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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: 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.