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Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

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

#191

Post by revscat »

cytzol wrote: post #177
revscat wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Limit the need for Explorer/Finder/etc. altogether. For those cases where it is needed limit top level UI elements to the most commonly used items. Move the rest to either a toolbar or a contextual menu. You know, I just checked Finder and realized that not only does it not have the things showed in this mockup, but that I have never missed them. Strange.

Did you consider that you haven't missed these things because you aren't used to using them?

No, I don't think so. Every function given by this ribbon is available in Finder without buttons.

I can give you the steps, if you'd like.

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

#192

Post by kaishin »

whatusername wrote: post #118
kaishin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ribbon concept is inherently flawed because no human brain can remember such an overwhelming amount of information (what command in which function group in which tab).

And your suggestion is? How is the ribbon any different to a hierarchial menu bar? (See the Gnome drop-down menu or the iOS Settings Menu).

The problem has more to do with the excessive number of available commands. My suggestion is to cut the clutter and avoid hierarchical UI elements altogether, regardless of their nature.

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

#193

Post by kaishin »

jarek wrote: post #128
kaishin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My parents definitely won't.

Well, that's at least 2.8741 × 10^(-8) percent of users!

What's your logic behind this number? Do you think Microsoft made all those billions selling crappy software to geeks like us?

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

#194

Post by alextingle »

ajross wrote: post #46
cwbrandsma wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work in support sometime. It is EXTREMELY common to find users that really don't know about right-click. Or that double-click everything. These are not new users either, they have been using computers for decades. For new users I might agree that they could figure out a right click because everything is new. But for users where everything is familiar ("I've always done it this way"), it gets much harder to break thos…

Do those users use the desktop shell at all though? In my experience with novice users (across platforms: Mac noobs are no better) is that they only know enough to launch apps. They never touch the desktop integration at all.

This is only because the Finder/Explorer has been made harder and harder to use. Apple's OSX Finder is a shocking UI abomination.

Their old MacOS Finder was clear and simple - my wife would spend hours arranging her work in coloured folders, each of which opened in a window whose shape and position she had chosen, and was meaningful to her. It was a powerful tool that enabled her to arrange and group her work.

Now, both Apple and Microsoft compete with each other over how bad they can make their file system interface. Microsoft wanted to do away with the filesystem in Longhorn, and Apple have actually done so in iOS.

Is this progress??

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

#195

Post by foxylad »

kyleslattery wrote: post #185
bmelton wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you got downvoted, and I upvoted to try and offset, but ignoring that... I think that you overstate the importance of turning off wifi and bluetooth. Those are power user options, for sure. When you're trying to conserve battery power, you're trying to streamline how you use the device, which to me, smacks of 'power user'. The flipside to that argument is that it is ridiculously easy to browse a web…

Yes, absolutely. There is almost no reason to touch wifi and bluetooth settings on iOS devices. I have wifi enabled all the time, and battery life is still excellent. Android devices on the other hand, need constant fiddling. My Droid would barely last a day with everything turned off, and with wifi, etc. turned on, it would die after only about 6 hours.

I'd hazard a guess your Android experience was a year or two ago. My Nexus 1 lasted barely a day when it arrived, but now lasts 48 hours on Gingerbread (2.3) with everything (including wifi, bluetooth and GPS) on.

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

#196

Post by shabble »

bane wrote: post #102
varunsrin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cumbersome because you have to navigate through a bunch of menus - however, its easy because you have a finite, visible set of actions to look through those menus (tap, swipe, repeat) and a finite set of menus themselves. In a desktop OS, you have a seemingly infinite set of modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Double click, click, right click, Ctrl + Shift), which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they m…

which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they must be learned and remembered. And now even those are getting out of control: http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/gestures.html Pretty soon I'm going to run out of fingers, and these certainly aren't easily discoverable.

I'm not sure if it's just me, but the 'pinch with 3 fingers and thumb' gesture seems to be practically impossible on the older macbooks with a separate pad & button - there just isn't the space.

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

#197

Post by ams6110 »

neutronicus wrote: post #168
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)

I hate the ribbon. It was the final push for me to abandon Word and learn LaTeX. Really.

I also use the shell for almost all file system manipulation, on OS X and on Windows (via Cygwin) so I know that puts me in a small minority of users.

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

#199

Post by kenjackson »

scott_s wrote: post #174
sid0 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what type of "documents" you're referring to Aha, therein lies the rub. These documents could be essentially arbitrary files, and there's no substitute to a general purpose file manager for them. Writing an app for every single file format that could be present on the USB drive is highly inefficient compared to the usual file manager. My basic point is that filesystems are a well-established standard , a…

I think the point you're missing is that most people only manipulate data that clearly belongs to some application. So, for most people, the relevant application managing their data and abstracting away the underlying file system is a valid option. If that doesn't work for you, then okay. You're not most people.

Oddly, Microsoft used to be app centric and moved to being file centric with Windows 95. The idea being that you cared less about the app and more about the document you were using. Apple is going back and saying you care about the app as the dominant focus.

This is interesting. For example, my mom knows the document she wants to open is her 2009 tax return document. The fact that it is a PDF or she reads it with Adobe Reader -- I'm fairly certain she doesn't know. If I were to layout every application she has installed and told her to find the one to open to access her tax documents I honestly don't think she'd have a clue. She'd probably try Word. I suspect she's not alone on this.

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

#200

Post by angusgr »

StavrosK wrote: post #166
varunsrin wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I think the argument is less "noone but power users would need this" and more "only power users will know how to apply 'Invert Selection' to get the behaviour they want".

ie there's an inductive leap between "I want to delete all files except this one" and "I can select that one file and then invert selection before deleting". At minimum it requires you to know what "invert selection" means. Ordinary users may take a different, more fiddly, path.

I don't know if that's the case here. My intuition says it is. However, in my optimistic heart I hope Microsoft did a bunch of usability testing and determined that ordinary users do grasp an "invert selection" concept more often than not.

That's how design for mass-use user interfaces works, right? By evidence-driven testing, not by what the programmer/designer thinks makes sense? Clings to idealistic belief.

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