User Interface Blunders

[Robert Robinson]

The Microsoft engineers have done an incredibly poor job in designing
many of the user interfaces. They tend to be non-intuitive, overly
complex, cumbersome and generally difficult to use. Toolbars must be in
this year because there are many, complex, multilevel toolbars that are
not only extremely difficult to use, but are wasteful of display real
estate.
Unfortunately, this poor interface design has been carried over to
Office 2007. It used to be a simple matter to create and link an Access
database to SQL Server via ODBC. Try doing this with Access 2007.
We had a new, bizarre, experience today opening an older Word document
with Word 2007. The document initially displayed correctly. Executing
the print command resulted in lines been drawn through much of the text
followed by a duplicate of the text without the lines. The option to
over-ride this behavior did not work.
It is beyond my comprehension as to why Microsoft has made such a
complicated mess out of what used to be simple operations.

 

[nick]

It is beyond my comprehension as to why Microsoft has made such a

complicated mess out of what used to be simple operations.

I will tell you why :

1st) Because they needed to have a different look.. because vista and office
had no real selling points.. by rearranging things for no apparent reason,
hiding important functions.... and generally making a huge mess of their
applications.
Office2007 is the worse GUI I have ever seen.. if I was in charge in MS I
would
throw the guy who thought of that "ribbon" into a swimming pool full of
hungry
window eaters....
2nd) I believe that the people who were in charge of the new GUI design,
were young and inexperienced and wanted to do something new without
understanding
of human - computer interaction. Almost EVERY change they made was for the
worse...
now don't get me wrong, I love change... but I want WOW change, not BARF
change.

Some fools actually like the new office look and even the windows start menu
and
windows explorer... or even IE7.... lol

I cant understand how these people survive... boneheads is the name for
them.

Vista is very badly designed... its a mess just as you said.. thank you for
being
truthful and expressing your opinion openly.

 

[Frank Saunders, MS-MVP OE/WM]

I will tell you why :

1st) Because they needed to have a different look.. because vista and
office
had no real selling points.. by rearranging things for no apparent reason,
hiding important functions.... and generally making a huge mess of their
applications.
Office2007 is the worse GUI I have ever seen.. if I was in charge in MS I
would
throw the guy who thought of that "ribbon" into a swimming pool full of
hungry
window eaters....
2nd) I believe that the people who were in charge of the new GUI design,
were young and inexperienced and wanted to do something new without
understanding
of human - computer interaction. Almost EVERY change they made was for the
worse...
now don't get me wrong, I love change... but I want WOW change, not BARF
change.

Some fools actually like the new office look and even the windows start
menu and
windows explorer... or even IE7.... lol

I cant understand how these people survive... boneheads is the name for
them.

Vista is very badly designed... its a mess just as you said.. thank you
for being
truthful and expressing your opinion openly.

Sometimes I suspect that I'm just an old fogey, but I'm with you on most of
that. In IE I've finally got to where most of what I do I can do from the
new Command Bar, but I still have to use Alt once in a while to get
something done without searching for a few minutes. Office drives me bats.
I don't do anything complex in Office and I still have to spend a
ridiculously long time figuring out how to do what used to be simple tasks.

I know that Microsoft spends a lot of money trying stuff out on what they
think of as ordinary people, but I really don't understand what kind of
ordinary person finds most of this an improvement. I do understand and
approve of UAC, but that's a different topic.

 

[Fred Morrison]

Memorize CTRL+F1, the keyboard shortcut for making the ribbon bar appear/disappear. It's your only
hope to survive Office 2007 ;-)

Once I learned this "trick", I got back all that screen real estate and no longer feel like I'm
typing inside a key hole ;-)

 

[nick]

Thank you Frank... its good to see an MVP expressing himself freely...
You are not an old fogey... you just want something that is usable and
smart.

I am realy trying to adapt to all this new stuff and I am doing it fast..
The rest I will tweak to my needs... but still this is not something
everyone
wants or can do. I have a simple idea. Microsoft go ahead make your changes,
but let people be able to customize them. For example you cannot customize
IE7 much, nor Office2007... They wanted to give a "static" gui... but that
was a bad
idea... I know why... they wanted less mess with the toolbars.. but hey they
could have
made an intelligent locking system for the toolbars... and a button to
revert back to default...

 

[nick]

Fred... that tip is very useful!!!!

thank you for posting it.. I will use it for sure!!!