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Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

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Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#61

Post by cc_ »

phaus wrote: post #44
TwistedWeasel wrote: post #17

It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next roun…

>It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. It is admirable, but their work towards a solution will be fruitless. N-Trig's pressure sensitive stylus technology is vastly inferior to Wacom. Sure, most people can't tell the difference, but most artists can. Sure, artists can still produce professional quality work with an N-Trig stylus, but the experience of using an N…

The SP2 Wacom setup was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, in my experience -- accuracy was terrible in the corners / near the edges, and parallax was a serious issue, if you did not write/draw with the pen perpendicular to the surface of the screen, there was a significant offset from the tip of the pen to where the line was actually drawn. These were bad enough to turn me (and at least one professional artist that I know) off from buying one.

The move to N-Trig hypothetically fixes both of these. Early reviews/videos say that corner accuracy is greatly improved, and the lack of a separate digitizer layer allows a thinner optical stack, reducing parallax (and allowing the device overall to be thinner).

Driver support has historically been an issue, but msft seems to be improving things significantly.

There are fewer levels of sensitivity and hovering doesn't work quite as well, but I am overall reasonably optimistic about the switch.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#62

Post by rasz_pl »

GodEater wrote: post #20

It's great to read that Gabe has had such a positive experience with a Microsoft product team - but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's because he's a somebody. His posts on penny-arcade reach an enormous audience, and so of course they're going to do their damn best to make sure he sings the product's praises. My experience is very different. I've been working for an enormous organisation for the last 4 years, a…

> They make great promises that they'll go away and think about it, and then nothing happens.

but this is EXACTLY how they treated Gabe. They didnt fix ANYTHING, they just showed up some prototypes and talked about fixing some stuff.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#63

Post by krschultz »

TwistedWeasel wrote: post #17

It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next roun…

Seemingly pedantic point, but this is a UX design problem not a QA problem. QA is largely something that you want to automate, minimize, and reduce the cost of. QA is making sure things work as designed. UX design is something that you want to maximize. That's figuring out what you want to make.

The tools of the UX design trade are very different. I think the best UX is done with mockups that go into customer feedback sessions. The middle ground is lots of static drawings of UX, which leads to a lot of bikeshedding and not a lot of real data. Obviously the worst is no UX design at all.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#64

Post by steele »

ebbv wrote: post #39

So if you're a famous millionaire the Surface Pro 3 is the device for you, and Microsoft will make sure to fix all your problems with it. Hooray?

It is probably a stretch to call Mike Krahulik a famous millionaire. Microsoft used his art in their recent ad campaigns, which itself was a response to a prior unsolicited positive writeup on their product. So it is perfectly reasonable that they get his feedback (albeit far too late). Not all the problems were fixed, and I suspect some of the problems can't really be fixed given the hardware that is being shipped. To some degree this is damage control on the part of Microsoft, because on his initial impressions with SP3, Krahulik was clear that he could not recommend this to illustrators with a similar workflow -- most of which are not famous millionaires.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#65

Post by dman »

dublinben wrote: post #35
dman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has pretty good potetial in hospitals, education and insurance where ability to take notes is important. Especially the use case where you are expected to stand and jot down things on a tablet sized device.

Those enterprises have already been well satisfied by the convertible tablets from Lenovo, Fujitsu, Panasonic, etc. for years. I don't think the Surface will make much headway into those fields, beyond the few people who are literally working in the field and not in offices.

I think the surface form factor is much slimmer than the bulky things I see in the hospital. This might be to the convertible tablets what Ipad was to the tablets before it.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#66

Post by Aissen »

> I could see some of them shaking their heads and looking at each other. They were very obviously bothered that they had not seen this before.

To me this looks like engineers that had foreseen the problem but were promptly ignored by UX people. Or maybe the other way around.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#67

Post by chillingeffect »

TwistedWeasel wrote: post #17

It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next roun…

> It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution.

It is, but it isn't some trade secret, they could open source this and have 1,000s of people converging toward the solution. Why are they so hung up and being The Ones Who Deliver The Software And The Hardware?

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#68

Post by [deleted] »

phaus wrote: post #44
TwistedWeasel wrote: post #17

It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next roun…

>It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. It is admirable, but their work towards a solution will be fruitless. N-Trig's pressure sensitive stylus technology is vastly inferior to Wacom. Sure, most people can't tell the difference, but most artists can. Sure, artists can still produce professional quality work with an N-Trig stylus, but the experience of using an N…

[deleted]

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#69

Post by TwistedWeasel »

krschultz wrote: post #63
TwistedWeasel wrote: post #17

It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next roun…

Seemingly pedantic point, but this is a UX design problem not a QA problem. QA is largely something that you want to automate, minimize, and reduce the cost of. QA is making sure things work as designed. UX design is something that you want to maximize. That's figuring out what you want to make. The tools of the UX design trade are very different. I think the best UX is done with mockups that go into customer feedbac…

I somewhat disagree, it depends on how QA fits into your organization and how you scope its role. UX needs Quality Assurance too, and sometimes things get past the UX team and into a product - at that point new issues come to light during testing and should be fed back up to the responsible teams.

In general I view QA as the last line of defense before the customer, if your QA doesn't speak up about ANY issues with the product, technical, UX or otherwise then who will?

Of course, my view of the role of QA in product design may be different from others.

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