Ten nine things I could learn Microsoft about software
Apr 20th, 2008 by handolio
We’ve been bashing Microsoft a bit lately, though I don’t notice anyone but Scott rushing to their defence. It’s a lazy pastime, so I promise to be nice to them. After this post.
I started thinking about the opprobrium heaped on Microsoft by bloggers, commentators and anyone else who’s used its products. Much of it unfair, no doubt, but there are some examples where MS deserves everything it gets.
One area where I think Microsoft earns a thorough shoeing is regarding usability flaws that have been in some of its products for years, or that are so basic that it’s inexcusable to cock them up. Here’s what I think they should be doing:
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1 Preserve focus - Focus simply describes the Windows window or menu that has your attention. It’s (at least in the Windows Classic desktop theme) the one with the blue top bar – you might be reading from or typing into it, and it’s generally on top of everything else. Which is why it drives me insane that it Windows doesn’t treat it with more respect.
Here’s the deal: Windows is an operating system. Its job is to facilitate my interaction with the machine. There is nothing that it could possibly have to tell me that could justify stealing the focus from what I’m doing, in the middle of me doing it.
I know what you’re thinking – what if you’ve got a virus or Something Really Bad? Yeah, it can wait. By all means allow the relevant program to flash up a warning window or something, but please don’t take the focus away from Word while I’m in the middle of typing a sentence, or worse, wait for me to navigate through four layers of the Start menu and then disappear it. Bastard.
2 Shut down, already – Still on the “Windows is an operating system” theme, it should do what I tell it to in a reasonable timeframe. Vista is slow to boot and sometimes shockingly slow to shut down.
I’m technical; I understand that there are programs to close and processes to bring to a graceful end, but I do like to leave the flat occasionally. Shutting down a fast, idle computer shouldn’t take more than 30 seconds.
3 Make things better – Hands up who’s used Office 2007? Is it better than Office 2003? Why not?
4 Apply your own standards – Standards and conventions help to make an OS easy to use. For example, we know that we’ll find Options on the Tools menu, typically. Keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-P for print and Ctrl-S for save apply across multiple applications. Standards help us pick up the basics of any new Windows program, so why doesn’t Microsoft itself always stick to them? Fair enough it might want to change things sometimes, but it should be consistent, and make sure that its changes improve the product (see point 3).
5 Be honest – I like to know what my computer is doing, but that’s just me. As Windows has taken over and automated the kind of housekeeping (defrag, updates) that I used to do manually, I’ve had to learn to let go, and that sometimes it’ll hammer the hard disk and I won’t know why. So I’m over that, but when you tell the user what you’re doing, make sure it’s the truth.
The example I’d offer is in Microsoft Word. I have to be honest and say that I think they’ve fixed this in (the otherwise hateful) Word 2007, but has anyone else ever noticed the “Word is preparing to background print” message?
That’s right, the one that appears when Word locks solid as it prepares your print job. Yes, that one, the one that should read “Word is conspicuously failing to print in the background. You weren’t busy, were you?”
6 Don’t be shit – I think we’re still stuck with “Word is preparing to follow this link” when you click a hyperlink, and the wait has got longer. You know what: don’t knock yourself out, I’ll start the browser myself.
7 Don’t be tetchy – Buy a brand-new XP computer, start it up and have a look at what’s on the hard disk. The first message you’ll see when trying to browse your C drive is “These files are hidden”.
Something I did?
8 Don’t be stupid – Thanks to Scott for this one. Got an optical disc in your drive? No point in your computer keeping it spinning if you aren’t using it. Any chance it could do anything at all useful while it spins it back up, though, like perhaps if I opened My Computer it could display what’s on my other drives and get back to me about the optical disc?
9 Don’t be greedy – Vista Ultimate install, couple of months old: 10.2GB of disk space used. Freshly booted, 1.2GB of RAM in use.
Anyway, rant over. There was a tenth point, but it was a bit technical, and I fancied I could hear the edge of hysteria creeping in.
Microsoft is by no means the only, or the worst offender for many of these, but the point is that it has had time to fix some of them (focus) and hasn’t, and it has the resources not to have cocked up many of the others in the first place.
Hate to play devil’s advocate (Devil’s injury lawyers 4u?), but in the interests of fairness:
1) Never had this problem in Vista.
2) Vista is just as quick to start / shut down as XP SP2 was on my PC (actually, shutdown is quicker).
4) Haven’t noticed a MS app that doesn’t obey Ctrl-S and Ctrl-P – which one?
6) Never spotted this, although that’s possibly because I bitterly hate hyperlinks in Word documents and obliterate them whenever possible.
7) The argument over how much access people should get to the files on their own PC is a long and complicated one (and I can see both sides), but I don’t mind this. If the user really wants to go to the root of the disk, it’s a click away. If they have no idea what they’re doing, maybe this will persuade them to turn around and go play Solitaire instead, and I’d say that’s a good thing.
9) Disk space is cheap, and Vista is stuffing the spare memory deliberately. Well, unless you tell it not to. So, again, I don’t really see this as a big problem – with 2GB I don’t ever suffer from Vista paging too much to disk, so it seems to find room in RAM when it’s needed.
Obviously, you’ll notice that I left a few out. The way Windows handles optical disks (8) is indeed stupid, the background print message (5) is absolutely hateful, and as for Office 2007 – the IT department will have to pry the Office 2003 toolbars from my cold, dead hands. But nonetheless – it’s easy to hate MS products because we’re exposed to them every day, and usually at work. Try Lotus Notes for a few days, and see if your viewpoint changes a little
Oh, and by the way – Nadine Baggott has been usurped by another celebrity beauty journalist. The new advert is equally horrible, although it is quite funny to see what advertising companies think a journalist’s office should look like (Terminal 5 meets Ikea).
Cheers Tom.
I’m stunned that there could ever be another celebrity beauty journalist. Especially as in Nadine Baggott’s case she, seemingly, actually means it in the sense of “I’m a beauty journalist what’s on telly, therefore I am a celebrity beauty journalist”.
1) XP was massively better than 98 in this regard, but still did it. Vista’s done it to me, but I think they’ve almost stamped it out, to be fair. I still find instances of the focus not being where I expect it, though.
2) Loads slower on my PC, which is a fast, modern fellow with bugger-all running on it. I’ve tried checking Vista’s (vastly improved) performance monitoring stuff but can’t find a culprit. This is my second Vista install on the machine (first one killed the MBR on one of my disks), the first install had the same problem.
4) Yeah, sorry, badly worded – should have taken that example out. They tend to use inconsistent menu hierarchies, though, particularly for the options. In Office 2007 apps, they’re an option on some rubbish root menu a bit like the Start button.
6) Yeah, just checked, still happens. It’s in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If your machine’s slow it can take a few seconds before anything obvious happens.
7) I agree that there should maybe be some mechanism for stopping people destroying important files, but this probably isn’t it – it’s a very unfriendly way to greet a PC n00b who’s just having a poke around. I’ve long thought Windows should come with a ‘don’t patronise me’ checkbox, checked by default. Unchecking it would switch off the annoyingness. (I’m half expecting somebody to propose a dual-boot Mac as a solution to this)
9) You’re wrong, and you’re a grotesquely ugly freak.
To be fair, I haven’t used Vista as much as you, so I’d humbly suggest that people take my ranting with a pinch of salt. I’m now wondering if for balance I should do a follow up post with things that Microsoft is has improved in Vista – hibernation, and power management in general, for example.
I like office 2007 and office 2003 feels dreadfully retro these days.
@Simon: put your mouse where you mouth is and stop using IE and use firefox! If for no other reason other than the fact that IE 6 has crippled progression ofweb development for years…
Agree that some of the old stuff seems retro, but I still think 2003 is easier to use than 2007. For me the main problem is that they’ve grouped functions together under themed menus, but functions that just used to be there on the screen are now under separate menus.
It’s a small thing, but it means for example that where you used to just click once to put a colour highlight on some text or insert a comment on it, you now have to be in either the Home toolset or the Review toolset respectively, so that’s more to think about and perhaps an extra click.
Anyway, I use IE7 and Firefox, so there
Will I be swearing if I say that I am now using a mac at my new job and thing it’s the best thing ever….. it treats me like an adult
It’s a good thing you’re on the other side of the world, Edwards
Seriously, I reckon it’s just personal choice. I know it leaves me open to the hostility and outright ridicule of my peers, but I don’t get on with Mac OS at all.
I think Office 2007 makes more sense, but only if you look at it from a first time users point of view. It makes it easier to find functions you’ve either never or rarely use because they’re listed under function areas.
Handolio doesn’t like Windows, or Mac OS… do you like Linux or do you generally just dislike things?
You were on the edge of hysteria, but you showed restrain when none was needed.
Point 3 is the killer. If you have a four year gap (or at least in the product title) between releases, the new version should be four years of back breaking labour better. Where did all those work hours go? Designing the ribbon? please.
I’ve remembered another one – it’s kind of point 6b: If you know something’s shit, use the first opportunity to fix it.
I’m thinking of Vista Backup here, which (and this is imbecilic) won’t support .bkf files created in Windows XP. Duh. Fortunately there’s a MS download available to let you read them.
Anyway, another idiotic thing about Vista Backup is that it won’t backup to network attached storage (NAS) devices. I’m not sure if this applies to all of them, but it’s certainly widespread. Vista itself can read or write to them with no problem, but the backup program prompts you for a user name and password, even when the drive has none (and when other Vista apps can access it no problem).
Good job that no-one buys a NAS to use for backing up their computers, eh?
Anyway, I was certain that this was such a major fuckup that MS would fix it in Vista SP1, but I’ve just checked and they haven’t (and my PC remains un-backed-up). I’m yet to find a workaround. Harumph.