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Cortana is really bad

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Re: Cortana is really bad

#181

Post by Pxtl »

nerflad wrote: post #131
Pxtl wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically the command-line probelms all over again, but with english instead of commands. It's only marginally better. So far nothing has been better than AutoCAD's approach, for me - all GUI commands are echo'd into the command-line as you do them, so you can see what commands you're using if you want to key them in later. Negligible hotkeys because the commands work so well and are more memorable than hotkeys.

A GUI with a 1-1 mapping to command line arguments sounds like heaven. Of course this exists for something like GVim, but I had no idea commercial software of any kind was doing it. That makes scriptability possible!

Yeah, AutoCAD is old so you have a lot of people with old command-line habits. I first used it in like '94. Loved the command-line and gui hybrid it used. Commands were composable too, like the "line" command would then ask you for where the first point was and you could use locator commands like "midpoint" or "endpoint" which in turn would take an existing line object as a parameter to select the origin of the new line. Haven't touched it in over a decade though, no idea what it looks like now.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#182

Post by ska »

tjoff wrote: post #178
ska wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Update as I can't edit original. This was not meant as a comment on the preference between MacOS and Windows, or the user experience. What I am questioning was the assertion that UX was the major engineering driver for MS in building windows. i.e. "optimized for". While I can buy the argument that apple's engineering was driven by UX (for good or for ill) it doesn't seem to me that this was true for Microsoft. Not th…

Actually MS has had really consistent and great UX. To the point where any slightly computer-literate person would get an intuition about where something ought to be located and be almost always correct. It is not as beginner -friendly as apples products, but far more user -friendly.

My main work machine is windows - I wouldn’t go that far though I think I know where you are coming from. From where I sit some of their engineering decisions seem much more driven by platform goals, etc, rather than user experience.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#183

Post by WorldMaker »

ethbro wrote: post #170
WorldMaker wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with you for a number of reasons, but it starts with I think you have "smart" mixed up as search boxes are the epitome of "dumb", even if a lot of work goes into them behind the scenes to make sure they anticipate what the user wants. Google proved many years ago that average users are more than happy to use a search bar as their primary user interface to everything. I've seen so many users that to go to a…

I used "smart" because ML / AI seemed overly charitable for what was going on behind the scenes. And it's certainly distinct (or tries to be) from "you must type in exactly and only the name of the thing you want to find". The issue with MS post-ribbon, and I would say this applies to Settings as well, is that I've yet to see them form a good answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the Ribbon?" Strictly…

The driving guideline behind discoverability in a ribbon (and to a lesser extent the Settings) is to balance a combination of the most common tasks and the most powerful ones front and center. The answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the ribbon?" is sometimes "Maybe there's a more common way or a more powerful/capable way to do it" because sometimes "it's no longer meant to be discoverable". (Though sometimes its simply it was underestimated to be a common need, maybe because its primary users opted out of telemetry.)

Personally, I think most of the ribbons are extremely discoverable, but obviously your mileage may vary. I agree though that the search boxes for ribbon functions should offer a "teach me to fish" moment of maybe somehow helping you see how you missed that option in the ribbon. Office at least uses the same icons consistently between search and the ribbon so you could potentially get used to the landmark and eventually figure out the sign posts along the way (and Help documentation still exists and is also in the search results).

> I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.

The Ribbon (and most everything else in this post-Ribbon era) was extremely influenced by user telemetry to figure out what users were actually using day-to-day. It was designed in coordination with user studies to observe how to make it as discoverable as they could. It didn't just come out of thin air in some ivory tower specification, it was prioritized as much as anything else by telemetry from users.

Similar for Settings, I'm sure the things that are moved into the new application and out of the old Control Panel are being prioritized by telemetry. It never surprises me that the users that most often complain about their "favorite" most commonly used settings not getting migrated most often don't have telemetry on.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#184

Post by knieveltech »

castis wrote: post #18
knieveltech wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly does nothing of the sort. There should absolutely be some kind of consequence associated with this kind of flaming dumpster fire making it's way into a production environment.

Well then the entire world should rejoice that people like yourself and OP are not in control of other peoples livelihood.

It's telling to see how casually the notion of personal accountability in the workplace is discarded. For the record, OP getting his wish still leaves the individuals responsible in control of their own livelihood, they just chose poorly.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#185

Post by wvenable »

TheGRS wrote: post #180

Alright, I'm glad this is brought up. I am back on Windows 10 after being on OSX for years. For the most part its fine, but it does a lot of things that I just plain don't understand. I have no idea how to configure the little metro page to my liking (like, I know how to remove stuff, but how do I make it useful?). Why does it even exist? I can see Microsoft put a lot of work into making Win10 user friendly, but it s…

Honestly I'm kind of ok with key reassignment apps not coming with the OS. At this point I'm more annoyed with the software that come pre-installed on operating systems than what they don't have. I can always download whatever apps I want.

But I totally agree that designers don't understand their users. I think there's a sense that Windows has to be "cool" like Android and iOS rather than just "useful".

Re: Cortana is really bad

#186

Post by TheGRS »

frandroid wrote: post #21
eterm wrote: post #12

The whole experience of the start search / cortana / mix is horrible. It can't even fuzzy search. Type "view event" and it brings up "view event logs", if you type "view events" it instead searches bing, in edge, for "view events". Edge isn't even my default browser. Bing isn't my default search engine, and I didn't want to browse the web. Any slight deviation from an exact phrase and it goes straight from "here's th…

Back when I was at MSN everything become oriented at delivering Bing searches at all costs, so whoever did this probably boosted their stats, got a 4.5 on their review, and now nobody dares improving the behaviour lest they have to justify the millions of lost Bing queries per day.

I bought Windows 10 this year and if this is the sort of behavior I should expect from a Win OS these days then I'll probably just go to linux or even back to OSX.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#187

Post by vanderZwan »

mcny wrote: post #147
milcron wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana.

> The Education edition of Windows lacks Cortana. Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I just have a web browser open. Windows, you don't need to do everything at this very moment. Why can't Windows Update be as simple as this? https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d... https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png Instead what I get (even wit…

> Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM.

I have 64 GB of RAM, and even tried turning off the swap. Still see that HDD light blinking. I don't know what is going on.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#188

Post by toss1 »

castis wrote: post #94
toss1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? This is not only a worse-than-useless, waste-of-user-time feature on its own, but it actively interrupts the user to get their attention! So, this PM decided to put into a production environment a feature that interrupts a customer's workflow for no good benefit. It doesn't even benefit Microsoft, so he's not even being a bandit. This is the very definition of stupid. Hurt the other guy, hurt yourself, for no…

The question was not whether or not an employer should continue to pay a person. The question was whether or not some angry internet person should be responsible for the livelihood of a developer of a product they are having difficulty with.

Oh, so it'd be ok if the "angry internet person" hust happened to be the PM's boss, noticed this abomination & fired them?

Indeed, if more "angry internet people" (with good clear points like this one) actually provoked performance reviews, we might have better software.

Quit the sophistry. The guy had a real point and you're merely trying to make distracting noise.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#189

Post by skizm »

CydeWeys wrote: post #38

Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…

Microsoft gets to harvest your data more easily, has a "feature" that can "rival" Siri, and artificially increases Bing's marketshare in terms of total number of searches. Win-win-win for MS. That said, I have no idea how they managed to mess up file/program search so badly. I have had the same experience as you searching for files/programs I know for a fact are installed and it refuses to find them.

Re: Cortana is really bad

#190

Post by staz »

_lce0 wrote: post #164
nerflad wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That same thing (Calc/Calculator) happens to me every day. haha. I never thought about how that is probably affecting a ton of users.

oh my, I'm not alone! ;) Anybody knows how to get that "calc" thing working as expected?

Have the same problem all the time, one time it was too much and I just uninstalled Libreoffice (of course in the end I just had to reinstall it)
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