Microsoft's Task Manager (Windows 10 does have one although it is very different from what was on Windows XP) and saw that a program OUTLOOK.EXE was running.

So, I told Task Manager to "kill" the program and started XCOPY again. So, then the XCOPY run worked fine!

Then, presto, bingo, the next day trying to run Outlook gave

Microsoft Office Outlook has stopped working

A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available.

Well, I decided not wait for a notification!!!!

I renamed that PST file and copied to the old name an old PST file and found that Outlook gave the same message. So, the problem was not the PST file. So, the bad memory Outlook was using about had to be in the Windows Registry.

So, maybe I could do a system restore? Looking around, such is still available. So I did a system restore.

Then Outlook started right away but also said that the PST file (the one Outlook was using before this mess) had not been closed properly or some such, checked the file, and found nothing wrong and now Outlook seems to be working again.

So, before doing a backup, do a system save. For Outlook, try to have it not running.

Why was Outlook running when I'd long since closed it? Okay, someone sent me via e-mail an appointment. A first ever for me. Of course, no way do I want Outlook involved in appointments. But, then, with that appointment, Outlook kept giving me notifications. The first backup attempt was actually after the appointment time and date, but somehow Outlook, when healthy again, reminded me again about the appointment. So, apparently if there is an appointment, Outlook will not stop but just keep running so that it can send notifications about appointments.

So, before doing a backup, go into Outlook and delete, cancel, eradicate, obliterate, get rid of, destroy utterly everything about appointments.

I JUST want Outlook to do e-mail, JUST e-mail, JUST simple, old SNMP (simple network mail protocol) and POP3 (post office protocol 3) e-mail. And, actually I want all the e-mail to be just simple, old ASCII text or UTF8. For more, use attachments as in MIME (multimedia internet mail extensions) with base 64 encoding, etc.

So, for this cause and cure, are just throwing stuff against the wall, hoping, causing problems, getting into a system restore with some work lost etc. Bummer. Huge bummer.

No, Xerox, Microsoft, your UIs are NOT "obvious". No, you NEED documentation.

But, for old, simple HTML, say, without JavaScript, for some 100+ million such Web sites in the world, some trillion+ such Web pages in the world, and for 2+ billion people in the world, modulo natural language, every person can understand every Web page and Web site right away, no users manual or experimentation required.

Lesson: On the desktop, the Xerox PARC stuff was an open door for chaos; on the Web, the simple HTML with its few, simple, well understood controls cleaned up much of the chaos and provided discipline that greatly helped UX (user experience).

So, for the goal of having Web pages more like desktop applications, UIs, UXs, no thanks.

IMO, it's also ultimately difficult to pull off.

My main point, again, falls back to people wanting things done for them because they don't take the time to learn how things works. They want things done for them and never learn the basics, the foundation of understanding. If one cannot figure out how to make an element a certain width using "width" + padding + border + margin because they never bothered to read the specification, or any of the multitude of online tutorials, where it is clearly explained that width is the containment area alone, then this is nothing more than plain laziness mixed with "give me teh codez".