Dave said:
In the interest of full disclosure, I do not have windows 8. I am what
they call a 'handy helper' in my old age, that involves helping older folk
(even more aged than myself) with anything from hooking up a dvd player to
their tv, to fixing computer problems.
On the few occasions when such a user have windows 8, I find the
experience frustrating to say the least. To find things like shutdown, you
wave the mouse in the general direction of where you are supposed to wave
it, and if it's your lucky day something will appear where it is supposed
to appear. If you are even luckier, it will stick around long enough for
you to select what you want and click before you have to start the whole
process over.
Now you will read howls of protest from those who like the thing correctly
pointing out that I am clueless and all will be well after a few months
practice. That may be true, but since the days of PC's and MSDOS thru' my
current windows 7 professional I've always seemed to manage.
Windows 7 professional is in my opinion the best windows to date. It comes
with virtual machine which should help with software that doesn't like the
64 bit version. I deliberately specified 7 vs 8 on a new machine purchased
last December. I never upgrade systems, what comes with the system works
well and I'll move up if and when I purchase a new model.
MS and others need to figure out that a desktop machine is not a tablet
and need not share the same user interface.
Well, I'm going to address this differently than Ken did.
First off, if you're helping others with their Windows 8,
it is possible to get third party tools to aid with it.
If the user is experienced with Windows, they may have a
bias for the old GUI elements. In which case, you can try
something like ClassicShell. A very nice piece of work, I
tested on the Preview versions of Windows 8.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Start_Menu_replacements_for_Windows_8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Shell
http://www.classicshell.net/images/startmenu1.png
Show them a picture of what it looks like first, so
they know what they're getting. Don't just install it and
walk away.
ClassicShell will not remove all the rough edges. Clicking
on the wrong data types, is still going to push the user
into a Metro tool interface, from which they may not
escape without help from a trusty assistant. But the
presence of menus, will make them feel at least some
of it is familiar territory (for an experienced user).
*******
As for the views about first experiences with a new GUI,
everyone has a valid opinion. Why is that ? Because the
essence of good GUI design, is making something that
anyone can operate. If even one user cannot operate the
product, and stops in frustration, then the design is a
failure.
As an example, look at public washrooms. To be language
neutral, they put a specific icon, one for the ladies and
one for the gents bathroom. If the icon was poorly formed,
or did not immediately suggest which facility was which,
we would have the embarrassing failure of someone going
into the wrong one by accident. (This actually happened
to me at work, when visiting one of our office building
I'd never been to before, and I kept looking at those
damn icons, and still couldn't figure out which was which.)
So depending on exactly which version of icon the
facilities people fit to the door, some of them
are abject failures.
At Microsoft, they would have had the time and manpower,
to do focus group studies, see how elements of various
interface choices are discovered by the users, and so on.
So from a purely technical perspective, you can evaluate
any prototype interfaces, for performance. If any users
"don't get it", that's a serious issue, and should be
fixed right away. In a test setup, you take video recordings
of their face and eyes, as well as instrumenting the time
in milliseconds, when they clicked a mouse, or moved a cursor.
All of this, gives evidence as to what is wrong with
the interface.
In the past, we had analogies, like "trash can" and "file
cabinet". It always puts a smile on my face, when I consider
exactly how many OSes I've evaluated (Linux included), where
9 times out of 10, the trash can is an easier entrance
to the file system, than the file cabinet is. That's
an example of an interface failure, that I've grown to live
with. I relish the thought of "searching for a trash can"
so I can "find the file explorer".
So to me, when someone (non-troll at least) comes along, and
makes a valid criticism of the learning curve for
a new GUI, I just shake my head and think of the
focus group and design work, that should have prevented
this in the first place.
There was a famous video, of an older gentleman, placed
in front of a Windows 8 screen. And we got to watch
as he waved the mouse cursor around, in an natural
attempt to explore the environment, and "find the
hidden treasure". The look on the guy's face was
priceless. (Sure, it could have been staged, but
the "deer in the headlights" look, is unmistakable).
These are all things that should be caught and addressed
early in the design cycle, not as some video on Youtube.
Microsoft should have been looking at the video of
the faces of its focus group participants, for a hint.
Paul
