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Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

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Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#141

Post by signal11 »

dTal wrote: post #59
pradn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The windows button looks more like a flag than a window, nothing to do with starting anything!

The "Start" button was never really about starting things in the first place. After all, clicking "Start" was the first step to shutting down your computer! Perfectly intuitive... Now it doesn't even say "Start" on it, and yet they persist in calling it the "Start menu".

The history of Windows 95 is fascinating. The Mac had a GUI, but overall the penetration of GUIs was very low. Windows 3.1 was getting popular, but Microsoft knew they had to something special to make GUIs mainstream (remember, DOS still ruled) and expand the market for PCs to people who'd never considered buying a computer.

It was a different time. The Windows 95 team had this idea of a "beginner's UI" to make computers more approachable -- an idea they subsequently shelved. But their research told them that:

> Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or "context") menus, even after training

Ironically newer UI designers have forgotten that 'visible cues' lesson -- both on Windows 10's Flat UI and on touch interfaces such as iPad OS, which imho suffers from really poor discoverability.

> Although we abandoned the idea of a separate shell for beginners, we salvaged its most useful features: single-click access, high visibility, and menu-based interaction. We mocked up a number of representations in Visual Basic and tested them with users of all experience levels, not just beginners, because we knew that the design solution would need to work well for users of varying experience levels. Figure 5 shows the final Start Menu, with the Programs sub-menu open. The final Start Menu integrated functions other than starting programs, to give users a single-button home base in the UI.

(Here's a picture of what earlier iterations of the UI looked like: https://imgur.com/IWCGPzU)

These extracts and image are from Kent Sullivan's very readable "The Windows 95 user interface: a case study in usability engineering": https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=238611 (previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899)

The upshot is: "Start" is just a label that worked well during UX testing, what mattered more was the anchored, affordance-rich, highly consistent button that let you interact with the GUI in a predictable way.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#142

Post by zw123456 »

There were a number of things that go missing when going from win7 to 10, like the games, Chess Titans (and others) disappear and replaced by ad driven crap. Also, DVD player, in Windows 7 it was included in Win10 you have to buy one or get a "free" one that is ad driven. Hard to blame Microsoft when it seems like everything has ads stuffed into it now days.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#143

Post by dpark »

DannyB2 wrote: post #102
mgraczyk wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fifteen years ago, Windows 95 was only 9 years old. I think changing something 9 years old over the course of 15 years is probably an acceptable speed.

Why after 9 years don't we change from a steering wheel to a steering tiller. Marketing thinks it is the bestest idea. After 9 more years, let's change to steering pedals and use hand controls for acceleration and breaking. (pun) After 9 more years . . . Maybe you see a problem with this progression?

You might want to go look at some actual early cars. A lot of stuff that’s now standard was not for decades.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#144

Post by LeoPanthera »

sneak wrote: post #137
nickjj wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like peering into the lives of computer users that don't have the level of computer literacy I'm used to day to day. It's a good reminder. Yep and sometimes it happens in unexpected places. I just went to the dentist the other day. The receptionist accidentally moved her task bar to be oriented vertically on the left and couldn't get it back to the horizontal bottom position. We're on very friendly terms so she a…

The only problem with that is that Sharif don’t like it.

OK I know it's off topic but I can't resist.

https://youtu.be/WEWG6kSYqlY

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#145

Post by xmprt »

c3534l wrote: post #136

Everyone is looking down on the users, but they're right. Usually the most correct UI design is the most obvious one, and showing off how clever you are might make the designer feel smart, but it makes the consumer feel dumb. It's one of the reasons I now live almost exclusively in the terminal. The terrible Windows redesigns are usually justified as being more intuitive to users who aren't "powerusers," but when you…

At what point do you stop blaming the user and start blaming the designer? Who's fault is it if a user doesn't know how to use a mouse and keyboard? Should we expect all apps to be built with text to speech and touch input as the primary interface? That just seems like a UX nightmare to me.

To apply that extreme to this case, I think it's not too much to ask that users know what the start menu is and how to use it to find and start apps.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#146

Post by c3534l »

xmprt wrote: post #145
c3534l wrote: post #136

Everyone is looking down on the users, but they're right. Usually the most correct UI design is the most obvious one, and showing off how clever you are might make the designer feel smart, but it makes the consumer feel dumb. It's one of the reasons I now live almost exclusively in the terminal. The terrible Windows redesigns are usually justified as being more intuitive to users who aren't "powerusers," but when you…

At what point do you stop blaming the user and start blaming the designer? Who's fault is it if a user doesn't know how to use a mouse and keyboard? Should we expect all apps to be built with text to speech and touch input as the primary interface? That just seems like a UX nightmare to me. To apply that extreme to this case, I think it's not too much to ask that users know what the start menu is and how to use it to…

> I think it's not too much to ask that users know what the start menu is and how to use it to find and start apps.

It is when you provide icons for most applications, but only provide text search for others (which has a confusing interface that sometimes displays webpages and local documents). There are limits to blaming the designer, but inconsistent, half implemented, with few affordances, that uses mixed metaphores is neither good programming or good design. It's not always the fault of the design, but this design is the fault in this case.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#147

Post by SL61 »

wiseleo wrote: post #69
DannyB2 wrote: post #52

Fifteen years ago, one of the Microsoft fanboy arguments against both Linux and LibreOffice (then OpenOffice.org) was that neither worked exactly like Windows / Office. Then Microsoft comes along and changes everything. The Ribbon instead of the pull down menus. Now which office suite works more like what users have used for a couple decades? Windows 8 comes along with a totally different UI. So different that ordina…

Office 2007 ribbon was a terrible release. I am an Office power user and I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing. I still hate that change.

This really shows the power of habit. Now that it's been 12 years, a whole generation has grown up with the ribbon UI. At 22, I'm one of them. Office 2003 and earlier (+ LibreOffice) feels clunky and arcane to me. 2007 was the first Office version that I seriously used, and I remember being confused as to why my parents complained about the ribbon.

Sometimes I wonder if UI design matters at all beyond what users are already acclimated to.

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#149

Post by sorenjan »

hnick wrote: post #135
ilkan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was troubleshooting WhatsApp over the phone for a relative work different hardware... Took me a bit of time to realize "solid triangle-ish" was wifi and "cup" was microphone. But for the Gen-Z and after, how would you intuitively represent Save and Call to people who've never seen a floppy disk or a phone handset?

For save I've seen an arrow pointing into a folder (opposite of the typical 'open') or a computery-looking grey square with an arrow pointing downwards overlaid.

The problem with the folder idea is that a lot of young people doesn't know how folders work. And nowadays a lot of files aren't saved to local storage, and even then, local storage is probably not a computer but a phone.

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2018/10/31/

Re: Where is Notepad in Windows 10? (2015)

#150

Post by sorenjan »

zw123456 wrote: post #142

There were a number of things that go missing when going from win7 to 10, like the games, Chess Titans (and others) disappear and replaced by ad driven crap. Also, DVD player, in Windows 7 it was included in Win10 you have to buy one or get a "free" one that is ad driven. Hard to blame Microsoft when it seems like everything has ads stuffed into it now days.

The DVD player might be because you need to pay a license to play MPEG-2 video. You still need to buy a license key to use the MPEG-2 hardware decoder on a Raspberry Pi.
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