90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Interesting piece of copy in this Windows Vista dialog box. Basically it’s saying:

1. Type your product key in now.
2. But you don’t have to.
3. But if you don’t, you could loose everything.
4. And you might have to buy another copy of Vista.
5. So on second thoughts, you probably should enter your product key in now after all.

Luckily, due to the way people scan-read when using a computer, few will actually read this paragraph and most will skip ahead to fill in their product key without even noticing the content.

Thanks to Peter Otto for picking up on this.

How many people are being sent .docx files every minute of every day only to find themselves unable to open them?

In Office 2007, you sometimes get shown this funny little dialog box when saving a large document. Have you ever noticed it?

So what happens if you click cancel - does it cancel saving the document? Or does it just dismiss the dialog box? And why does it appear for a second or so, then disappear, unprompted, equally quickly?

It’s obviously intended to let users escape from a really slow save (e.g. a big document over a slow network), but most of the time it doesn’t quite work.

This kind of design mistake is like a vestigial feature. It exists in its current form mainly because it’s not quite bad enough to get any design attention.

Microsoft Surface is a pretty amazing piece of research: tabletop touchscreen computing done really well. But, the “origins” section on the Surface website strongly implies that the whole concept of tabletop computing originated from Microsoft. It didn’t. If you find this stuff exciting, you should check out some of the prior research in this area.

MERL’s diamond touch : one of the first multi-touch technologies (works by running an electronic signal to your finger via your chair to identify each user).

IPSI’s roomware: this is an entire room decked out as touchscreen surfaces that are all linked together.

Stanford’s Tabletop groupware: they’ve done tons of stuff in the area. You may recognise some of the gestural stuff that also appears in the MS video.

Jun Rekimoto’s work (Sony) this includes “holotable”, “smart skin” and “augmented surfaces”. Jun is a genius- in my opinion, his research is genre defining.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that Microsoft are building on top of prior research - this is, after all, what research is all about. I’m just trying to say that there are some talented people and research groups out there that also deserve recognition for the state of the art today.

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 ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my aging laptop the other day and after scanning my machine for a few minutes it gave me this wonderful feedback screen: [Blue speech bubbles added for emphasis]

Great stuff. Even though it may or may not work on my PC, it tells me that the business edition is a “good choice for my PC”. Better rush out and buy it then!

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.

IntelliAdmin.com: The 5 sins of Vista

This is depressing reading. Basic bread and butter stuff which I’d hoped was going to get better in Vista. I had assumed that stuff like this had been sorted out but simply wasn’t being trumpeted around.
I’m struggling to figure out what they’ve spent the last umpteen years actually doing on Vista? Do translucent windows take that long to implement?

According to Diggnation, Microsoft ran a number of focus groups for Office 2007 and asked people what new features they wanted Office to do. They gave a list of needs and nice-to-haves. Funnily enough, all of the requested functionality was in Office already, but nobody could find it because it’s all hidden away in the many-layered UI.

This is an important lesson - if your users can’t find a feature, it may as well not exist and you’ve wasted your time making it. The Ribbon menu has done a lot to fix this problem, since it only shows you the features relevant to what you are doing at that particular point in time.

The enchanted office

Microsoft using a comic to sell the benefits of the new Office UI brought home to me what a big event this is. This is going to affect more people than any other piece of interface design since (insert preferred choice of Windows 95/3.1/Mac OS (or Apple Lisa/Xerox thingie if you want to be a real curmudgeon)).

Am I exaggerating? Not sure myself but the amount of people who work with Office is much higher that the number of people that worked with GUI’s in any form back then and the change is fairly big. So maybe I’m not exaggerating…