Rant: Microsoft: make up your mind with menus!
-
That's so true, and I can't even switch back to the UI from before in Word. :(
ROFLOLMFAO
-
You must be talking about Office 2007 and Vista...I'm still on XP and Office 2003 which still sort of feel a little new to me. I would have stayed with Windows 2000/Office2000 if it wasn't for them making later versions of DX9 not run on Win 2K, which there was no good reason for except to force me into XP. Really though, Windows hasn't improved any since 2000...just window dressing and eye candy which I don't need. If they really want to make headway in the market, they should get rid of the whole 'Client Access License' thing from their server products...that was the beginning of their downturn and when the market started working against them...too greedy. They should just Edit-->Undo Vista :)
I second that! 5 for that last comment…
ROFLOLMFAO
-
David Veeneman wrote:
If Microsoft wanted to improve usability, why didn't they put the functionality of the Ribbon in task panels? (The panes that appear to the right of your document in previous versions of Office). That approach would have allowed them to retain menus for the majority who were used to them, while providing a simplified command interface for those who need hand holding.
because the number of sidebar panels had grown out of control and was becoming unmanageable. IIRC there was also the problem that if they kept piling more crap into them it would become necessary to rework the UI again to allow for multiples visible at once. If anyone feels like digging them up the office team blogged in detail about why they did what they did and why the existing UI had grown unworkablely large.
-- If you view money as inherently evil, I view it as my duty to assist in making you more virtuous.
well, just to add a bit more sauce to this debate, if you've ever seen 3DS Max and the million buttons it presents you with and having spent years learning them all, then to suddenly change them for a fashion statement would generate a lot of ire as well. Individuals and companies put a considerable amount of time & energy (which translates to money) into knowledge of a user interface...it's not something to trifle with on a whim.
-
Absolutely, This post, too, is right on the money. There are two schools of thought about how humans operate: cognitivism behaviorism The cognitivists prize our ability to actually reason about the world and they think that user interfaces should be set up intelligently based on the specifics of the task at hand. The behaviorists think that people have automatic behaviors that are triggered by what they see and here -- and that these behaviors are triggered regardless of the logic of the situation. The behaviorist would suggest that the delete button be in the same place on the screen in all GUIs even if in some GUIs it was the only option. The cognitivist would say that in this case, only one button should be shown and it should be in the most convenient place on the screen. The cognitivists are idiots -- as are people who constantly redesign interfaces so that they look prettier. Everyone that I have seen trying to use the latest generation MS Excell hate the interface -- not because it is bad, but because they can't find things that have been confortable with for years.
Lowell Boggs wrote:
not because it is bad, but because they can't find things that have been comfortable with for years.
But this is what breeds the 'we have always done it that way' attitude. When things need to change it is always painful but people adapt. Before windows people were used to using other ways to pick items and those new fangled 'icons' were too hard to remember. Personally I would love to see an interface that has NO choices on it until you go look in a single tree view type menu and teach the application what you need to have on the screen because you use it. Or at very least offer that as an expert mode setting. I like the ribbons myself, I just can;t think that MS thinks they are new. The Delphi IDE had them years ago.
-
Lowell Boggs wrote:
not because it is bad, but because they can't find things that have been comfortable with for years.
But this is what breeds the 'we have always done it that way' attitude. When things need to change it is always painful but people adapt. Before windows people were used to using other ways to pick items and those new fangled 'icons' were too hard to remember. Personally I would love to see an interface that has NO choices on it until you go look in a single tree view type menu and teach the application what you need to have on the screen because you use it. Or at very least offer that as an expert mode setting. I like the ribbons myself, I just can;t think that MS thinks they are new. The Delphi IDE had them years ago.
Ray's point about the importance of innovations is a good one. However, training costs are not zero. How much productivity is lost when people are sitting at their desks scratching their heads trying to figure out how to use a feature that they had already mastered in the previous version? How much productivity is lost searching crappy help systems trying to figure out how to do the same thing they've always done but using new buttons, gestures, etc. How much of other people's time is lost when you finally give up and go ask your buddy and they get involved in a discussion of last night's game? My point is that change needs to be justified in terms of training costs. Point and click time is not really all that important -- we can move our hands very quickly. When a new design provides some truly "better" way then I'm very tolerant of change. But when its just a matter of adopting the latest cutsey fad then I feel that my software vendor is cheating me out of the time I have to spend learning their "new" approach. Instead of innovating in the areas of screen interaction, why doesn't microsoft make these products work faster
-
Ray's point about the importance of innovations is a good one. However, training costs are not zero. How much productivity is lost when people are sitting at their desks scratching their heads trying to figure out how to use a feature that they had already mastered in the previous version? How much productivity is lost searching crappy help systems trying to figure out how to do the same thing they've always done but using new buttons, gestures, etc. How much of other people's time is lost when you finally give up and go ask your buddy and they get involved in a discussion of last night's game? My point is that change needs to be justified in terms of training costs. Point and click time is not really all that important -- we can move our hands very quickly. When a new design provides some truly "better" way then I'm very tolerant of change. But when its just a matter of adopting the latest cutsey fad then I feel that my software vendor is cheating me out of the time I have to spend learning their "new" approach. Instead of innovating in the areas of screen interaction, why doesn't microsoft make these products work faster
While I don't argue about the 'work faster' part (who here has not had to take lunch while some large project builds) I am in slight disagreement about training justification. I guess this is just one of those chicken in the egg things. You can't stop innovation just because it will require people to re-learn a new way of doing things. Just think of what we would have missed out on had we thought that way through the years. Once again, change requires adaption. There is no getting around that. The problem I think, the real problem, is that there is much MORE change today than their has been in previous years and decades so the number of times we need to change and the degree of that change has gone up exponentially. That's really what I think causes the frustration. The fact that innovations happen on the heels of previous ones is a good thing in that it shows progress but a bad thing in that it forces people to always be in a 'learning' mode and delays their ability to reach the peak of their true cognitive ability, and thus their upper performance limits, in all situations. But does it really? You see cases all around you where some people always seem to be able to GET the latest tech changes quicker than others. Some people CAN adapt while some can't. And really while some can adapt fast in some areas they may not be able to in others, so I think it all evens out in the wash. Using the term 'cutesy fad' I think is minimising a bit the large amount of work done by MS user experience engineers. These guys (and gals) have a really tough job of trying to build a UI that works across ALL users. You know as well as I do that some people should not try to use anything above Wordpad because any more options are just too much for them to handle no matter ho well the UI arranges them, while others can handle anything you throw at the, These UI designers have to try to find a way to handle a majority of people. That's no easy task by any means. Are they going to miss some? Yes, that's just a simple fact of life. You can never please everyone all the time, but you can please most of the people. Until the tools allow users to build their own UIs to their liking, something that until now has only been seen in things like Star Trek control panels, users are always going to have issues with being told how their UI should work. The true fact is though that even if you had that ability today most people would complain that they have to take time to do THAT before they can become productive. You just can't win...
-
While I don't argue about the 'work faster' part (who here has not had to take lunch while some large project builds) I am in slight disagreement about training justification. I guess this is just one of those chicken in the egg things. You can't stop innovation just because it will require people to re-learn a new way of doing things. Just think of what we would have missed out on had we thought that way through the years. Once again, change requires adaption. There is no getting around that. The problem I think, the real problem, is that there is much MORE change today than their has been in previous years and decades so the number of times we need to change and the degree of that change has gone up exponentially. That's really what I think causes the frustration. The fact that innovations happen on the heels of previous ones is a good thing in that it shows progress but a bad thing in that it forces people to always be in a 'learning' mode and delays their ability to reach the peak of their true cognitive ability, and thus their upper performance limits, in all situations. But does it really? You see cases all around you where some people always seem to be able to GET the latest tech changes quicker than others. Some people CAN adapt while some can't. And really while some can adapt fast in some areas they may not be able to in others, so I think it all evens out in the wash. Using the term 'cutesy fad' I think is minimising a bit the large amount of work done by MS user experience engineers. These guys (and gals) have a really tough job of trying to build a UI that works across ALL users. You know as well as I do that some people should not try to use anything above Wordpad because any more options are just too much for them to handle no matter ho well the UI arranges them, while others can handle anything you throw at the, These UI designers have to try to find a way to handle a majority of people. That's no easy task by any means. Are they going to miss some? Yes, that's just a simple fact of life. You can never please everyone all the time, but you can please most of the people. Until the tools allow users to build their own UIs to their liking, something that until now has only been seen in things like Star Trek control panels, users are always going to have issues with being told how their UI should work. The true fact is though that even if you had that ability today most people would complain that they have to take time to do THAT before they can become productive. You just can't win...
The amount of effort put out by developers is unimportant. The question is this: is the negative impact to hundreds of millions of people outweighed by the benefit those hundreds of millions expect to get from the change? I strongly doubt it. Most people are not power users and the ROI on the training cost are never going to be recouped by the companies buying the s/w upgrade. I am not being a luddite, I am being a cheapskate.
-
The amount of effort put out by developers is unimportant. The question is this: is the negative impact to hundreds of millions of people outweighed by the benefit those hundreds of millions expect to get from the change? I strongly doubt it. Most people are not power users and the ROI on the training cost are never going to be recouped by the companies buying the s/w upgrade. I am not being a luddite, I am being a cheapskate.
Then again we go back to stifling change and at what point it is OK to do so. I am not trying to be a pain here but again, if we really looked at this we would have never improved past the pull down menu, if we had even managed to make it that far. Remember the days of all the various control key combinations just to format a document? It worked. It was a major pain remembering them, but it worked. Why advance past them? I bet you like using VI don't you :)
-
Then again we go back to stifling change and at what point it is OK to do so. I am not trying to be a pain here but again, if we really looked at this we would have never improved past the pull down menu, if we had even managed to make it that far. Remember the days of all the various control key combinations just to format a document? It worked. It was a major pain remembering them, but it worked. Why advance past them? I bet you like using VI don't you :)
My personal preferences are not the issue -- cost benefit analysis is. Change does not equal improvement. Some is and some isn't. For example, a Dvorak keyboard is a clear hands down winner for technical reasons but it has not caught on because of the retraining costs. Do you use a Dvorak keyboard? If not, why? Since you asked about VI: No I don't like VI -- although there are some technical arguments in its favor. Emacs is a major improvement but both editors have suffered from the historical fact that they evolved in an environment rich in diversity: there were a wide variety of computer monitors and keyboards. Sadly, each vendor chose to innovate in different directions -- leaving no standard keyboard design and more importantly, no standard software interface to the keyboard. Thus the clunky and ridiculous key bindings in emacs became the expected norm -- because they worked everywhere. I, on the other hand, became enamoured with the IBM's SPF terminals -- which had lots of named function keys. While the editing paradigm there was primitive, it was somewhat standard due to IBMs ubiquity. Later when I was called upon to write a text editor for PC's and unix boxes to be included in my company's product (which ran in both environments), I made sure that the named keys on the keyboard were properly interpreted. By this point in time function keys had appeared on unix keyboards but, lo and behold, only small parts of the unix s/w base -- excluding emacs -- took true advantage of them. (You could trick emacs into it but it took more work than a lot of people wanted to do -- and you needed different settings for each terminal) And when I tried to make my editor portable in the unix environments, I found that the IT people didn't know how to set up the termcap stuff properly and make it work consistently on every customer site we tried to deliver on -- I finally just started auto-generating a user override to the term cap database as part of the editor installation. It was a never ending hassle caused by unconstrained innovation and lack of proper training -- including my own: most of the users already knew how to run either VI or emacs and thus didn't need a new editor, they needed a way to plug their own editor into the rest of our tools suite and have it work correctly. Even if my function key based editor was some sort of improvement, it wasn't enough to justify the cost of training the users or the sys-admins. Ok, let me throw in one luddite remark: icons are joke. T
-
My personal preferences are not the issue -- cost benefit analysis is. Change does not equal improvement. Some is and some isn't. For example, a Dvorak keyboard is a clear hands down winner for technical reasons but it has not caught on because of the retraining costs. Do you use a Dvorak keyboard? If not, why? Since you asked about VI: No I don't like VI -- although there are some technical arguments in its favor. Emacs is a major improvement but both editors have suffered from the historical fact that they evolved in an environment rich in diversity: there were a wide variety of computer monitors and keyboards. Sadly, each vendor chose to innovate in different directions -- leaving no standard keyboard design and more importantly, no standard software interface to the keyboard. Thus the clunky and ridiculous key bindings in emacs became the expected norm -- because they worked everywhere. I, on the other hand, became enamoured with the IBM's SPF terminals -- which had lots of named function keys. While the editing paradigm there was primitive, it was somewhat standard due to IBMs ubiquity. Later when I was called upon to write a text editor for PC's and unix boxes to be included in my company's product (which ran in both environments), I made sure that the named keys on the keyboard were properly interpreted. By this point in time function keys had appeared on unix keyboards but, lo and behold, only small parts of the unix s/w base -- excluding emacs -- took true advantage of them. (You could trick emacs into it but it took more work than a lot of people wanted to do -- and you needed different settings for each terminal) And when I tried to make my editor portable in the unix environments, I found that the IT people didn't know how to set up the termcap stuff properly and make it work consistently on every customer site we tried to deliver on -- I finally just started auto-generating a user override to the term cap database as part of the editor installation. It was a never ending hassle caused by unconstrained innovation and lack of proper training -- including my own: most of the users already knew how to run either VI or emacs and thus didn't need a new editor, they needed a way to plug their own editor into the rest of our tools suite and have it work correctly. Even if my function key based editor was some sort of improvement, it wasn't enough to justify the cost of training the users or the sys-admins. Ok, let me throw in one luddite remark: icons are joke. T
Cool, this is turning out to be a worth while conversation...
Lowell Boggs wrote:
Change does not equal improvement. Some is and some isn't.
I fully agree here. I have seen many changes that happened over my 42 years of being on this planet that clearly were not of any benefit and seemingly done just 'for changes sake' rather than real value.
Lowell Boggs wrote:
Dvorak keyboard
This is a really odd one. I am not sure why it has not caught on to be honest. Saying that retraining is the cause is not really true. You do not have to retrain users on this technology really. You make decision to migrate to it, start teaching it in schools to children that have never used anything else and to them it becomes natural. As people migrate tot he work force these can coexist side by side with traditional devices and soon, after a majority of people have moved on and retired you have created the new standard. Yes, it takes time and planning, but if it is truly a beneficial change then taking it slow can happen and the end results can be good. Are you going to run into those odd issues where the IT guy that has to come down and touch the system is not used to it? Sure, but he can bring his own and plug it in for when he has to work, or learn to handle it and adapt. I trust that you selected this as a simple example so I am not going to spend too much time on it but it shows that you CAN introduce new things that may at first appear to require massive amounts of pain to change but really don't when you sit down and consider it. Now, IF the industry was coming out with new formats for keyboards every 2-3 years THAT WOULD be a pain. You have no time for the standards cycle to take hold and everyone gets stuck in the constant, low productivity mode, while they adapt time and time again. Evolution takes time but when conditions change to rapidly, even evolution can't adapt.
Lowell Boggs wrote:
icons are joke
I don't agree. The world is driven by them and their roots are carved into the very evolutionary process that bright us the ability to communicate. Pictographs, when done correctly, can be very beneficial. Maybe what you mean was that the icons often used are a joke, and there I might agree, but the theory of how they work is sound. The problem is that we have many difficult to convey constructs that do not fit into the pictograph par
-
Cool, this is turning out to be a worth while conversation...
Lowell Boggs wrote:
Change does not equal improvement. Some is and some isn't.
I fully agree here. I have seen many changes that happened over my 42 years of being on this planet that clearly were not of any benefit and seemingly done just 'for changes sake' rather than real value.
Lowell Boggs wrote:
Dvorak keyboard
This is a really odd one. I am not sure why it has not caught on to be honest. Saying that retraining is the cause is not really true. You do not have to retrain users on this technology really. You make decision to migrate to it, start teaching it in schools to children that have never used anything else and to them it becomes natural. As people migrate tot he work force these can coexist side by side with traditional devices and soon, after a majority of people have moved on and retired you have created the new standard. Yes, it takes time and planning, but if it is truly a beneficial change then taking it slow can happen and the end results can be good. Are you going to run into those odd issues where the IT guy that has to come down and touch the system is not used to it? Sure, but he can bring his own and plug it in for when he has to work, or learn to handle it and adapt. I trust that you selected this as a simple example so I am not going to spend too much time on it but it shows that you CAN introduce new things that may at first appear to require massive amounts of pain to change but really don't when you sit down and consider it. Now, IF the industry was coming out with new formats for keyboards every 2-3 years THAT WOULD be a pain. You have no time for the standards cycle to take hold and everyone gets stuck in the constant, low productivity mode, while they adapt time and time again. Evolution takes time but when conditions change to rapidly, even evolution can't adapt.
Lowell Boggs wrote:
icons are joke
I don't agree. The world is driven by them and their roots are carved into the very evolutionary process that bright us the ability to communicate. Pictographs, when done correctly, can be very beneficial. Maybe what you mean was that the icons often used are a joke, and there I might agree, but the theory of how they work is sound. The problem is that we have many difficult to convey constructs that do not fit into the pictograph par
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.