I knew it..Pretty Interfaces are just slow

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dale White
  • Start date Start date
This was already brought up a while ago. See the thread, "An objective
study that compares 3 OSs"
Click to expand...


Anything that has to call itself or be called objective ... isn't

akin to the 'reality based' left ;)

The new UI is plenty fast here ... and faster that the XP UI with the same
set of installed applications

now what?


Rich
 
Yeah, I figured someone already beat me to it. I didn't noticed until after
the post that it was dated in Feb.

As the great thespian Homer J Simpson once said...'DOH!"
 
Did you read the article, it was talking about user speed not system,
speed.
Click to expand...

Thats even worse .. objectivity about someone else's navigational abilities
on a new OS?

thats has to be the summit of cherrypicking nits.

"I bitch, therefore I am?"

Rich
 
I don't know about that. It's supposedly a measurable item. They tell X
number of users to do X number of tasks, and they see how long it takes the
users to do such tasks. By the report, it took the users 14% longer to do
the same task with Aero than XP.

An example of some of the time loss, is due to things like menu fading,
which looks cool, but if you're waiting for one menu item to close and the
other to open, it's lost time.

The point of the article is that most OSes strive to make this time faster,
but in Vista's case, the new interface slows users down..
 
Dale White said:
I don't know about that. It's supposedly a measurable item. They tell X
number of users to do X number of tasks, and they see how long it takes the
users to do such tasks. By the report, it took the users 14% longer to do
the same task with Aero than XP.

An example of some of the time loss, is due to things like menu fading,
which looks cool, but if you're waiting for one menu item to close and the
other to open, it's lost time.

The point of the article is that most OSes strive to make this time
faster, but in Vista's case, the new interface slows users down..
Click to expand...

That's a bunch of bull. I want to see what exactly these people where told
to do. I have 5 users that I upgraded from XP to Vista Business and they
all screamed at first that it sucked and it's different, blah blah blah.
When I took their new puppy away from them later on down the road they all
screamed to get Vista back.

That, among other things, is the exact data I needed for my upgrade
proposal.

As for "fade", XP has plenty of fade and scroll effects of its own. I bet
they turned them all off, used low resource machines and left Aero alone.
 
It sounds like you don't like the results of the test. There is nothing that
implies they cheated or that this researcher had an axe to grind with Vista
or Microsoft. It was even noted, that you could turn off Aero to fix the
"friction" but that would defeat the purpose of the test.

Also, just because end users like the new Aero look, doesn't means it's
faster or doesn't have "user friction" Another point that I thought was just
me, is they talked about Mouse pointer precision, in which you click the
wrong thing. I myself do this every so often in both XP and Vista, whichis
why I hate that they have delete and rename so close together.

This researcher also did the comparision with the MAC OS-X.

I myself always run everything turned off, as I don't need or care for all
that pretty stuff. So I gues now I can say that I run with less friction
 
Dale M. White -LV32 said:
It sounds like you don't like the results of the test. There is nothing
that implies they cheated or that this researcher had an axe to grind with
Vista or Microsoft. It was even noted, that you could turn off Aero to fix
the "friction" but that would defeat the purpose of the test.

Also, just because end users like the new Aero look, doesn't means it's
faster or doesn't have "user friction" Another point that I thought was
just me, is they talked about Mouse pointer precision, in which you click
the wrong thing. I myself do this every so often in both XP and Vista,
whichis why I hate that they have delete and rename so close together.

This researcher also did the comparision with the MAC OS-X.

I myself always run everything turned off, as I don't need or care for all
that pretty stuff. So I gues now I can say that I run with less friction
Click to expand...

Not liking results has nothing to do with it. In fact there are no results
in which not to like. In order to have results you have to something in
which to result from. That article had no "from".

Just because a "French analyst" makes up his own term "UIF" doesn't mean it
equates to anything tangible.

As was already mentioned, that French guy has written nothing more then a
opinion piece. He never ties anything together. He mentions very specific
things which MAY have been slower on HIS machines then tell us Vista is
slower then XP. Never does he mention any of the improvements. For
example, "menu latency". Menu what? What menus, which application menus
and how are they slower? The common application menu bars are not slower
then XP (they are both instant) and the start menu is leaps and bounds
faster then XP. New system? Old system? The people performing the tasks,
did they know XP? Did they know Vista? Which did they know better? There
are far too many holes in his "theory" and far too many questions are
raised. That alone shoots down the entire article. The basis of the
research is biased unless he found people that either knew both systems well
or didn't know either system at all.

So, like I said, I want to see what exactly these people where told to do.
 
Rich said:
Anything that has to call itself or be called objective ... isn't

akin to the 'reality based' left ;)

The new UI is plenty fast here ... and faster that the XP UI with the same
set of installed applications

now what?


Rich
Click to expand...

What that means is that your XP install had issues and was running slow....
 
Also in terms of menu latency MS's research is that setting it too low means
many people can't use the menus.
 
I don't know Justin, it wasn't that hard to google his name and get the
report
http://pfeifferreport.com/trends/trend_vistauif.html

Here's the actual report http://pfeifferreport.com/trends/Vista_UIF_Rep.pdf

I would suspect that if PCworld posted it, it must have some credibility to
it. It would see from reading most of the report, that their goal is simply
to measure user friction of a user shell and report back. They clearly state
that it's not meant to be a complete measurement of Vista.

--Snip--
What were we looking for?

These User Interface Friction benchmarks are not intended as a complete,
all-encompassing assessment of Windows Vista or of the new Aero user
interface: the key goal of these efficiency measures was to establish how
Windows Vista impacts some key areas of User Interface Friction observed in
previous releases of the Windows operating system.

The benchmarks compared Windows Vista running the new Aero user interface to
Windows XP SP2 on one hand, and to Mac OS X 10.4.8 on the other.

--Snip


Seems like he's doing more than just writing an opinion about some random
people he saw at the local internet cafe.
 
I'd like to see the research that says, a menu that pops open the second I
click it is a problem. The problem that the researcher noted is that windows
menus, though visual pleasing , is apparently too slow for a productive
user.

This is why, even under XP, I turn all the different menu fading, and
everything else off. I click it opens, I click it's gone. Obviously a
personal choice, but I'll take speed over pretty.
 
Not everyone has great psycho-motor skills. Solitaire was incl in Windows to
teach the psycho-motor skills. Clicks don't have a delay - hovering over a
sub menu has the delay. It's a setting and default is 400 ms.
--
 
That PDF only strengthened my comments. There are too many holes and too
many questions in the end.

In addition to all this, you can turn off "GUI extras". I kill the fades
and scrolls simply because I don't like the way they look.
 
Dale M. White -LV32 said:
I'd like to see the research that says, a menu that pops open the second I
click it is a problem. The problem that the researcher noted is that
windows menus, though visual pleasing , is apparently too slow for a
productive user.

This is why, even under XP, I turn all the different menu fading, and
everything else off. I click it opens, I click it's gone. Obviously a
personal choice, but I'll take speed over pretty.
Click to expand...

Who said fade was pretty? Just curious.
 
What that means is that your XP install had issues and was running
slow....
Click to expand...
Sorry Charlie ...

Thats what you want it to mean.
I actually means something you do not WANT it to mean

Know what I mean?

heh


Rich
 
I dunno, don't you think the menu fade was put there to be aesthetically
pleasing ? Afterall, under the advance tabs, there is the options for Best
Appearance and an option for Best Performance. Choosing best performance,
task away all the "Appearance items" Whether anyone says, oooh that menu
fade "was pretty" or whether they say 'That's cool that way it does that" is
not overly important, and unless I'm missing something, options like Menu
fade, Taskbar slide and the likes, don't offer anything in terms of being
productive, Turning them off doesn't take away features
 
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