Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 242 posts

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#171

Post by Angostura »

userbinator wrote: post #128
wayneftw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're serious, but > Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; this is just the most obtuse way of doing things. > usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag it to the trash; So does this, and unreliable as you noted - i.e. usually . But, ugggh... dragging things to other things to do things though? There's a reason why certain l…

I figured out very early on Windows (this was the days of 3.x) that the Alt key could activate the menu and then let you browse the items with the cursor keys, and the underlined letters (which idiotically have been hidden by default more recently) work in combination with Alt to activate UI elements. I couldn't figure out how to do the equivalent in Mac OS. You had to inspect each menu first with the mouse (and hold…

CMD O for open, S for save P for print seem fairly intuitive to me.

For max fun though, hold down opt/alt while you have a menu displayed and watch the options change.

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#172

Post by [deleted] »

thrower123 wrote: post #163
dangus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.

This, but unironically. We haven't made a great deal of progress moving forward, actually. Twenty years of churn and bloating system requirements. Give me Word 2003, Visual Studio 6, and AIM Messenger again and I don't think I'd be much disappointed compared to what I'm running today.

[deleted]

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#173

Post by thrower123 »

emn13 wrote: post #169
jdnenej wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the bugs that are an issue with 10. It's the mountains of nagware, spyware and advertisements built in to it.

Also the unbelievable amounts of inconsistent interfaces. There should be some rule internally at Microsoft that institutes a complete ban on new settings UI unless it actually replaces old UI. The amount of times I need to fall back to the old UI is absurd. Also - I'm not sure programmers appreciate how jarring it even is to have the same settings presented in two places. It forces users to construct some kind of me…

At least you can drop down to the old Control Panel and get at the settings that they haven't bothered to expose in the new UI.

Unfortunately, you have to do so so often that discoverability of where things are in the new UI suffers. It's not worth bothering to learn, particularly when the new UI is in flux and changing often.

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#174

Post by thrower123 »

2ion wrote: post #168
partiallypro wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. Everyone hated XP until SP2 and SP3. The Security Center was something everyone hated too. But yeah, some things it did really well, but others not so much. 10 is so much better than people give it credit for, and yes there are st…

Windows XP, Vista, and 7 were all fine. I just enabled the classic design and things largely worked and looked the same in key UX aspects. I'm still only using 7 (virtualized) and what I've seen from 10 on colleagues' computers looks much worse and more complicated UI than what xp-v-7 ever did. Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual -- which would be…

> Don't even get me started how difficult it is to get your hands on Windows 10 LTSC as a private individual

This is really a damn shame, because it is far away the best Windows distribution ever. If I didn't have access to it through MSDN, I'd pay a couple hundred bucks for a license.

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#175

Post by dangus »

thrower123 wrote: post #163
dangus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.

This, but unironically. We haven't made a great deal of progress moving forward, actually. Twenty years of churn and bloating system requirements. Give me Word 2003, Visual Studio 6, and AIM Messenger again and I don't think I'd be much disappointed compared to what I'm running today.

You’d have a great point if you only mentioned VB6 and left out AIM and that word processor that spat out binary files.

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#176

Post by thrower123 »

dangus wrote: post #175
thrower123 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, but unironically. We haven't made a great deal of progress moving forward, actually. Twenty years of churn and bloating system requirements. Give me Word 2003, Visual Studio 6, and AIM Messenger again and I don't think I'd be much disappointed compared to what I'm running today.

You’d have a great point if you only mentioned VB6 and left out AIM and that word processor that spat out binary files.

I still have a portable version of Word 2003 on a flash stick, because it still works better.

The most incomprehensible thing to me is how much worse all the IM software I have to use today is.

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#177

Post by comex »

enitihas wrote: post #18

Bill was doing a fantastic job here, but it is a bit too sad to see how most of the executives in the mail show much less concern for the company's and customer's goals, and more concerns on who should own the problem. I think this is a bit too common in any corporate environment.

I actually think it makes sense.

There are a lot of issues raised in the email. Some of them are small bugs that could just be fixed on the spot. But many of them are more like design flaws, which could only be fixed by designing and implementing new features. That requires time and planning, so it makes sense that they would be talking about who should be responsible for it.

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#178

Post by dmitriid »

knolan wrote: post #162

2003 was the pinnacle of MS Office for me. The introduction of the ‘Ribbon of Confusion’ in 2007 around the time of the adoption of 16:9 screens was appalling. The ribbon was welded to the top of the screen leaving a letterbox sized area for your documents. It was like using a toolbar encrusted IE. This all happened when Adobe were demonstrating excellent UI design in their pro apps with pallets that could be docked…

A huge amount of user research went into the original ribbon. However, it looks like they decided that no further research was needed and just started moving everything into the ribbons without any thinking whatsoever.

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#179

Post by mcintyre1994 »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #132
machello13 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dragging things around is not required on macOS. There are always ways to do things without it. It's just that it's a generally pretty intuitive way to accomplish a task, and it's something that macOS embraced in a way that Windows never did. Want to trash an app? Drag it to the trash. Want to print a PDF? Drag it onto a printer. You can do it other ways, of course — right click and "move to trash", or right-click an…

want to remove a device? drag it to the trash where the icon suddenly changes to eject "intuitive"

Or right click > eject, which I’m pretty sure is the same as Windows.

Re: Bill Gates on Windows Usability (2003)

#180

Post by iforgotpassword »

partiallypro wrote: post #69
TimTheTinker wrote: post #52

The early 2000's were a period of especially low usability for Microsoft's products. At the time, I had a roommate who was a die-hard Windows user. Over several years, I tried to convince him to switch to Mac OS X, with examples like: (a) Just drag/drop a PDF to a printer spool window, and it will print; (b) to install an app, usually you just have to drag it to the Applications folder; to uninstall it, simply drag i…

Still to this day people view Windows through the lense of XP experiences. I always wonder how much damage that era did. People claimed to "love" XP, but they are all rose tinted in memory. Everyone hated XP until SP2 and SP3. The Security Center was something everyone hated too. But yeah, some things it did really well, but others not so much. 10 is so much better than people give it credit for, and yes there are st…

XP had a bad start due to relative slowness on the hardware on release (just like Vista).

But as you said, from sp2 days on it was rock solid and reliable. And since everyone skipped Vista, and a notable amount of people even 7, it was "here to stay". While any previous version of Windows was replaced within 2 to 4 years, many used XP for close to a decade. Some grew up on this OS.

When 7 came along it was a welcome evolution of Windows without breaking too many workflows that relied on muscle memory, for better or for worse.

8 was a clusterduck just like Vista, but for different reasons. Vista fell behind schedule and was unpolished and also, Microsoft overestimated the advancements in hardware power that would be made during its development time. With 8 the problem was that Microsoft went "all in" with conquering the mobile market. The ambitious idea of creating a unified user experience on every platform, while designing every thing as mobile first and then just slamming it onto Windows on the desktop. Obviously they didn't nail this first try, and although Windows phone 8.1 was a really solid user experience we know how this ended. So the primary reason why this modern UI was conceived was eventually gone, but by the time the decision to scrap Windows mobile was made, it was already on the desktop, but at least now you can make changes to the UI without thinking about phones. (just tablets and game consoles...)

With 10 they're still to this day working on creating a consistent modern UX on desktop. I'm still highly skeptical whether that was the right thing to do at all. Considering the current trend everything seems to be eventually web based, and those couple business use cases probably wouldn't care if Windows 10 still looked like XP.

And that all didn't even address the couple major duckups they introduced with updates. Older Windows had its problems, but that's a whole new dimension here. Some ex Microsoft employee claimed on his YouTube channel that Microsoft massively scaled down their own QA. Wouldn't be too surprised if that was the case.

Post reply on HN