Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#161

Post by WiseWeasel » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:36 PM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #56

martingordon wrote: post #38

Everyone I know loves managing their files, so it's great that Microsoft is finally improving Windows Explorer! WRONG! For the hundreds of nerds complaining that they don't have access to the file system on their iPads, there are millions of normal people who are delighted by a computer that they can use rather than manage. How much longer can Microsoft keep making a 20th century operating system? What's going to be…

I was just thinking this myself. Windows 8 is moving towards a tablet-like structure, they need to go all the way on this and get rid of the filesystem for 90% of users. Open almost any Windows laptop, and you'll see users who basically think of the hard drive as a file dumping ground. You'll see files stored on the Desktop, or everything just goes into one big directory. How many conversations have you had where you…

This reminds me of BeOS's metadata database filesystem, taken to its logical conclusion on the front end:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-fil...

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#162

Post by unconed » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:40 PM UTC

Meai wrote: post #113

Lewisham wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just thinking this myself. Windows 8 is moving towards a tablet-like structure, they need to go all the way on this and get rid of the filesystem for 90% of users. Open almost any Windows laptop, and you'll see users who basically think of the hard drive as a file dumping ground. You'll see files stored on the Desktop, or everything just goes into one big directory. How many conversations have you had where you…

Interesting idea! There is no indication of what "My Documents" contains. What do I put in there? What is a "document" anyway? I'm frequently annoyed by files being saved somewhere I don't remember, or into huge folder hierarchies where I troublesomely navigate into. This is just simply stuff a user shouldn't need to think about. Couple your suggestions with a proper realtime search engine like we have with http://ww…

My Documents is the worst possible solution to "I can't find my files."

First of all, they designate only one part of the visible filesystem as "safe", when it should be the opposite. Everything that's obviously accessible should be safe, and system-critical stuff should require going elsewhere.

Secondly, there is nothing personal about "My Documents". Every program routinely dumps files there that you can't do anything with directly. Game saves are the worst offenders here. They're cryptically named and you can't double click them like every other file.

And then people complain that normal users don't understand files.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#163

Post by archgrove » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:40 PM UTC

pointyhat wrote: post #127

revscat wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two questions: 1) Why the anger? 2) What specific tasks are difficult for you to accomplish in Finder or Mail? The default icon set in Mail (seen here: http://i.imgur.com/zYmaw.png ) do not seem to be difficult to parse. Ditto the Finder icons.

1) 2 days with Lion and ten years of Apple fanboys whinging in my ear like angry wasps. 2) Just about everything from the awful toolbar icons (the labels are turned off by default on my MacBook) to the fact that it makes an awful mess of the messages and it's impossible to stick an image attachment in it without it trying to rape you in the eye socket with iPhoto.

Right click, "Icon and Text". Done.

Click "Attach a document" rather than "Photo Browser" - it's literally 2 icons to the left, visible by default, and uses the universal "Paperclip" motif. Done. The other is even called "Photo Browser" rather than "Attach Photo" because, you know, it uses the system wide photo browser (i.e. iPhoto).

Mac Power User? Power troll, perhaps. Sigh.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#164

Post by fmavituna » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:42 PM UTC

Article is ignoring a big thing, features such as "Copy Path" is almost hidden in Win 7/Vista unless you know where they are.

In 7 you have to "Shift + Right Click" to see "Copy as Path" in the context menu. Now how many users (even power users) actually know about this? So many of my friends were really pleased to find this out when I showed them.

There are lots of other features such as you can actually copy a file and when you try to paste it to a "File Open Dialog" 7 will automatically paste the path of the file, so that's why "Copy Path" was quite hidden, because for common usage it's just easier to do copy & paste.

We have to understand that just like everyone know what is Ctrl + C all power users eventually gets rid of menu bars and just uses hotkeys. New Ribbon interface (with hide/customise features) provides a nice infrastructure for that while not punishing the normal users.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#165

Post by anigbrowl » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:44 PM UTC

chetan51 wrote: post #144

anigbrowl wrote: post #39

The writer of this blog uses a picture of the Golden Gate bridge as the background image on the page. As someone who lives near the bridge, I can affirm that at any given time, more than 50% of the bridge is empty; that is, less than half of the bridge's surface is covered by cars or pedestrians. Clearly this is a complete waste of resources, and we should just get rid of the empty half. Also, what is up with those s…

Civil engineering is very different from UI design.

Well, i wouldn't want you to overthink it...but they're not so far apart.

Games have the best UI; ideally a game will only show you the bare minimum of information required, and make the play experience as smooth and intuitive as possible. But games also have very narrowly defined win/loss conditions, and even in sandbox games (like Grand Theft Auto) success means that that players in the middle of the normal distribution are able to complete the game and interested enough to spend time doing so.

For creative or productivity software, the definition of success is open-ended, because while designers can anticipate the kind of tasks/problems users will want to perform/solve, the end product of their labors is fundamentally unknowable, rather than waiting within the software to be discovered by the diligent user (player). Sure, Michaelangelo used to say that the statue already existed within the block of marble and his job was simply to reveal it, but you should probably see that as an early example of successful branding rather than a design document. A game is like a theme park ride insofar as the riders may change but their interaction with the ride is highly constrained. An application is more like a civil engineering task insofar as it has to bear a substantial amount of traffic, but its job is to facilitate rather than fulfill. You want those things available on the toolbar, even though many of them may not see regular use, because it's the easiest way to signal the availability of such functionality. The relative utility distribution of toolbar buttons or menu items follows Benford's law just like everything else.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#166

Post by StavrosK » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:48 PM UTC

varunsrin wrote: post #79

sunchild wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't explain the "invert selection" button. I'm pretty sure that one is indefensible.

Yeah, while I think that select all & select none are pretty important ribbon items (most people never learn CTRL+A or Shift+Clicking), select inversion feels like a power user option to me.

"Delete all files except this one."

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#167

Post by leon_ » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:49 PM UTC

varunsrin wrote: post #9

The first problem with the article here is that some of the buttons (Move To, Copy To) did not exist previously. They are also extensions of existing functions (Move, Copy) - so concluding that half the UI is covered by buttons that were not used is an inaccurate assumption. Secondly, the actions are being moved from the context menu to the ribbon. Most new computer users find it very hard to remember additional, non…

What makes you think that new computer users who can't remember "non intuitive" concepts like right clicking and context menus will know what cut/copy/paste on files does?

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#168

Post by neutronicus » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:51 PM UTC

pointyhat wrote: post #99

Disclaimer: I'm a Windows and Mac OS X "power user" and I'm going to be rather critical of Apple who are seen as at the forefront of UI design. I'm probably going to get voted down for this. I'm a proponent of the Ribbon UI and I fucking hate toolbars in OS X. I use Outlook, Word, Excel and Windows Live Mail extensively. All of which have the ribbon UI. It turns out that for the sake of actually getting stuff done, t…

I love the ribbon. It briefly brought me back to Word from LaTeX. I am by no means a Word power user, but I found it 2007 much easier to use than 2003.

(I also have a Mac and prefer it to Windows, but I interact with it mainly through the terminal, the browser, and emacs - and I can't be arsed to learn powershell or whatever in order to do the same thing on Windows)

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#169

Post by abduhl » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:52 PM UTC

tdfx wrote: post #151

pointyhat wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're only angry because you have to relearn it. You're probably used to using the Alt-F-S type key shortcuts. The rest have pretty much been left unchanged (Ctrl+S) for example. Also don't forget the clusterfuck that was the menuing system from Office XP -> Office 2003 where every time you opened a menu, everything was in a different place. Google Docs is no good for me when I have to deal with sensitive data that…

I see that argument about the security of Google Docs often and I don't really understand it. Speaking hypothetically, as an attacker I'd much rather see you keep your sensitive documents on your own computer where you browse flash-enabled web sites, open and edit PDFs, and download email attachments. Trying to get to your Google Docs through a Google Account with 2-step authentication would be much more painful. Tha…

Speaking hypothetically, if I were to have sensitive documents on my network they wouldn't be on a computer with access to anything but the LAN. Your definition of sensitive seems to differ wildly from the definitions I've seen from corporations.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#170

Post by leon_ » Mon, Aug 29, 2011, 10:56 PM UTC

martingordon wrote: post #38

Everyone I know loves managing their files, so it's great that Microsoft is finally improving Windows Explorer! WRONG! For the hundreds of nerds complaining that they don't have access to the file system on their iPads, there are millions of normal people who are delighted by a computer that they can use rather than manage. How much longer can Microsoft keep making a 20th century operating system? What's going to be…

Yeah, many users even don't understand the file system metaphor. MS unleashing the full fury of cut/copy/paste/files isn't really helping user experience.

But MS is a highly engineer dominated tribal culture. I don't see how they can overcome that. I guess the windows explorer will survive another decade.