I meditate often to identify the negative patterns in my thoughts behavior. I can then formulate a strategy to prevent them or overcome them. One aspect of negativity in my spiritual life that I haven’t been able to overcome? My daily negative experience with Vista. Vista doesn’t pass the spirituality test; let’s hope the next operating system does. If the operating system you make is a daily source of negativity for users, you need to improve the operating system and eliminate that negativity.
In my meditation earlier this morning, I was cycling through my thoughts. Where am I angry, where am I depressed, upset, etc. And there it was, as it is every day: Vista.
It’s worth noting (for those that haven’t tried the new Win 7 Calc) that the above screen shot is of Calc in Programmer Mode. There’s also Standard, Scientific, and Statistics modes.
Would’ve been nice to have a graphing mode, oh well.
The main issues is that windows is a developer universe so people think in functions rather than in experiences.
As I normally say it’s not the what but the how that’s important.
A button is not just a button that is defined by the function that sits behind the click, it’s also the actual visual appearance of the button before the click. It’s part of the experience.
The Task Manager update is also very nice with all the new graphing for disk usage and some more process information
It’s there since Vista.
I think MS had to go for a compromise - if they also tried to change system’s visuals more than just to show off new infrastructure code (see wddm and aero), they’d risk some even more problems and release delays. They’ve had time to stabilize the infrastructure and now they’re going to take advantage of it, whether it’s aero (aero shake, x-ray window view, better taskbar thumbnails) or the improved security (simplifying UAC and making the world a better place because of so many more apps running with low privileges now).
That calc ui is very web2.0. Guess that’s why users want these days, everything to look like a Mac?
That certainly doesn’t look like a Mac at all. And that’s one of the bigger problems with Vista: they tried to make it look too much like a Mac, but failed miserably. The Mac UI style is neither fisher-pricey nor visually cluttered like Vista’s.
People don’t move to Vista because XP is good enough and Vista is a disruptive upgrade. Today users want incremental upgrades, just look what Apple is preparing to to with Snow Leopard. Microsoft doesn’t undestand this and instead gives them bling and pointless UI redesigns.
I can hear the criticism already. DON’T improve unless it’s visual!?! OMG Jeff has gone CRAZY!
However, I understand your point. Users generally won’t notice that the product has changed unless they can SEE the improvements. This is in the general sense. It’s not entirely valid for those users (such as the readership here) that rely on software being updated in small ways to either improve the experience by eliminating bugs, or changing behaviour in such a way that makes a program easier and more powerful.
So in that sense - if you want your users to appreciate the improvements you’ve made, update the UI accordingly.
Of course none of this changes the fact that a calculator app that attempts to mimic a physical calculator, complete with graphical buttons that you click with a mouse, and a single line display is completely freakin’ stupid to the core.
I saw PalmSource learn this the very hard way. When they acquired Be, Inc. they spent three years working on a new OS called Palm OS 6. It that looked and behaved exactly like the previous Palm OS versions. Under the covers it was more advanced, powerful, consistent and stable. It had real memory management, threading, processes, and other features adopted from BeOS. And nobody wanted it.
The Palm OS Licensees (which were rapidly disappearing) didn’t want it. End users didn’t want it. PalmSource backpedaled and called it Palm OS Cobalt so it didn’t seem like a direct replacement for the existing OS. In the end they spent three years developing a product that didn’t appear on a single device.
During that time Palm, Inc. (the hardware half of the Palm family) was forced to do the innovating. They introduced Bluetooth libraries, soft input areas, better flash card support, and other tangible new features.
Palm recently announced it has developed a href=http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/08/the-palm-pre/the Palm Pre and webOS/a. This is Palm giving PalmSource (now ACCESS) the final snubbing it deserves. Palm no longer uses Palm OS! When Palm developed a new OS, it made something that doesn’t resemble the outdated Palm OS at all, and early reviews are quite positive.
I don’t totally agree with this post. I do agree that all improvements should improve the end user’s experience in some way, but I don’t think that the improvement has to be directly related to the change or that the user has to be consciously aware of the improvement to appreciate it.
What about refactoring code to improve maintainability or reusability, for example? The user will probably not notice a change like this, but it could potentially give the user a better experience. Maybe the software will be released sooner or updates will get out faster. These types of changes aren’t always worth making, but I think they certainly can be.
I googled for some stats and found out that IE’s market share is around 75%, with 40% for IE7 and 35% for IE6. So I made a mistake in my previous post, but the real percentage still supports my point. Everyone I know who still uses IE6 does so because they find IE7’s UI awkward to use, because it’s very different from what they are used to. Maybe it’s technically better and more streamlined, but most people don’t care about streamlined user interfaces. Just look at the popularity of Hotmail and MySpace.
The main goal of IE7 should have been to stop people from using the awkward and insecure IE6. IE6 is the one and only browser used by people who just accept default software and don’t bother to look further. The rest of us switched to Firefox/Opera a long time ago. So pulling people away from IE6 is a very difficult task, and is hampered by the revolutionary IE7 UI.
One shouldn’t confuse UI improvements with more eye-candy. Making things transparent and glide everywhere is very different to working on making things more intuitive and accessible with less clicks for common tasks and increased consistency between applications.
Slightly on a tangent, from a support perspective, we discourage our customers from switching to Vista as our website solution does not work properly under Vista.
From a personal standpoint, I have yet to see a computer running Vista that did not have problems.
This line should’ve been all changes should improve the end user’s experience.