A cluttered taskbar
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@PJH said:
] Ya know, that always bugged me - males, when presented with someone pretending to be female online still always used to ask ASL, even though the S bit is bogus.
(Apart from having less brain cells than fingers,) why?FTFY
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I've read about studies that proved that girls going for dolls and boys for cars is actually innate. I'd go along with that - with the understanding that it's not a hard and fast rule and there exceptions (eg me). I have 2 older sisters, and as we were all treated equal as much as possible. Most of our individual toys became shared toys, but I gravitated towards the 'boy' things (cars, meccano, robotic arm - now that was cool!), while my sisters gravitated towards the dolls. That difference came from somewhere inside each of us, not from what we were exposed to.
Apologies for the hijacking...
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@lolwtf said:
Good plan! And pretty easy to implement, too. Obviously the said window would be system modal, and would NOT contain any 'confusing' controls, like an 'OK' CommandButton or anything like that. Of course, it would contravene the Windows 'User Experience' (UX) guidelines, but one can't have everything….
The guidelines written by the same company responsible for such UI fuckups as:
- Visual Studio 6 installer: "The installation wizard will now reboot the system." No "don't reboot now" option. Apparently installing VS6 does something so important that you have to reboot RIGHT FUCKING NOW. (Unless you just toss the dialog off to the side and keep working...)
- One incarnation of Windows automatic updates popped up a box asking if you want to reboot now or later. If you click later, it pops up again in 5 minutes - stealing focus, with the "reboot now" button selected and set to default, almost inevitably while you were typing. Whoops, reboot!
- The IE6 installer which just terminates all programs and reboots the system without even any warning.
Did you know Microsoft has over 70,000 employees? Did you know every group in Microsoft operates completely independent of every other group?
Please, bitch about Windows Live, or MS SQL's installer, or whatever. But realize, on average, Microsoft's doing pretty fucking good... look at Adobe's flagship products, Flash, Photoshop, and tell me with a straight face Adobe's doing a better job at usability than Microsoft. And Adobe's *good*, compared to shitholes like IBM, Siemens, PeopleSoft, Oracle... Adobe's on-the-ball compared to those idiots. Even Microsoft's "small" projects, Windows Phone 7, Xbox dashboard, Zune, are pretty goddamned good compared to the competitors. Compare Xbox Live Arcade with Playstation Store, for example.
Now, you could argue that Apple's doing a better job than Microsoft, but they also have much fewer products.
But yes, you're right: there are some Microsoft groups turning out shitty work right now.
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@PJH said:
@dhromed said:
Ya know, that always bugged me - males, when presented with a female online still always used to ask ASL, even though the S bit is (supposed to be) redundant.@Mel said:
This is an excellent point. I'm a girl,——
GASP
A GIRL!!!!~1
A/S/L?
(Apart from having less brain cells than fingers,) why?They're asking for sex. Not "what is your sex?" But "will you have sex with me?"
That way you get maximum creepy factor.
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@RogerWilco said:
I think there are a couple of things going on:
- People are usually very goal oriented. Over the years they have become trained that most of the dialog boxes are pure gibberish to them and clicking OK gets them to their goal.
- Same thing with the above example. Aparently the user discovered that ignoring the dialog boxes made no difference to her.
- A lot of people function on routine and aren't used to learn and figure things out. They have memorized certain sequences of actions to get to goals, like a ritual, without understanding of what they are doing.
This puzzles me, and it does so every time one of these "users don't read" discussions comes up. The person I help most with computer stuff is my mother, and she is the exact opposite of this "typical user who doesn't read," because she will stop and read EVERY SINGLE THING on any dialog, get distracted/confused, and then need assistance. She basically lacks this goal-oriented approach to using computers, where you focus on what you need to do and ignore all the extraneous garbage. Some of this, I'm sure, is learned helplessness on her part, some is god-awful UI design (she's using Windows Live Mail despite my repeated suggestions to set up her account through Gmail), and some probably comes from her days using DOS where you had to pay attention to what showed up, because guess what, it was important. She figured out how to get on Facebook without much trouble, though, so it's not that she can't/won't learn.
At any rate, I don't think it's as simple as "users don't read," it's more like "the means by which we convey information aren't working and nobody has quite figured out how to do it right."
- Especially girls are trained from a young age to see technology as magic. Advertizing for a toy car targetted at boys might go into technical details, while a moving talking doll targetted at girls will present the whole things as magic and lifelike and go to great lengths to hide and divert attention that there might be servo motors, gears, batteries and a speaker inside. Over time this does teach us to approach technology different. It's one of the contributing factor to the low numbers of women in technical professions.
This suggests, to me, a deeper cultural problem: things we don't understand are seen as somehow intimidating, even if they're perfectly innocuous. Couple this with a tendency toward willful ignorance and a suspicious attitude towards education (among some segments of the population anyway), and guess what, nobody's going to even try to figure out how to use your program.
- Even for people in a rather technical field like mine (astronomy), computers and software have evolved from where in the 70s nearly everyone in the field wrote their own programs, to where most of the scientists are now pure users and have only a fundamental grasp of the basic mathematics and physics models in the software they use. To a less technical audience most software is equal to magic.
I see this as a symptom of the era of hyper-specialization. The jack of all trades is an endangered species, much to the detriment of society (in my opinion anyway).
- The big problem of the computer, and the famous VCR and other similar equipment, is that it usually has more functions than it has buttons or other interface controls. This means that what happens depends on the state a device is in, not just on what button gets pushed. I'm ot familiar with the model of washing machine, but one of the other posters mentioned their mother being able to use it, despite it being more complex than the VCR. I think he might be wrong and the washing machine might have a perfectly simple interface with each button and knob performing one clearly defined action. There might be a lot of controls, but the mental picture the user needs to have to use it will be much simpler.
+100 internets to you, sir. Somebody give this guy a medal. This is the best summary of the problem with modern UIs that I have ever read. I blame the "clean design" crowd for this; somehow people got convinced that it was a good idea to hide the controls in order to make things look pretty. The end result is that you can't figure out how to do anything without a whole lot of searching around. I don't really understand why this took hold in computers so easily; nobody would advocate "clean design" for an airplane cockpit. It's not a perfect analogy, no, but it gets the point across: a good interface is one where you can clearly tell what does what, and that tends to be sorely lacking in modern GUI applications.
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Exactly what type of VCR do you have that it has more functions than buttons? Even my DVD player has 4 buttons on the front, which correspond to "Power", "Play/Pause", "Stop", "Eject"
Ok, I see what you're saying, when the DVD player is on, Power turns it off, and when it's off, Power turns it on! Yes, very difficult, I agree.
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@Justice said:
At any rate, I don't think it's as simple as "users don't read," it's more like "the means by which we convey information aren't working and nobody has quite figured out how to do it right."
Here, an internets for you.
@Justice said:
I blame the "clean design" crowd for this; somehow people got convinced that it was a good idea to hide the controls in order to make things look pretty. The end result is that you can't figure out how to do anything without a whole lot of searching around. I don't really understand why this took hold in computers so easily; nobody would advocate "clean design" for an airplane cockpit.
Yeah, but the other end of the spectrum is the video converter Super.
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@Sutherlands said:
Exactly what type of VCR do you have that it has more functions than buttons? Even my DVD player has 4 buttons on the front, which correspond to "Power", "Play/Pause", "Stop", "Eject"
Ok, I see what you're saying, when the DVD player is on, Power turns it off, and when it's off, Power turns it on! Yes, very difficult, I agree.
- You own a VCR!?
2) You own a VCR without a timer?
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@Falcon said:
@b-redeker said:
It's partly a choice. My mother in law (whose intelligence is above average) finds VCR/DVDs terrifying, but manages her washing machine fine (which has more buttons and options). She flat out refused to use PCs until her kids moved out of the neighbourhood, and now she skypes and mails and everything. I'm pretty sure she might end up with a similar task bar ("oh, that's a technical question, my husband should handle that").
I once heard something from an Australian comedian along the lines of: Old people are afraid to use technology, such as ATMs, or they're confused by them. But when they go to gambling machines, they're not afraid of technology. So, maybe they should make ATMs more like gambling machines - "Come on, double or nothing!"
Not only are people over 70 the only ones to still use checks at the grocery store, they always do so when there's a long line behind them and they never bother to take the simple courtesy of filling out the date, memo, and payee before they get there.
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@operagost said:
Not only are people over 70 the only ones to still use checks at the grocery store, they always do so when there's a long line behind them and they never bother to take the simple courtesy of filling out the date, memo, and payee before they get there.
You have the clock: they have the time.
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@frits said:
@El_Heffe said:
@Master Chief said:
People aren't stupid most of the time, they just refuse to learn.
Refusing to learn is a form of stupidity.
I'd go as far as to say it's the root of most stupidity.
True. I was speaking in terms of, if they did try to learn, they wouldn't have issue with it.
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@Justice said:
At any rate, I don't think it's as simple as "users don't read," it's more like "the means by which we convey information aren't working and nobody has quite figured out how to do it right."
There's also something about assumed common knowledge. I remember about five or six years ago my boss (a frighteningly smart guy) got himself a cordless phone and asked me for help because he couldn't find the "menu" key that the instruction manual told him to press. The menu key was right there, so I pressed it. Up popped the menu, and he asked me how I knew that that was the menu key. Then it dawned on me - he didn't have a mobile phone, and had missed out on about five years of "everybody" knowing that phones use soft keys. He'd seen them on ATMs, but ATM UI design wasn't his first point of reference for figuring out how his phone works, reasonably enough.
All the manual really needed to do was replace "press the menu key" with "press the key with the LCD label 'menu'" and he'd have been fine. On the other hand, that's a much clumsier turn of phrase and makes reading the manual that bit more of a chore for those of us who do understand that phones have soft keys. Swings and roundabouts.
@Justice said:
I don't really understand why it (clean design) took hold in computers so easily; nobody would advocate "clean design" for an airplane cockpit. It's not a perfect analogy, no, but it gets the point across: a good interface is one where you can clearly tell what does what, and that tends to be sorely lacking in modern GUI applications.
I think this particular analogy isn't helpful here because an airplane cockpit, for all its complexity, only has one very specialised goal: to make it easy to avoid the landscape while you're flying from A to B. A specialised program can also put everything on screen because there's not too much to show - an extreme example is a widget I wrote for my phone after the last time my whole family had flu at the same time. It's just a button and a label; when you press the button the label is updated with the current time. All controls and indicators are front-and-centre, and it is (or I think it will be) an easy way to record the last time I gave my son Calpol when I'm also running a fever and less than compos mentis, but it doesn't do a lot else. At the other end of the spectrum you have software like Word which has hundreds of features that I never use, but some people use all the time. I think the generality of such software is why clean design took hold - you can't show all the features without eating all of the screen and then some, so you put them in a tree that you think the user will be able to navigate and collapse the tree.
I should add that, analogy aside, I do agree with you. Digging around the twelve tabs in a dialog found in a sub-menu for the right tick box to turn off an annoying feature is deeply frustrating, even to someone who has no fear of the help docs. Unfortunately, I can only see two approaches to a solution. One is to use more specialised software for particular tasks; but that just shifts the problem to identifying which piece of software has the exact feature set you need before you begin. The other is to replace the tree with something else that is more easily navigable, but I have no idea what that would look like.
This Penny Arcade comic always makes me smile: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/3/3/. Unfortunately, it, too, is just a statement of the problem without much in the way of possible solutions.
Regards,
Ibix.
