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Windows 8 Designer Explains Why It Annoys You

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday February 19 2014, @08:27AM   
from the you-had-one-job-ONE-JOB dept.

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.'"

• Discoverability Discoverability (Score: 3, Insightful) by TheLink on Wednesday February 19 2014, @03:48PM

  by TheLink (332) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @03:48PM (#2538) Journal

  Discoverability is at an all time low. In old versions of Windows a noob^H^H^H^H^H casual user would be able to _find_ and do almost everything a casual user would want to do by just left clicking stuff, from the "start" button to the usual menus.
  
  Now Microsoft changes lots of stuff in ways that helps neither the noobs nor "pros" who'd take the trouble to learn shortcuts.
  
  For example: to logoff (a common task in many enterprises) you have to right click on where the start button used to be (in 8.0 or the start button in 8.1). How ridiculous is that? Which UI expert expects such users to keep track of whether it is right or left click? And how the heck are users supposed to figure out such things? Randomly left and right click on everything?
  
  It's so ridiculous that I've noticed that many users actually find it faster to use google to figure out how to do common tasks in Windows 8, than to try to discover it via the UI.
  
  It's not easier for the noobs nor faster for the pros. For example, shutting down in Windows XP for the noobs - left click start, select turn off computer. Shutting down in XP for the pros: winkey, u, u (the advantage is you even do this without a mouse and the monitor off). And no, pushing the power button doesn't always do a shutdown on all PCs.

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• Re:Discoverability (Score: 1) by Yog-Yogguth on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:09PM

  by Yog-Yogguth (1862) on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:09PM (#2683) Journal

  "Randomly left and right click on everything?"

  You make lots of good points and I'm not really arguing against you but like many others I used to teach a course on doing this, it wasn't cheap but it included keyboard-mashing :P

  Currently I would possibly have been teaching the replacement "Jazz Hands 101" which includes poking/stabbing, pinching, and rude gestures.

  This might all sound strange but computer-illiteracy is nothing but a specific combination of shyness and risk aversion common in adults (or it's just plain disinterest because they don't really need to know or use any of it).

  Likewise a big reason many people fear the CLI is the enormous amount of possible permutations: doing it like a million monkeys would isn't really a practical option (and how many permille would read any manual?) so they just stay away.

  All that said I try to avoid both Windows and Android (and Apple for other reasons).

  --
  Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))

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