@scgtrp said:
What you seem to still be missing here is that usability is completely subjective.
Oh God, please tell me you don't write software with a UI. That sentence is completely wrong.
There are bits of UI design that are completely subjective, for example, whether the border of that menu be blue or dark red. That's subjective. Measuring the performance of it? That's objective.
The reason Slashdotters (and you) don't believe that UI design is mostly objective is because measuring it requires *gasp* leaving your basement and talking to actual users-- you know those scary things you some times hear about during support calls. Eeeew! Ick!! Microsoft, on the other hand, thankfully hires developers and UI designers who understand that psychological concepts are measurable, who have read the literature in the field, and who have the time and budget to perform actual tests with actual users. They also have an extensive institutional database of "oh yeah, we did that a few years ago, it was a terrible idea" to feed off it.
Most companies, on the other hand, either 1) don't give a shit about usability at all (IBM, Sun, Oracle), 2) Make things look pretty and just assume they're usable too (Apple, Sony, the bit of Microsoft that builds WMP), or 2) Waits for Microsoft to develop a similar app, then rips-off their UI ideas (the entire open source world). Note that Apple used to be far and away the leader here, but since they've absorbed the NeXT staff, their usability design has gone into the toilet.
How long it takes a user to complete a task using a certain UI is measurable. I have no idea why you would assume it is not... do stopwatches not exist on planet Scgtrp? The learning curve of the UI can be measured by giving the user several tasks over a period of time, and measuring the delta between them.
The reason you're even griping in this thread has nothing to do with usability, you just hate learning new things. So far you've demonstrated nothing concrete to prove that the "new" Start menu design (which, BTW, is like 3 years old now) is objectively worse than the old. People in this thread have given plenty of examples of how it's better.
Here's the deal: when you get a bunch of people together, plan an experiment, give them the task, watch them complete the task with both Start menus, time their performance, and document it all with scientific and statistical rigor... and if your results agree with your knee-jerk opinion... THEN come back here and post.
@scgtrp said:
The fact is, whether you like it or not, that you can't measure people's likes and dislikes by anything BUT "I like X" or "I don't like X".
Chew on this: people can still be more efficient with a more efficient UI, even if they don't like it. Most people who don't like the Office 2007 ribbon are probably more efficient on it, if measured objectively. "Like" doesn't really work into the equation.
@scgtrp said:
You also can't just put a room full of people in front of computers and say they magically represent everyone who will ever use your product.
Of course not, but you can do enough studies to reach statistical significance. Which is all that matters.
@scgtrp said:
Let's say there are 3 billion Windows users around the world (I've got
no idea what the actual numbers are, but you said billions so this will
have to do). Let's also say that 0.5% of us prefer the classic menu
(although I'd be very surprised if it was that low). That's 15 million people
you've just blithely ignored the opinions of.
1) Microsoft's goal is to make a Start menu that's more discoverable and more efficient, not to make one that people like. So the number of people who "like" one or the other don't figure into it.
2) You'll probably find this insulting, but making those 15 million people happy isn't worth as much (to Microsoft) as the cost of supporting two different Start menus in Windows. Every checkbox you add into an OS basically doubles your QA time. Resources are not infinite. (And again, I hope you're not writing software *of any kind* if you don't understand this concept.)
@scgtrp said:
I can understand not wanting to provide 50 different menus to choose from, but restricting everyone to just one is stupid and just another way to say "hey, we're in control and you aren't!" to your customers. Especially when you're off advertising how Windows 7 incorporates ideas from all its users.
No, it's a way of lowering their QA burden. QA being one of those things that Microsoft critics have nailed them in the past.
@scgtrp said:
Again the key issue here is not which menu is superior. It's whether I get to CHOOSE which menu I want to use.
Seriously? You don't care how poor it is, you'd rather use the poor version then spend 10 minutes learning the new menu? There's hardly even a point to debating with a mindset with that.
@scgtrp said:
By the way, since you claim to be a usability expert,
No, I don't. Not with desktop software... I do usability on the web, mostly for forms and checkout funnels, and always data-backed.
I don't know what variations Microsoft tried and which they discarded for Windows, and as far as I know that team doesn't have anybody writing an MSDN blog. (The Office 2007 Ribbon, on the other hand, was extensively blogged... if you're interested in usability, it's a great read: http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/)
@scgtrp said:
Again, it doesn't even have to be the default. Just give me a choice.
Choice = more features exposed. More features exposed = more bugs exposed. Again, this is software development 101 here.
If you write a program with a UI, I'd love to see it. I bet it's a complete disaster.