The excuse is that now with LCD monitors you have higher resolutions
therefore more screen space. Yes but why waste it??
Exactly! People want big screens for one or both reasons:
- they can't see, so need things big at standard res
- they use hi-res to see more stuff at once
If a Word document hogs the whole screen at 640 x 480, the idea of
going to 1024 x 768 is to NOT have it hog the whole screen, duh.
Actually, you know something? Resolutions are NOT getting higher, as
you'd expect. When 17" were costly, they'd also go up to 1600x1200;
today's standard 17" max at around 1024x768, just like the old 14" did
(though mercifully not limited to 60Hz). LCDs are hard-wired to quite
modest resolutions, too; 1024x768 again, with 17" LCDs costing as much
as 1600x1200 19" CRTs but delivering only 1280x1024.
If you want 1600x1200 today, it's still going to cost a bomb.
Also there is another factor. Too much information on every
screen makes you dizzy!
MS rarely give you "too much information on screen" - that's more of a
geek / Linux / shareware thing
MS typically don't give you the info you need (e.g. hiding files,
paths, extensions so you have no idea what's going on).
More to the point, there's this silly idea that things are "easier" if
you make everything big, like for a two-year old... it's like...
"tjuutpp y'qqvada vada pkl?"
' I'm sorry, I don't understand Klingon '
"o sloog; TJUUTPP Y'QQVADA VADA PKL?"
Then there's the silly idea that ppl look AT the GUI, rather than
attempt to work THROUGH it. That's only true for the first few hours,
and the joys are easily outweighed by the "WTF?" factor...
"This dialog box is dead - it doesn't do anything when I click it."
' Erm yes... beautiful plumage though, innit? '
Things I really hate:
1) The assumption that you loooove scroll bars
You know the drill; there are always 10 items, but the dialog box is
fixed in size and shows only 8 without scrolling,
Worse is the same thing, but with horizontal scrollbars that show...
| EPSON Color Stylus 800 for Windo | (ws 2003 1.11 English)
| EPSON Color Stylus 800 for Windo | (ws XP beta 0.95 do not use)
| EPSON Color Stylus 800 for Windo | (ws XP 1.11 Slovakian)
| EPSON Color Stylus 800 for Windo | (ws XP 1.11 English)
| EPSON Color Stylus 800 for Windo | (ws 2000 1.11 English)
2) The assumption you have only a dozen items
It gets worse still, when there's an unbounded item set, because it
seems as if MS doesn't test with real-world item collections. Every
GUI demo I've seen always has a handful of files in a folder view;
never, say, a couple of thousand in System32 or something.
3) Fixed size dialogs with unbounded item sets
Forget the new Vista UI feature set, I'm still waiting for MS to
embrace the Windows 3.1 feature set, like "resizable dialogs" and
"remember user-selected size". I'd MUCH rather have the GUI remember
dialog box sizes than the (x,y) position of big dummy icons throughout
the Explorer namespace - a much better use of registry space, IMO.
4) Gratuitous waste of screen space
You know what I mean; one word of redundant static text on the left
just has to be in a big font, with a horizontal band of wasted space
stretching right accross the dialog box - or huge slabs of flat
do-nothing UI 3D grey above and below a tiny mailbox slot through
which you are supposed to scroll through hundreds of items.
Its like putting a car driver in the seat of a pilot of a 747 with
hundreds of indications. They will be overwhelmed.
I think MS layers info quite well - sometimes a bit too well, formy
taste (e.g. where you have to bang a menu twice to see anything other
than the things you used recently). The Alt-menu, toolbar, Ctl-hotkey
approach was one of the best things that came out of Windows 3.1-era
usability testing. But WYSIWYG needs to do more than let you do
stuff; it should indicate risk level, and the system should never
"paint outside the lines" of the info that was shown to you.
This is more than just not showing you an .EXE file as if it were a
ReadMe.txt - it applies to all cases of "type drift", even between
types that are ostensibly similar in risk level.
For example, a JPG and GIF may be intended to be equally-safe data
standards, but the discovery of an exploit can escalate the risk of
one of these way up to that of raw code. So if it's called .JPG but
is internally GIF, I don't want the system to "open" it; at the very
least, I want an alert dialog, and I'd be quite happy if it refused to
"open" it until I'd renamed it properly.
An informed user is a *blameable* user ;-)
They seem to be making things harder for no real benefit.
Different = harder, even if it's supposed to be easier.
If you're used to a routine of...
- take off kettle lid
- hold under tap
- open tap
- close tap when filled
....then it may be "easier" to go...
- take off kettle lid
- hold under tap
- walk away when filled
....due to tap automation - but ingrained habits are such that it would
most likely create cognitive dissonance (forcing me to think about
what I normally do not have to think about) and be annoying.
If I have to wait while the tap does a little "TA-DAA!" twirl before
the water starts pouring out - taking longer than if I'd did the
operation manually - then you'd BET I'd be annoyed.
If the tap sometimes pours petrol instead of water, and out of the
wrong tap so it splatters my smoking jacket, then I'd be beyond
annoyed; I'd start to get angry and/or fearful.
That's why safety WYSIWYG is so important.
Again I am not conserned about me, but about the novice user.
Novice users don't stay novice users, so there's no point in making
the whole world revolve around them. Who is more likely to buy
product on an ongoing basis, the user who builds skills and becomes
more productive, or the one who learns nothing because they hardly use
the computer at all? This is not "What is a Computer?" 1983 anymore.
As a teacher of technology, and a person who supports many
peoples tech problems I know how hard it is for them to do
things others regaurd as simple.
The first 10% you learn takes 90% of the effort - and if you waste
that effort on crap sware you end up having to walk away from, then
that becomes another source of anger and resentment.
That's why I get fed up with constant UI pressure to push MS's bundled
apps in your face, so you start using them first - whether it's
DRM-ridden Windows Media Pimp or what-data-do-you-want-eaten-today
Outlook Express. Ever wondered why OE's top-of-the-UI icons are
always set as Read-Only, and why every obligatory bugfix IE/OE upgrade
foists these icons on all over again?
As I told the beta newsgroup a simple example.. imagine a tech giving
support.. he used to say "press start > all programs bla bla bla"
On vista he will have to say "press that little round button like an orb
with a thing that looks like a flag"
What you're hilighting here, is the need for a consistent mouseless
UI. Generally, MS is pretty good at this - try using AdAware or
Spybot without a mouse, or anything written for or ported from Apple!
I cant imagine how a person would guide someone in the new windows
explorer... its chaos or in other words, bad design!
MS are very aware of the tension between beauty and usability, and
normally I'm firmly on the side of usability, but when the UI team
showcased some of the "concept car" UIs they were playing with, their
joy in what they were doing was kinda infectious. They, too, were
aware of usability concerns, but there always seem to be blind spots.
If I had to address this, I'd say "don't bother to demo me a shell UI
with anything less than 10 000 files in a folder, preferably with a
balanced mix of .ZIP, .EXE, .JPG etc. to stress the metadata gropers".
Perhaps the best approach would be a skinnable GUI (shades of X?) so
that test GUIs can be tested on working systems (ha!). You need to do
more than walk a mile in new shoes, once; you need to wear them
non-stop through a months' work.
The other cool GUI idea would be smarter theme controls, based around
usability approaches. For instance, instead of hand-tweaking 20
different font, icon, window frame etc. sizes, how about "optimize for
content", "optimise for appearance", "optimise for legability" etc.?
By the way I have solved the screen area problem by installing 3 screens on
my workstation and 2 on my entertainment computer
I still do a lot of work on 14", because folks bring in just the box
and I can't afford to have 7 x 17" lying around. My prime seat is a
new 1024x768 17"; it can't touch 1600x1200, and flickers at 60Hz if I
do 1280x1024. There are a few oddball resolutions between 1024x768
and 1280x1024, but more often than not the aspect ratios get wierd
and/or the geometry has to be heavily tweaked.
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