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stmuk writes:
"BGR reflects on recent comments by a Metro designer. 'Metro is a content consumption space,' Microsoft UX designer Jacob Miller explains, 'It is designed for casual users who only want to check Facebook, view some photos, and maybe post a selfie to Instagram. It's designed for your computer illiterate little sister, for grandpas who don't know how to use that computer dofangle thingy, and for mom who just wants to look up apple pie recipes. It's simple, clear, and does one thing (and only one thing) relatively easily. That is what Metro is. It is the antithesis of a power user.'"
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Windows 8 Designer Explains Why It Annoys You
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I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth.
-- Fry
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bolek_b on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:01AM
I consider it almost a behavioral pattern.
First, the responsible individual conceives a terrible design, which might suit his tastes, but is repulsive to almost anyone else. Removal of functions and other aspects (depowerment?) is common.
Second, negative feedback is met with arrogant stance; "No, we know what is best and there will be no turning back. Leave if you don't like it!".
Third, the affected product/service becomes marginalized and its owners puzzled, why do those ungrateful users leave.
Fourth, NO profit (except for products/services that jumped in as a welcome replacement).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by pmontra on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:43AM
Well, if MS's told their designers to design for casual users maybe Metro is not that bad. However I don't think MS understood who their users are. They don't have almost any causal user. They have only users that use Windows almost every day, a few power users and many unskilled (not casual!) users. So they should have asked their designers for another evolutive step of the Windows interface. That's it.
Their users were flocking to iOS and Android and leaving their home PC behind not because those interfaces are more suited to casual users (they're not casual, they're using phones all the day) but because they come on devices which are more convenient to use where people spend most of their time (not in front of a desk) and where they want to spend it (again, not in front of a desk or with a heavy laptop on their legs in the couch).
Apple and Google did well without the convergence of mobile and desktop interfaces. MS should have spent all their energies on their mobile OS and should have left alone the desktop one. MS bet a substantial part of the company on the wrong assumptions. It's not a surprise that it's not going well.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hyper on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:51AM
I blame MS Office. They came out with a brand new way of showing program functions being a bastardisation of the drop down menu system and graphics program gui with a total disregard for the interface hall of shame [dev.soylentnews.org]. Now others are copying them.
My feedback is that I only have so much memory space for program commands. For programs that use icons I can learn the place and meaning of icons mostly by their location. Photoshop will be etched into my brain forever. Moving icons? Hidden options? Not being able to see everything? No.
One issue for me remains: I am capable of needing to use a function in a MS Office 2010 program and not being able to find it. I can spend a chunk of time searching for it and not find it. Even though in many cases it is right in front of me. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to teach newbies. Can you see it? "Click on this object, and this menu should appear, and there should now be an option here to do this".
Has anyone looked at the productivity cost inflicted by MS Office? What happens when lots of software, starting with Foxit, copy them?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:59AM
Link test [interfacehallofshame.eu]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Istaera on Wednesday February 19 2014, @07:00AM
Parent link doesn't work, try this:
http://interfacehallofshame.eu/www.iarchitect.com/ shame.htm [interfacehallofshame.eu]
I believe there's somebody out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:20AM
I think it's a matter of engineering by the marketing department.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by joekiser on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:35AM
It's not just the Windows world. Gnome 3, KDE 4, Firefox, and Amarok have suffered from UI regressions. I think its a case of designers trying to "anticipate" trends in the market as opposed to designing to/for their current audience. The problem is that trying to predict trends can result in making the wrong prediction, while also alienating your current user-base. Look at the damage done in the KDE camp; they totally re-wrote their framework to embrace desktop "widgets" when
For example: KDE totally re-wrote their UI framework in anticipation of everybody using "Widgets" on the desktop. About the time that code became usable, Microsoft was getting rid of their Sidebar/Gadgets, Google Desktop was disappearing, and Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets was abandoned. Meanwhile, KDE added the ability to "rotate" your widget on the desktop (because rotating an analog clock 30 degrees is a vital desktop feature) at the expense of stability. All the time the KDE team wasted in making their desktop widget-friendly alienated their user-base, while the "widget trend" moved to something else. To their credit. they have tried to backtrack the past few releases by saying its all about "Activities" now, which is some bastardized combination of virtual desktops and widgets.
I won't even get into the mess that is Gnome 3 (touch-centric on devices that don't support touch), except to say that when it really matters, when real money is on the line, Red Hat Enterprise 7 is making the new Gnome Shell look exactly like Gnome 2.
The World is Yours.
Former
(Score: 1) by bolek_b on Wednesday February 19 2014, @12:20PM
Regarding Firefox... Up to now I had auto-update switched to "Announce only" due to some past negative experiences with stability, but after sandbox tests I have usually upgraded anyway. But now, with the prospects of that shiny metal, ehm, design of Firefox, codenamed Aurora, I have decided to disable auto-update functionality altogether.
Unfortunately the downfall of Firefox has probably already started. For example, the so-called "Library" is so badly designed that certain obvious actions are not even present in pop-up menus of downloaded items. "Double click must be enough for you, we don't want any redundancy, you ingrate," thought the responsible designers (perhaps).
(Score: 1) by bobintetley on Wednesday February 19 2014, @01:11PM
I understand the hate for Gnome 3 and how they alienated a chunk of the user base who just wanted an incremental update.
That said, Gnome 3 is NOT touch-centric at all, it's very much designed for a mouse and I find the workflow to be a huge improvement over Gnome 2 - I really would not want to go back to Gnome 2 at all. The beauty of free software is that those guys who hate it can stick with MATE or XFCE or whatever, but I really like the direction the Gnome guys have taken. Unfortunately I seem to be a lone voice in the wilderness :)
I'm a free software developer of 20 years and not affiliated with the Gnome project in any way and have never worked on it. I have however been using it since Gnome 1.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday February 19 2014, @12:19PM
FTFY. I already have a list of settings to apply to unfuck my default Firefox install. If they finally hack out about:config, I'm gonna be pissed. (So far they seem to be the only sane ones that let you turn everything off.)
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
(Score: 1) by Ghostgate on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:26PM
(Score: 1) by tangomargarine on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:32PM
I'm not (Xubuntu), but thanks :)
Do they have a Linux version of Fasterfox or Waterfox or something is the question then...
A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing what he reads.
(Score: 1) by microtodd on Wednesday February 19 2014, @12:27PM
Don't forget YahooMail. That one was funny [huffingtonpost.com].
(Score: 1) by Ghostgate on Wednesday February 19 2014, @10:39PM
What bothers me more than the ugly designs is the lack of choice. There would have been very little outrage over Metro if you could choose from several options when performing a clean install of Windows 8, such as: 1. classic desktop only (Metro is not loaded or even installed on the system), 2. hybrid mode - boot to desktop (Start Menu included of course), 3. hybrid mode - boot to Metro (this last one would be the default on the new Dells and such). But the general trend in computing right now seems to be taking options/choices/features away rather than giving you more. The reason many of us are on this site instead of Slashdot is another obvious example of that.