Edi wrote:I'll second Durandal on what a fucking pain in the ass it is to get people to manage even the very basic things like finding the fucking Windows Start Menu (of whatever Windows version) over the phone, never mind things like right-clicking or anything else.
To Microsoft's credit, they stopped calling it the "Start Menu" in Vista, since that was where the shutdown options were. This led to my mom's famous criticism, "I have to go to Start to stop? That's stupid."
The Windows Vista UI is fucked up from start to finish in its basic configuration, which is what 99% of the users stick with. Whoever designed it should be fired and legally prevented from working in the IT industry for the rest of his life. It just sucks that badly most of the time, though some things are somewhat easier to find than in XP. But the rest of it is just so crap that any minor improvements are buried under a ton of shit.
That's the thing, though. It wasn't just one guy. Windows is a perfect case study of Conway's Law, which states that organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structure of those organizations. As evidence of how Conway's Law applies to Windows, I offer
this and
this.
You can tell, just by using the UI, that Windows was designed by committee. Everyone wanted to have his fingers in every little pie. So you wind up with idiotic things like the Windows Network control panel UI, which is just god awful and hasn't gotten any better. When you want to modify your network settings, you have to get Properties on your network card (why?), then choose "Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)" from a list of items that includes "Client for Microsoft Networks" (what?), "File and Print Sharing for Microsoft Networks" (again, what?) and maybe even "QoS Packet Scheduler" (double what?). How
any of these things are related to my IP address, I have no idea.
What happened there was the folks in charge of configuring shit like Active Directory probably said, "Hey, we'd like to have a little shortcut for getting to some of our settings, and the UI guys wouldn't give us our own control panel. Could you just throw it in that items list?" And someone working on the QoS Packet Scheduler (whatever that is) thought that his thing just
had to be in there because it would make 0.01% of tech support cases either, so it made it in there.
My other favorite example is the Vista window titlebar. Someone said, "Hey, we have to be more like Mac OS X. So let's make our windows partially transparent to give it some visual fluff." Then someone else said, "We want people to
notice this. So let's make it, like, 30% transparent."
Then someone noticed, "Hey, text is hard to read against this." That second person then piped back in and said, "No problem! You know, the Chinese word for 'problem' is the same as the one for 'opportunity'. So let's take this opportunity to show off more UI effects. We'll just give the window a frosted glass effect, like a shower window. That'll make the text easier to read."
Then someone said, "Text is still hard to read against some backgrounds. Maybe we should just--" That second person then said, "No! Remember the Chinese proverb! We can just use another effect. Let's put a yellow glow around the text. That'll make it really easy to read!"
And it was done. That's probably how one of the ugliest window designs ever came to be.
