Whatever Happened to UI Consistency?

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“MS research revealed that by almost every measure of user experience the old office had failed completely. They even published some of this in order to explain the changes starting with the fact that 9 of the 10 most requested features in office were already there. They have click maps and videos of users searching in vain frustration to accomplish a given task that was often right in front of them”

And yet, with Office 2007, my wife took over 3 hours to figure out how to “Save” a document, and when she did, she was PO’d to find that it didn’t save in the format she wanted. Then, when she wanted to print the document, it took another 2 hours. After 3 days of flailing around, she finally uninstalled it and switched back to Office 2005.

This sounds suspiciously like “changing the software to fix the problems for the 10% of users who complained about problems while simultaneously destroying the usability for the 90% who never complained.” Our development group has been guilty of this, as well:

"Well, no one ever seems to use this feature, so it’s okay if we remove it."
Of course, what we didn’t pay attention to was that practically everyone used the feature, they just never said anything about it because it worked fine for them!

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I’m not giving up XP until windows 7. Vista is by far the worst MS OS every and it’s new look is just a cheap knock off of OS X.

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I’ve been using the ribbon in Office 2007 for a while now, and it constantly surprises me how easy it is to find stuff.

I needed to convert some text to a table in Outlook (Word is the editor). It took me seconds to find Insert, Table, Text to table.

We’ve recently deployed O2k7 across the office, I haven’t had many issues with it at all.

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I used Mac for 2 years before switching back to Windows (Vista) recently. Anyone else see signs of the Mac UI going a bit off the rails? It’s true that Leopard made some advances (so long, brushed metal and the HIG’s laughably made-up justifications for it). But Apple’s been lavishing so much attention on the iPod and especially the iPhone that it’s not surprising they’re trying to crowbar some of those products’ UI into the Mac OS. The left-right on/off switch in Time Machine is an egregious offender. As is any usage of Helvetica where there was none before.

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I honestly don’t know how I feel about the Ribbon yet. I use 2003 at work, and at home I have 2007 but I have had little occasion to use it yet. In the little time I’ve used it, I had some initial difficulty finding stuff I used to find easily in the menus. I also couldn’t figure out how to access options that disappear when you make the window smaller. However, I have coworkers on 2007 who swear by it. But seriously… 3 hours to locate the save icon at the top? That sounds like an exaggeration :slight_smile:

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Interestingly enough, it sounds like a lot of work went into figuring out the Office 2007 ribbon, and in addition, there was a nice post about “it’s not what you say, it’s what you’re actually doing” mixed in there as well. Here’s a blog series from one of the folks that actually worked on the UI. I suggest going down to the bottom (where the first entry is) and reading backward.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/tags/Why+the+New+UI_3F00_/default.aspx

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Makes you appreciate Mac OX’s UI even more. Although I’m sure there’s probably a few gaffs in there too.

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It’s not just the UI. Every new release puts critical functionality like ODBC setup or network configuration in a different part of the menus, or puts it in/takes it out of Control Panel, etc. If you’ve got to relearn everything anyway, there goes another argument against switching to Linux.

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You simply have a choice as a developer: get the product out, or make it perfect. Most of the time, these days, the focus is getting it out in “working” condition and fix issues with a whole hell of a lot of updates and patches. Vista itself was a rush job and people know that. Release dates during the project were constantly being pushed further and further into the future, and the end product wasn’teven really as ambitious as they had expected to be. Worse yet, it works best (note, I say “best”. It will work less than optimally otherwise) with only the most advanced hardware.

And to what purpose? Most people only use their computers to check their email and do minor surfing of the internet.

Most people can do these things with much less hardware and much less flashy interfaces than they have. ( You can still use a system with a P3 processor and about 128 MB RAM, and a now miniscule 20 GB harddrive running Windows 2000 for this sort of stuff. You probably can do it with less, but this is the most “out of date” systemI’ve seen people use.) You can also still old out of date software to do your bookkeeping, some minor photo retouching, and to play some basic everyday media files. (I know someone who until recently still used floppies to install and save their quickbooks files).

In all honesty user’s… well… use… hasn’t changed much in recent years.

What DOES drive the technological market is the constant desire to have the newest, greatest, and often times, most expensive hardware and software out there. It’s almost always a status symbol driven market similar to the fashion industry.

It’s very difficult to build a case against that.

So of course you get the push to have a new product out virtually every “season”, which goes back to the decision I mentioned earlier: design well, or design quickly. Designing quickly is going to win out usually because otherwise you aren’t going to have a product to sell within the proper market time frame.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years, as hardware has outstripped user’s needs, (with, perhaps the exception of SSD’s, which are relatively new still and have room to expand, and RAM, which programs seem to just LOVE to gobble up these days). My prediction is to expect to see ever crappier user interfaces and even more buggy software than ever before as the tech industry scrambles to create more fashionable products in shorter periods of time. What I, and I’m sure many others are wishing for is that this nonsense stops and people take the time to build truly beautiful programs that are efficently coded and take up minimal resources.

But don’t expect it any time soon.

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I read an article about changing the gui to minesweeper back before Vista even came out. This article is telling and explains WHY these inconsistencies exist and why it takes so long for Microsoft to create an OS.

http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/shellblog/archive/2006/09/26/The-UI-design-minefield-2D00-er_2E002E002E00_-flower-field_3F003F00_.aspx

MS has never been innovators. They “borrow” ideas from other companies and take them to another level. Those asking for MS to innovate their OS stop holding your breath. XP was a necessary upgrade for those users still stuck on ME (UGH), and 98 … AND for those who used 2000. Lets face it 2000 is stable but ungodly slow in booting and shutting down. It’s ugly. 98 … well I don’t have to say anymore. BUT Vista in this isn’t necessary. It’s to a) make money b) give those business users who paid for the upgrade service to reap their rewards. As a new experience it offers very little that can’t be downloaded. (except for DirectX 10).

The reality folks is that we’re stuck with it for better or worse. Our ability to buy XP ends this month. Stock up now…

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Instead of bashing Microsoft (an easy target) I hope the point is getting thru that all developers need to be wary of the guidelines and consistently follow them. At a previous job I was known as Mr. AnalRetentive for strictly reviewing screen design. It was a tad annoying for those designing screens and for me, but in the end we had a consistent UI.

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What’s surprising about Vista’s inconsistencies and it’s components that seem like throwbacks from the Win9x era is that Vista is supposed all new, totally rewritten. The UI goofs kinda suggest a different story…

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I think that Vista is a great OS when it works. After almost two years I have had no problems at all with anything, a first with any Operating Systems, including OSX and three different distributions of Linux.

That being said, a lot of people are complaining about Vista just because they can. Microsoft did promise a lot of features that they didn’t provide from the original ideas of Longhorn. The Vista UI looks great, but you’re right in the sense that a lot of it has just been pulled from previous versions.

Next to everyone I know that has complained about Windows Vista seem to moan that things are different, like trying to get to the desktop properties, screens to set up wireless, etc.

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The problem Jeff is thought out real criticism about the UI of Vista is lost in the din of “blah Vista suks” from the general population.

I cant figure out what is so good about OSX. I mean Leopard had more security threats in the three months it was out then Vista had all year in 2007. Oh yah, it’s all that lipstick.

When stuff fails in osx… no error message nothin, it “Just Doesn’t Work”.

There are issues with vista’s control panel navigation too… which was mentioned by another. All these little things add up. As a developer i like Vista, but as a general user i just have to sigh. So close… yet…

So osx is the lipstick explicitive i want to date, but Windows is the gal you want to marry.

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If you think the “nerd rage” over vista is unwarranted, you probably haven’t read this yet:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

or this:

http://badvista.fsf.org/

The article that you link to about “nerd rage” is understandably naive and misinformed, but the fact is that a great deal of the horribleness of Vista is real. And as you seem to have discovered, everyone can find something not to like, even if they discount the bigger picture :).

Personally, I’m thrilled about this. Nothing the open source community could have done would have created an opportunity for Linux anywhere close to the windfall that the Vista disaster has created.

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I read through some of that example chapter and theres one thing I don’t agree with. He says that instead of using “Username” as a label you use “Member name”. I think this might be a little dated. Most people know what a “Username” is.

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My annoyance is the drop down of the address bar, press the down arrow thing and it brings up a list of recent file locations but mixed in there are also recent internet locations. I believe up until SP1 clicking on one of these did nothing, this changed to open the web browser to that site in SP1 but really if I am in an explorer window am I really likely to want to bring up an internet address no, I am probably moving, copying or opening files.

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You think that’s bad, try using Office 7…

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While I’d agree that consistency in vista is terrifying; the OS in itself definitely better than XP.

@Glyph: Both the articles speak only of DRM; which you need to watch BD movies. Badvista article is the usual FSF stuff. Peter Gutmann’s article is much debated over - I personally haven’t seen “increase in CPU usage while using WMP11”. Regardless of that, both of the links don’t say “Vista is bad” but “Vista is evil” which is a totally different story.

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@ Vincent: “This weekend, I have been changing a friend’s wireless network security from WEP to WPA. Mac OS X had such a hard time figuring out the password and the security has changed. The only way to change it was to remove the password in the Keychain…not very user-friendly.”

I’d say if you are reconfiguring your network to use a different authentication scheme you should have the wherewithal to figure out the solution. BTW, I’d have gone to Internet Connect and changed the option there rather than the Keychain directly.

But, it does speak to a larger issue: any time you do something for a user, you risk them not being able to correct it themselves should the situation change.

In any case, the example shown in the article is a Windows 3.1 dialog box which just has never gotten changed. Set aside the obvious “why” (wouldn’t most people want to manage their fonts with some kind of a preview rather than just as a list of names?) The question is, why wouldn’t Microsoft at some point “clean house” and eradicate all uses of a particular type of control (such as the Win16 controls in use here)?

I can think of a few reasons:

  1. You need to look at each functional area. Just replacing the tree control with one from this century would end up making the other controls on the dialog look dated and ugly. It’s quite likely that starting with “all Win16 tree controls in the OS” and expanding to “all functional areas containing those Win16 tree controls” would end up netting a major UI revamp project across the entire OS, far too big for a five-year “rewrite” to absorb.

  2. You also need to consider external training and documentation, and not just first-party. How many user manuals for other hardware and software include instructions for navigating that clunky dialog box? How many IT shops have instructions for setting up a machine using that dialog box? To break all those aged manuals, you’d have to grow a pair, and Microsoft is apparently incapable of doing this (ex: Zune DRM fiascos).

  3. Next, you have to worry about all the third-party “close but not quite” duplicates of the dialog. How many third-party apps will you break by making this dialog work in a reasonable and modern manner?

  4. You have to care in the first place. Microsoft does not see a large portion of its cash cow user base migrating to anything besides the next version of Windows in the next ten years. They may be wrong, but they don’t see it. They just plain do not care, at a fundamental level. The Win16 controls are good enough. You can live with it, and you will pay for it, just like you have seven times before (Win 3.1, '95, '98, ME, 2k, XP, and now Vista).

Microsoft’s general policy here is, “when we rewrite that functional area, we’ll update its UI [to the state of the art at the moment, which will again be dated the following year]”. This leads to a general OS blight and broken windows down every half-dark alley. On the other hand, it does serve as a pretty good indicator as to where Microsoft has invested its efforts in each release: you know that if the UI still looks like Barney Rubble designed it then that functional area has not been worked on in any significant way. Obviously, Microsoft cares about fonts (at least the ClearType aspect), but it is obvious it doesn’t care a whit about how the user manages their fonts.