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.
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.
You gotta help a user out a little, especially if the error is catastrophic. In the case of this ridiculously cryptic error message, it is indeed catastrophic, since the user is barred from logging in, and is absolutely stuck. I’ve seen this one before*, but managed to get a snap of it this time since it was in a VM:
Well, now what? No help, no explanation, nothing. How do I fix this? What the hell is a trust relationship with a primary domain, anyway? There’s zero excuse for this abysmally terrible experience. Since I’m getting a friendly (heh) error string, not something like “Error 3X98C4” or “Fatal error in com.microsoft.security.DomainTrustController“), obviously someone bothered to write the string, associate it with the error and localize it. Why, then, isn’t there any information on what the causes might have been and (more importantly) what to do to fix it? Initially, I had no idea what to do, but learned through trial-and-error that logging in as Administrator and restarting solves it. Why does that work? No idea. How can I prevent this error in the future? Again, can’t say.
In general, I’m not a fan of help text. Nobody reads it, it’s often poorly written and an afterthought. However, in this case, there’s no alternative (i.e. a web search) to get the info.
*=And before you think this is a Server problem, and therefore not worth friendly user assistance, I’ve had it happen on Vista as well.
If you’re going to be obnoxious, at least don’t be lazy about it. I’m against using browser detection except in extreme circumstances, since it’s so easy to break, causes headaches for developers, testers and users alike, and is generally just sloppy. Here’s a perfect example of that sloppiness, in the form of this notice for IE 8:
Astute readers will notice immediately what’s wrong with this picture: I’m looking at this page in Firefox on a Mac. So, getting a new version of IE is absolutely impossible for me. Assuming this is done with a user-agent detection, why couldn’t they hide this for obviously non-upgradable configurations? But it gets worse. Say I’m interested in this mythical upgrade to my experience*. I click on the link and get, not directed to a useful page where I can obtain the update, but a cheesy pop-over:
Dude, yes, I’m interested. Why the interstitial bullshit? Anyway, I perform a second click, which leads me somewhere useful:
Well, I was just trying to get the browser, so I’m not sure what “Get all 3″ means†, but, whatever, OK, get me to downloadable file already! Nowhere does it say anything about compatibility, so I assume I can get a version that will, in fact, work on my computer. So I go ahead with my third click and get this unattractive, albeit informative, message:
Ah, there’s the fail. Finally. Now, obviously, they can do detection that indicates I’m not going to be able to use IE 8. Why couldn’t they have told me that before I bothered to click around?
Granted, I know better, and this was an exercise. But what if I just bought a Linux netbook, and really didn’t know? I’d be frustrated. Microsoft does enough frustrating things to/for users (though plenty of non-frustrating, quality ones!), it’s a shame to see this sort of sloppiness still going on. EPIC FAIL.
*=Also they lose points for trying to be clever/coy. Just say “Upgrade to IE 8,” for god’s sake.
†=Bundling crap with your desired download is so five years ago. Lame.
The concept of a desktop craigslist browser is a perfectly reasonable one, but just look at this:
Things wrong with this picture (and the others at the developer’s site):
This makes me want to cry, and curse MSFT for licensing RibbonX.