Here was a nice surprise: Visual Studio points out which of your typefaces are fixed-width, therefore most suitable for its code view. Simple, (pleasantly) surprising, elegant. Interestingly, I didn’t notice the explanatory caption at the time; it was obvious. Even better.
Aren’t computers supposed to deal with this crap for us? This UI does a not unreasonable service: it lets me know the track I’m playing has a nonstandard string in the Artist field:
So, you know what the problem is and can tell me about it, but you can’t just make it work? How about creating an association between similar strings and not bothering me with it? “It’s not Beyonce, it’s Beyoncé” is just patronizing; “Please fix my tags”? Fix your damn interpretation of my tags. Maybe I didn’t write that tag; Maybe I can’t change it. Fail.
I read several Apple blogs, and if there’s one consistent theme, it’s badmouthing the user experience of Microsoft products. Generally, I agree with them; there are a lot of problems, depending on the product.
But this post on Edible Apple really pissed me off. The author, by implication, asserts that problems one company had getting a Surface table working is endemic of a universal problem at Microsoft: “It’s a mystery to me why Microsoft still hasn’t learned this lesson.”
Hey, jackass, it’s not a consumer product, nor is it particularly mature. Here’s the comment I wrote, posted here as I fully expect it to get ignored:
Update: it never got posted. Surprise.
“Would it be that hard for Microsoft to create a more straightforward and consistent consumer experience for its entire product line?”
Yes. It’s herding cats taken to an extreme. We’re talking about thousands of people working all around the world. I’m sick of hearing about everything Microsoft makes as if it comes from some single, magic fountain, and if one application or service or whatever is sort of sucky, it reflects on everyone’s work. Apple maintains, what, twenty pieces of software? Microsoft makes hundreds. Complete consistency across a huge and varied product line is absolutely impossible (nor, in fact, entirely desirable), but getting to a point that makes sense for users of related products *is* a priority (In fact, it’s 80% of my job), and nobody ever points out improvements.
Also, since when is Surface a consumer product? You can’t just get a table from Best Buy; My advice to Gordon: Call your fucking sales rep before you whine about it. In fact, he revised the post (http://kinesismomentum.wordpress.com/2009/04/25/wither-our-post/) after being contacted by Microsoft, who agreed his experience wasn’t intentional: “Turns out, in fact, that our experience will most likely be unique, in that all customers should either receive an installation service or two days of training. He directed me to the online Surface “Eco-System Partners” site for additional help, info and community. I thanked him for the call, and we hung up.”
I respectfully request you update your post to reflect that, in fact, the issue isn’t just another instance of Microsoft giving users the short shaft on UX. Full disclosure: I work for them, but neither speak for nor apologize for them.
Once you establish a pattern, stick to it. This one was pointed out by @deeann and @geekosaur, and I had forgotten how awful it really is, I’m so used to it now.
First, Apple decided that the “Save to PDF…” button needed more options, and instead of replacing the command button with a proper drop down menu, they added a glyph to a command button:
I really, really hate it when people break standard controls like this, especially OS vendors in global dialogs (and in this case Apple is as much to blame as the usual offender, Microsoft). Predictability is a key tenent of usability: once a user learns how a control behaves, they expect every similar-looking control they encounter to behave that way. This example is particularly bad, as there is a standard control that does exactly what they want.
Full disclosure: I’ve had occasion recently to re-design a drop-down, but it’s for an extraordinarily specific purpose, we’ve styled it very differently from the standard, and use them in enough places (a sort of global-to-System Center) as to establish a pattern. Still, we all agree it’s a gamble and will be tested before it’s released.
Of course, Apple just made a lazy, arbitrary decision and called it a day, something they do too often for my taste.
That’s not the only problem with this dialog. Look at the arrow to the right of the Printer: drop down:
What do you expect it to do? @geekosaur assumed it was a list of recently used printers. I think that’s an entirely fair assumption. It’s not correct though, as the arrow serves as an expander to reveal more printing options and show a mini-preview:
So why the hell is it next to the drop-down? The proximity creates an implicit tie between the two controls, even though they are not functionally related at all. Here Microsoft gets it right, using a pattern specifically for expanders (the chevron) and often giving it a label like “More options…” I like them a lot; here’s a particularly good example, from the Vista global Save dialog:
These are fairly minor, and fairly easy to figure out, but I really expect more from a global, OS dialog, so it graduates to an EPIC FAIL.
