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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

#241

Post by kyberias »

mitjak wrote: post #238
bane wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Work in support sometime." Spending 2 years in hell doing phone tech support for an ISP after high school was probably the most valuable career experience I've ever had bar none. Nothing has prepared me for making and selling software to regular people better than this experience. Entire assumptions about how users interact with computers, ones based on my own experience, were rendered useless. The ways regular peop…

Sounds like a potentially useful experience but, what does a development lead have to do with designing good UI?

What are you implying? That development leads should not or could not contribute to designing a good UI?

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

#242

Post by wisty »

siromega wrote: post #123

The simple answer is that MS had to add all those buttons in the ribbon to make the UI more touch friendly. You cant right click on a tablet with your finger.

I can't believe this wasn't upvoted more.

Moving to this design is a step in the right direction. They need to do more - like ax the filesystem altogether (rendering this step meaningless), but that's another story.

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

#243

Post by Lewisham »

archgoon wrote: post #186
super_mario wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS X already has that, but I still would not like to see the filesystem hidden from me. It's just too valuable idea for it to go away and it takes us further away from general computing to turning our computers into appliances owned by our OS vendor.

I think the idea of the parent poster is that there would be no file system (at least not in the sense of a tree hierarchy of directories), just a large database with some SQL like language exposed through the GUI.

I wasn't necessarily heading in that direction, I just meant modifying how data is presented to users (and, in fact, the platform APIs too). I guess once you reach that abstraction, it doesn't really matter whether it's a filesystem or WinFS or whatever else.

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

#244

Post by mitjak »

sid0 wrote: post #125
revscat wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lion 10.7.1 was a whopping 79.3MB. That's nothing, especially for an OS point release. And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.

Lion 10.7.1 was a whopping 79.3MB. Well, they might have fixed it then. All I know is that I balked at the 1GB OS X update waiting for me. And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive. The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries. You will find tons of PCs running Windows in not-so-rich countries, orders of magnitude more. That is exactly…

To add to the other voices here, it's massively popular in Eastern Europe not so much as a computer replacement but as a symbol of wealth, regardless of whether you actually possess any.

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

#245

Post by jhdavids8 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #165
chetan51 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distri…

If your ridiculously large intellect can stop applauding itself for one second, I hope you can find time to read this.

That was probably the largest amount of psychobabble condensed into 2 paragraphs I've ever seen. Seriously, your first point was extremely over-simplified and you were called out on it, rightfully. I could make your first argument about anything. Watch: "Only 50% of people went out to eat this weekend. Clearly, we should get rid of 50% of restaurants." or "Only 50% of cars are driven on any given day. Clearly, we should just git rid of 50% of the cars."

Your first point was a miss, and chetan called you out on it. Then, you insult his intelligence and go into a psychobabble rant about little to nothing that applies. Jesus dude, come down a peg or two.

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

#246

Post by jhdavids8 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #165
chetan51 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distri…

And your argument starts off with some random assumption that "games have the best UI". You can't lead into the rest of your argument with some random tidbit you assume is true. Some games have great UIs, some have shitty ones. Largely, it's irrelevant to your point, whatever it may be.

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

#247

Post by pinaceae »

The ribbon discussion reminds a lot of the iPad one - all the IT "geniuses" simply don't get it.

Hate the ribbon. Hate the iPad.

But for the majority of users, those are massive improvements in UI.

Right-Click, Double-Click, ... arcane commands only people like and love that are good at memorizing actions. And if those memorized actions are gone, the rage begins. You need to be anal to love the old Office UI or the command line. Do you remember the hate the old Office UI got in the past from the very people who now praise it?

Personally, I think the ribbon UI was the ballsiest move that MS did in a decade. It showed real guts, real vision. In Office 2010, they improved upon it, making Excel, Powerpoint and Word actually more usable. Exposing new functions and teaching me about them, from within the UI.

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

#248

Post by anigbrowl »

jhdavids8 wrote: post #245
anigbrowl wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distri…

If your ridiculously large intellect can stop applauding itself for one second, I hope you can find time to read this. That was probably the largest amount of psychobabble condensed into 2 paragraphs I've ever seen. Seriously, your first point was extremely over-simplified and you were called out on it, rightfully. I could make your first argument about anything. Watch: "Only 50% of people went out to eat this weeken…

My first post was a joke, to emphasize how silly I thought the UX critique was. Complaining that software and civil engineering are not the same is so obvious as to be trite.

I stand by my point above, though. Call it psychobabble if you like, but I like my metaphors. Shoot me.

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

#249

Post by ordinary »

prewett wrote: post #180
hernan7 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "copy to" and "move to" buttons, seem to be some variation on the old "send to" command, which is currently available via both right-click and menu bar. (For those not familiar with Windows: if I select a file, the "send to" options are: compressed folder, create desktop shortcut, documents, fax, email, burn to DVD, network directory.) Personally, that's an command that I never use; not sure how popular it is wit…

I love "Send To". I keep a link to Notepad2 and a hex editor in there (and sometimes Emacs) so that I can easily use a real editor or get a hex dump. It's kind of like "Open With..." except that it's always in the menu and somehow Open With... might not pick up the program you want, so you have to waste time traversing the directory tree.

You might like this, then:

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/7784/emacss.png

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