90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Dear Microsoft,

Sorry to not write directly but you don’t seem to have any address to send bug reports to.

I’ve been using Vista on my telly as a Media Center for a few weeks now and there are some really obvious bugs you might like to fix. I’d love you to let me know whether you already know about these but you don’t seem to want to share that information so I’ll have to assume you don’t.

1. The music library is still really slow if you’ve got a large music collection and really really slow if you have a large music collection shared over a LAN. Like - so slow you’d think your machine had locked up.

2. Seeing as Vista Media Center is meant to run on a TV at TV resolutions do you think you could get rid of that annoying ‘there is not enough room to display your start menu’ when I am running it on a TV?

3. There is no way to list browse videos by name. So I just get a screen full of black squares as my videos all start with a fade in from black.

(By the way what are videos doing in the same category is pictures rather than with TV or movies?)

4. Shuffled playlists seems to contain big chunks of repeated items.

(Oh please let me browse my music by folder! Please! My tags are a mess.)

5. Skipping tracks too fast keeps throwing up ‘an unknown audio error has occurred’

I’ll let you know what else I find. Thanks for being so interested!

regards,

Andy

PS I’ve found a horrific data loss bug in Windows Mobile but seeing as it’s been there for three versions now I think you probably know about it. Shame it killed a bunch of my files

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Web 2.0 darlings 37signals. I used to read their ‘design not found‘ articles fairly avidly and even bought their excellent book ‘Defensive Design for the Web‘. Their sense of aesthetics is faultless and they put a lot of thought into making simple details of usability perfect.

So I finally tried out Basecamp - the project management web app.

And I must say I feel a little under-impressed. All the parts seem a bit separate. You can’t link messages to to-do list items or milestones or anything else. The only place where everything intertwingles is on the overview page and this appears as nothing much more fancy than a chronological list of changes.

I know the whole philosophy behind their apps is a about simplicity and avoiding featuritus but this harks back to the debate about simplicity that went on a few months back. Simplicity of use doesn’t imply absence of features and some well chosen additions to Basecamp could make it massively more useful.

It also implements one of my pet hate - plain text boxes that allows formatting via simple markup. I hate this in Wiki’s, I hate Textile and Markdown and all the others. Mainly because there *are* several and I can never remember the formatting rules.

Although web-based rich text editing is far from perfect I feel like I’m flung back to the stone age everytime I have to use markup on a site.

After all the beta testing - how did this one slip through the net?

When you browse videos in Vista Media Center it only shows you thumbnails with no text label whatsoever. (you do get a filename displayed when you hover over a particular item).

All my videos fade in from black. So I’m stuck browsing 30 black rectangles!

Microsoft. Reinventing Mystery Meat for the modern living room.

I just paid my tax online (how fascinating) and was asked to take a quick survey. One of the questions was a ‘If so, then…’ type question. Of course I’d answered ‘no’ to the previous question so I skipped it. And of course I couldn’t submit the form without answering it.

I did another survey a few weeks back (I was procrastinating that day as well) and it assumed a few things about my job that weren’t true. As a result half the questions - which were again compulsory - were unanswerable. After a page or two of entering junk just to be allowed to go on to the next page I gave up.

The problem with the tax question was just silly but this is a much more subtle issue.

If you’re designing an online survey you’re obviously assuming respondants are fitting a certain profile and this will be reflected in the design of your questions.
If you get this wrong you’ll either be getting a high drop-out rate or people will fill in junk answers.

I’m apparently the CEO of a company called ‘N/A’. I’m sure there’s a few of us on the board…

My chum Mel works for a company called Headstar who - from the one’s I’ve met - seem like thoroughly decent chaps. They describe themselves thusly:

“Headstar is an independent publishing house and events organiser based in Brighton focused on technology and social issues. It publishes two free email newsletters,
the fortnightly E-Government Bulletin on electronic public services, and ‘e-democracy’ and the monthly E-Access Bulletin, on access to new technologies by people with impaired vision, although this is soon to expand its remit to all disabilities.”

Well they’ve decided to leap head first the exciting new world of blogging with their E-Access blog:
http://www.headstar.com/eablive

Go and say hello and say that I sent you.

I’ve finally got a copy of Vista running at home. I’m mainly going to use it as a Media Center and I’d like to say that there’s lots of thing I like about it. I’d like to say that because I’m probably going to spend the next few months bitching about it

Number one. It does look pretty. That’s the first time I’ve said that about a version of Windows since i spotted Windows 3.1 in the window of Dixons (and that was coz I’d never seen a 256 colour graphics card before)

Number two. I’m judging it as a media center. That means the whole 10 foot interface with no mouse or keyboard. And in that field there isn’t much competition. Nothing Apple is doing? (Please correct me…)

Number three. I’ve got way too many music files. Vista isn’t doing that well at not choking on my music library. That kind of sucks but I’m going to let it go. I’m not a typical user and I’ll have to fight this battle some other time.