I'm a heavy Mac user, but Finder is and has always been one of OS X's pain points and its gotten worse in Lion. Until I changed it when I opened a Finder window it defaults to a list of "All My Files" which is useless (the first 20 or so items are __init__.py)
It's hard to claim that the context menu is good UI. The fact that so few people use the menu bar means that it's currently useless and needs to be reworked. It's not as if they're replacing the context menu with the ribbon, they're replacing the currently-unused menu bar.
That's not the problem here - it's that they are cramming literally hundreds of different actions into the ribbon. They're taking a bad design, and making it many times harder to navigate and far more confusing.
In Windows 7, the menu bar is hidden by default, that's why no one uses it. Also, "no one uses" those other commands only because no one knows they exist now. The whole point to the new UI is to change things to be better.
Still to this day, Alt-F is engrained in my head. "Alt-F-S" for saving, actually. I use it all the time. On a Mac. I always get annoyed at myself when I search for the letter "S"
Yes, but as much as you and I like keyboard shortcuts, I think we're a very small minority of Windows users. I don't think I've ever seen any of my normal everyday friends use Alt shortcuts, or even Tab and Enter in a dialog or web form. Even if I have them try it, next time I see them they are back to mousing and clicking everything.
F10 and Alt do almost the same thing with some subtle (perhaps unintentional?) differences. For example, without hitting any other keys, try tapping F10 repeatedly, then tap Alt repeatedly.
Yes, instead of the menu bar they have this weird bar with "Organize", "New Folder", and "Burn". Not sure why "Burn" on every single explorer window; maybe they think all users are Napster fiends or something...
Small nitpick: "Burn" doesn't show if you click on the main options of the left tree ("Favorites", "Libraries", etc).
I find it interesting because it clearly shows something changed on the last couple of years, we still remember how important burning something was, right?
This is a grossly-skewed assessment of the interface. Wouldn't the under utilization of features warrant an analysis WHY they are not being used? Wouldn't there also be a UX overhaul to make those features/commands/buttons/menus more approachable? The data and infographics would only be relevant if they were based upon the Win8 redesign.
Everything I had to explain to my ex-boss about dealing with files is there in one click. I could hide it if I wanted and have my usual experience. I really don't see the problem.
I actually think that overall this a big improvement. Minimalism can go screw itself when it costs me hours of free labour :)
The first problem with the article here is that some of the buttons (Move To, Copy To) did not exist previously. They are also extensions of existing functions (Move, Copy) - so concluding that half the UI is covered by buttons that were not used is an inaccurate assumption.
Secondly, the actions are being moved from the context menu to the ribbon. Most new computer users find it very hard to remember additional, non intuitive actions like right clicking & context menus. Each of these is a 'modifier' that power users are used to, but which make the mental model of file manipulation much harder for beginners to wrap their heads around. They have to remember to apply these modifiers to see if the functions they want exist. Moving the functions into a contextually aware ribbon will make life much easier for these users.
Third, Move, Copy, Delete & Rename occupy the center of the ribbon. These are the most used commands (by far) and rightfully occupy center stage. Power users will call it clutter, but it will be extremely helpful for beginners.
[Disclaimer: MSFT Employee, but I do not work on Windows]
Most new computer users find it very hard to remember additional, non intuitive actions like right clicking & context menus
I didn't realize this. In fact, if I were asked to guess, I would have answered that most new users would pick up pretty quickly how to use context menus, especially if the context menus had related commands like file manipulation if in Windows Explorer (is it still called that?), or formatting if in a text document, etc.
Hell, rats in a cage can learn what to push in order to eat, so I would have thought that people would be able to learn this. Of course, it would help if they were told somehow and didn't have to discover it.
agree, in fact UI like this encourages a user to develop bad usage habits, which will remain with them for an indefinite amount of time until these behaviors are (if ever) unlearned.
Work in support sometime. It is EXTREMELY common to find users that really don't know about right-click. Or that double-click everything. These are not new users either, they have been using computers for decades.
For new users I might agree that they could figure out a right click because everything is new. But for users where everything is familiar ("I've always done it this way"), it gets much harder to break those expected actions.
Second part is about explorer itself. While it might seem like a common utility (even necessary), I find it very rare for a general user to know about it (my wife does not, nor my parents, siblings, their friends,...but my wife's father does). Once they see it, they have no idea what to do. Copy a file? Really, they have no idea.
Do those users use the desktop shell at all though? In my experience with novice users (across platforms: Mac noobs are no better) is that they only know enough to launch apps. They never touch the desktop integration at all.
This is only because the Finder/Explorer has been made harder and harder to use. Apple's OSX Finder is a shocking UI abomination.
Their old MacOS Finder was clear and simple - my wife would spend hours arranging her work in coloured folders, each of which opened in a window whose shape and position she had chosen, and was meaningful to her. It was a powerful tool that enabled her to arrange and group her work.
Now, both Apple and Microsoft compete with each other over how bad they can make their file system interface. Microsoft wanted to do away with the filesystem in Longhorn, and Apple have actually done so in iOS.
Are you talking about spatial mode? That still exists in Finder. Just hit Cmd+Opt+T or select "Hide Toolbars" from the View menu.
You're absolutely right. I don't have the citation on me right now, but spatial mode has been found to be easier to grasp for new users in every single test ever. The only reason it was dropped was because (1) Windows Explorer, (2) power users whined about too many open windows and (3) a lot of people got used to URLs opening in the same window thanks to web browsers, so people sought to apply the same principles to file browsers.
Spatial mode used to be default on GNOME for a long time. There, too, it was dropped because of the same reasons.
> Just hit Cmd+Opt+T or select "Hide Toolbars" from the View menu
The problem is that there's no global switch to force Finder in spatial mode coming from anywhere, anytime. This results in a messy affair when suddenly a non-spatial Finder pops up because you never opened that folder directly and previously put it in spatial mode.
I don't know about Windows but on the Mac it's not spatial mode (and hasn't been since OS9) - it's just a poor imitation.
You can easily have two Finder windows open on the same folder, meaning you lose the immediate recognition that spatial mode gives you. My personal take - they should have two types of Finder window - a spatial "folder contents" window and a folder-browser (probably in column-view) that only shows folders and maybe a preview of the files within.
So you can navigate quickly/enter file-paths in the browser, but to actually use a folder, you enter spatial mode, so you have the instant recognition of where you are.
Gnome's (and OSX's) spacial mode was rubbish. The whole philosophy of MacOS's Finder ("spacial mode") is to hide applications from the user, and make the whole user experience document-centric. The user opens documents and manipulates them without having to worry about what program they are using to do it.
Wonderful though Linux is, it's applications are not consistent or mature enough to support a totally document-centric UI. Microsoft could achieve that with Office, but they would probably be accused of over-integration, and hit with the anti-trust stick.
There is a crusade against the filesystem in general. We should probably go all the way and design an OS that absolutely does not need the concept of files, extensions and directory trees, even for programmers, else we'll have to deal with this UI debate for god knows how long.
Disclaimer: I believe the best UI for a filesystem manager was Windows Explorer 98, the last iteration with perpetual, irrevocable and non exclusive root access, with Norton Commander as its only rival.
From the moment we cared about maintaining our system's safety from the user's "big fingers syndrome", it all went down (starting with hiding file extensions) to the atrocities we now have to deal with. And yes, I put Seven's Explorer in the same basket as Finder and the likes of Nautilus, mostly due to /that/ horrible folder scrolling bug that MS refuses to hotfix.
Re: explorer-- then I probably used the wrong term. I was refering to the program you are using when you are on the desktop, and simply want to copy a file. Mac used to call this the "Finder," I believe.
Now the idea that you actually have more problem with experienced users is interesting. I can see that in myself (damn new microwave!). But I still feel like it's no harder to learn, however, than what a bunch of icons are supposed to represent. But once it's shown, then is it really hard for them?
Seems like the problem is one of discoverability, not complexity.
You have the right terminology for both platforms. It's still called Finder on the Mac, and Windows Explorer or Explorer for short - in fact the executable is explorer.exe.
Spending 2 years in hell doing phone tech support for an ISP after high school was probably the most valuable career experience I've ever had bar none.
Nothing has prepared me for making and selling software to regular people better than this experience. Entire assumptions about how users interact with computers, ones based on my own experience, were rendered useless.
The ways regular people think about technology is endlessly fascinating because it very rarely has anything to do with how I think about technology.
At my day job, we eventually decided to put our development lead as tier-2 tech support because we couldn't get this across. He receives every single piece of support mail we get and is asked to respond to a pretty good percentage of them.
It's been a 2 year, very difficult, education for him.
In small companies, people often fill multiple rolls. Our dev lead happens to be our lead UI designer as well -- but we all provide feedback. Sticking him on part-time tech support duty was a creative way of both giving us another tier of support while simultaneously forcing him to deal with our regular 'ol user.
Experiencing the mind of the typical user day after day has caused some major changes in his UI design philosophy. Don't bury things in menus, limit the number of ways you can do something, walk users through set procedures, etc.
There's a bunch of different approaches to interface design and many of them don't work well. We've all seen the beautiful but hard to use designs made by professional designers, and the control-panel-of-a-spaceship design made by developers.
It seems that what both cases miss out on is spending time working with and understanding the average guy on the street. Or rather, good interface design means spending lots of time optimizing for regular users.
Second part is about explorer itself. While it might seem like a common utility (even necessary), I find it very rare for a general user to know about it (my wife does not, nor my parents, siblings, their friends,...but my wife's father does). Once they see it, they have no idea what to do.
Seconding. Especially before Windows 7 added Explorer as a pinned item by default, the less-technologically-literate persons I know would simply called it "My Computer", and used it in the large-icon, single-paned view. On one occasion while helping a friend find a file, I opened Explorer and switched it to the Details view option. Between that and the folder hierarchy in the left pane, I guess it looked different enough from "My Computer" that my friend was used to and I was given the reaction "Wow, you're really in the guts of the machine, now."
Invisible actions are harder to discover than visible ones, not that illogical really, and one of the key ways in which the Mac is more user friendly as it depends on context menus to a lesser degree.
While I agree with all of your points, keep in mind that when 'civilians' were just getting to use computers (being forced to at work, etc.), Mac lost in favor of the IBM-compatibles (what people started calling 'pc's). There are a lot of reasons for this, to be sure, but difficulty of using the PC was not something that carried much weight in the argument (I was there for the arguments, and I was a mac man).
True, but for reasons closely related to this discussion. Back in the day, the benefits of Macs were mostly invisible to novices when making a purchase decision. PCs looked cheaper and safer.
Apple has learned a lesson here. They are now heavily optimized for ease and comfort of purchase.
Yes but people don't WANT to learn things like this. My mother doesn't want to remember what mouse button to click or that CTRL or ALT is a modifier on this command.
I would argue that THIS is what made Apple's OS hang on all those years it was in the severe minority. There is a segment of the population that wants only one mouse button to click, not 3, not 3 plus CTRL or ALT or etc. Apple did end up having to rely heavily on their option key to extend functionality but at its root the UI was designed so that the average user could do things in a simple, straightforward way. MS sees visually exposing commands to the user as their way to do it and while I may not entirely agree, I don't think it's without merit. My kudos to them for also letting me as a "power user" collapse the "newbie visual noise" off my screen and drop what I want on a custom quick access bar.
Remember: don't let your status as a power user cloud your view of how your grandmother might want to use her computer. There are FAR more 'grandmother' grade users than there are us.
Then why are the ipad and iphone taking off? It's really hard to learn to do things on those devices. It's cumbersome to turn off wifi and bluetooth to save battery. The control location makes no sense in the settings menu (to my mind, anyway).
I was a HUGE Apple fan for the early Macs. I totally get what you are saying. But we LOST in the workplace. It was just too slow for the other folks in the office to use (of course, the real death blow was having only a graphics mode to the display so the typing was dreadfully slow-- and the secretaries wouldn't use them- but that's another story).
But I get your point. That's why I phrased my response as I did. I have never done UI/UX testing- maybe the parent has and was sharing his insight.
But if we are all just speculating, I've got to throw out a shout for the other point of view. Yes, too many (how many is too many? I don't know) and it gets to be like using VIM. But two buttons? Seems like it should be ok.
I understand what you're saying, and despite the content of my above post I've never been an Apple guy, always a Windows one. Every time I went over to the Apple OS I felt I had one hand tied behind my back by lack of options. I also try to keep in mind that I'm not typical. I started on "PCs" in 1981 and have grown with them, this all comes naturally. So when I judge a UI I literally stick my Mom on it... she's 68. I have also had the good fortune to work with a lot of 'artistic types' over the years as well, and in turn I watched how they use a UI. In my experience they just don't use much more than what is presented before them option wise.
Trust me, I agree that this new ribbon is very cluttered and contains too much visual noise, but in turn I don't mind exposing things visually to the end user. I hate MS Office with the ribbon, but I deal with people all the time who love it. Just let me turn it off :)
". I also try to keep in mind that I'm not typical. ... So when I judge a UI I literally stick my Mom on it... she's 68"
Well she no more typical a computer user than you are I would think. I like to see a curve of typical computer users age distribution (but I understand it would be a little skewed if it's hard for the older generations to use computers).
I feel that ribbon is designed for a select group of new users who need that kind of help. And I hope it's easy to disable it. It's fine for Microsoft to use something like this as a default mode as long as power users are able to turn that stuff off.
This is what turns me off on OS X, there is often no way to do certain more advanced things. Or it's hidden so well it requires hours of searching on the web for what plist to modify.
It's cumbersome because you have to navigate through a bunch of menus - however, its easy because you have a finite, visible set of actions to look through those menus (tap, swipe, repeat) and a finite set of menus themselves.
In a desktop OS, you have a seemingly infinite set of modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Double click, click, right click, Ctrl + Shift), which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they must be learned and remembered.
I'm not sure if it's just me, but the 'pinch with 3 fingers and thumb' gesture seems to be practically impossible on the older macbooks with a separate pad & button - there just isn't the space.
No, it supports both 3 finger swipe (fwd/back in browsers), and 4 finger swipe (change Space), as well as, iirc 3 finger touch & click (although I haven't got this working since I installed Lion)
Yeah, because those gestures are more akin to keyboard shortcuts, i.e. something for power users. OS X is perfectly usable without complicated gestures. Two-finger scrolling is the most complicated thing an average user has to learn.
This same pattern continues on iOS devices. They don't ever use complicated gestures, certainly not as the only way to accomplish something. The most complicated gesture you need is pinching.
The new iOS 5 has gestures to switch apps and get home, but those are really like keyboard shortcuts since the home button is still there and offers a simpler alternative.
There is still a problem when you accidentally trigger gestures. All my friends are scared to touch my Mac because they'd trigger hot corners all the time. With 10.7, you can easily trigger gestures even on default settings. I am worried the iOS5 gestures will have the same problem.
Easy? Maybe for some. I bet the same people who have to be told to right-click also have to be told how to work their bluetooth/wifi connection (and never bother to turn it off to save battery).
Except that those boil down to a couple of basic gestures: tap, pinch, swipe. The hardware buttons are irrelevant in this case. Oh, and swipe to delete? That's in the "manual" that comes with the device. It's smaller than a dollar, for god's sake.
I believe that it's only part of it. Another part is the lack of a filesystem. Many, if not most users, just don't like it or understand it. Though there are functions that are seriously lacking in iOS, I can't help but think that they're much closer to what is needed than MS.
The actual removal of abstraction (mouse) have made it much easier to use it. This is why my son at 2 can use the ipad and he can't use the mouse and keyboard for the desktop and laptops.
I agree but what would happen if your son had to navigate Windows Explorer on a touchscreen? He may never have to but if older users are experiencing similar difficulties with the filesystem, little can be done with the command bar to completely fix this issue.
I have no doubt that this UI, though cluttered, will help users out but I question whether this is ultimately the best solution.
I don't know why you got downvoted, and I upvoted to try and offset, but ignoring that...
I think that you overstate the importance of turning off wifi and bluetooth. Those are power user options, for sure. When you're trying to conserve battery power, you're trying to streamline how you use the device, which to me, smacks of 'power user'.
The flipside to that argument is that it is ridiculously easy to browse a web site, check your email and play Words with Friends and Angry Birds. These are the things that the majority of people care about... not whether or not a given physical interface is active or not.
Yes, absolutely. There is almost no reason to touch wifi and bluetooth settings on iOS devices. I have wifi enabled all the time, and battery life is still excellent.
Android devices on the other hand, need constant fiddling. My Droid would barely last a day with everything turned off, and with wifi, etc. turned on, it would die after only about 6 hours.
I'd hazard a guess your Android experience was a year or two ago. My Nexus 1 lasted barely a day when it arrived, but now lasts 48 hours on Gingerbread (2.3) with everything (including wifi, bluetooth and GPS) on.
That misses the point of "airplane mode". Airplane mode is for use during take off and landing. Ie, you'd need to turn wifi off too.
The only reason to turn off the cell radio but not the wifi radio is to conserve battery, which again puts you well outside the use case of the typical apple user.
Actually, it's probably the mobile network that's killing you. I get about a day of battery life with everyone on, and about a day of battery life with wifi and bluetooth off. But when I turn the cell phone radio off, suddenly my battery life increases to nearly a week. (I found this out by accident. I went to Sweden where my phone doesn't work, so I turned off everything except Wifi. A few days without charging later, I still had about 60% battery!)
I agree with you- that example may not fit everybody's problem. When I switched from a simple phone to a smart phone it was important to me, but now I don't bother (never too far from a charger).
And you are right, of course, in that ios allows most people to do the things they most care about very easily-- that's probably the takeaway. If you do that, then, apparently even if the other stuff is hard, people will probably figure out how to do it when they need it. Somehow.
Yeah, while I think that select all & select none are pretty important ribbon items (most people never learn CTRL+A or Shift+Clicking), select inversion feels like a power user option to me.
I think the argument is less "noone but power users would need this" and more "only power users will know how to apply 'Invert Selection' to get the behaviour they want".
ie there's an inductive leap between "I want to delete all files except this one" and "I can select that one file and then invert selection before deleting". At minimum it requires you to know what "invert selection" means. Ordinary users may take a different, more fiddly, path.
I don't know if that's the case here. My intuition says it is. However, in my optimistic heart I hope Microsoft did a bunch of usability testing and determined that ordinary users do grasp an "invert selection" concept more often than not.
That's how design for mass-use user interfaces works, right? By evidence-driven testing, not by what the programmer/designer thinks makes sense? Clings to idealistic belief.
People who don't know about menus shouldn't really be mass-deleting things yet. Alternatively, add a button for "Help! -The Computer lost all my stuff".
A brief Google search confirms that "lost my files" wasn't solved in 1995. I'm pretty sure those aren't all Mac users. Even if 90% are due to other issues, there are many people who would like their data back. I believe many are due to the ease with which a user can delete files compared to the difficulty they experience when restoring them.
The dangerous button is much easier to find than the fix-it button. One is right there, with your files. The other is someplace else, related by metaphor alone. Once you have selected the recycle bin you then have to search through your very long deleted file list, select the file you want, select another button to restore it (which appears in the same place as a different button existed before selecting the file), and then navigate back to the place you were expecting the file to be. We're talking about users who can't figure out a menu, but they can perform this multi-step task. I can easily see a new computer user screwing this up.
Next time you look at the context menu of a removable drive, see that "Format" is right there with the eject menu item. One should be used every time you use the drive, the other very rarely and only when you're sure. The latter should be removed to a sub-menu under "advanced", or similar.
Myself, I'd make it harder to delete things and a lot easier to find them again.
Select all, then deselect (ctrl-click) the one item you want to exclude. That's the exact same amount of work, just with the inversion step at the beginning instead of the end.
It's not immediately obvious from the label what the button does, but it is from experimentation. And unlike the multistep 'cut' or 'paste' buttons or 'move to' (which pops up a dialog, I think?), the discovery process for a user is one click.
Or maybe two. One to go from selected file to all other files, and another click to get back.
I've often wondered why not pop up the context menu with the left mouse button, then. It's what most people seem to use most. How many times you actually have to select a file, except to context-click on it?
Selection only comes handy when you will be doing something to several items at once. Thus, the selection function could be turned on via a menu item or a button: it's a totally different operating mode where you click on or drag around the items to select them.
Agreed. And not only does the ribbon increase accessibility for novice users, it also encourages advanced use by displaying keyboard shortcuts to a wide variety of functions in an intuitive way.
> In fact, if I were asked to guess, I would have answered that most new users would pick up pretty quickly how to use context menus
As someone who has done a fair amount of tutoring seniors on basic computer usage, I have a large amount of anecdotal evidence to indicate this is definitely not the case for them. Depending on the person, I would sometimes try to not show them context menus or keyboard shortcuts at all and just teach them how to use the File, Edit, etc. menus.
There are people who just want to learn the correct order of incantations so that they can check their mail and do things with their photos. And that's okay! Trying to show them that that there is more than one way to do a given action often just leads to confusion as they meld them together (right click on Edit..)
I have seen a fair amount of people with a similar approach as well, but my largest body of personal experience comes from the tutoring, which is why I mentioned it.
>There are people who just want to learn the correct order of incantations so that they can check their mail and do things with their photos
I have been seeing the same thing with research colleagues.
What a lot of us in IT or related fields do not "get" from normal users is that the way they "see" the icons and pictures in the computer is completely different from what we do. We have a "mental model" of what Word or Excel or Firefox is doing. Some of us have a more accurate and detailed model than others.
But "normal" users only know what they see and what will happen after they do something (either because they have done it before or because we told them, and they trust us). For them, there is no more meaning to "click on the File menu" than if a Scuba diver told you to "check your SPG every 10 minutes".
The main problem with right clicking is that right clicking does a myriad different things depending on what is being clicked on, whereas left clicking almost always does the same thing.
Methinks that kind of summarizes the issue: Microsoft doesn't seem to realize it's not 1995 anymore. "Beginners" are no longer a big market, and people are more comfortable with "discovering" software interfaces, as proven by the success of web apps, Apple, etcetera.
Most "normals" I interact with are beginners every time they use the computer. They are not comfortable discovering anything. I can teach them something and be confident in them forgetting it by the next time I talk to them.
Things like moving files around directories is black magic to them. Directories are black magic to them. The problem I see with this solution is two-fold:
1. The people who understand this stuff will be comfortable using context menus.
2. The people who don't understand this stuff will be just a stymied by the "move to" being in the ribbon versus being in a never-seen context menu.
However, what I would imagine MS is hoping with this is that the people in category two will gradually slide up to category one (well, more like 1a) because these things are in their face all the time.
File systems and file browsers are just never going to be easy for users to understand. That's why Apple is slowly but surely hiding them entirely from "beginners"/"people who don't care to learn how to use their tools".
Microsoft's solution is more akin to the way animal researchers teach apes to recognize arbitrary symbols. It's a subtle and pernicious form of vendor "lock in", because when you try to move those users away from their comfort zone in Outlook or Windows Explorer, they feel lost.
Personally, I think Microsoft and "people who can't be bothered to learn their tools" deserve each other.
This. Files and folders are not an optimal paradigm for this stuff. Partly because even real files/folders are not a "civilian" thing, especially now. Plus, there's typically just one level of folder nesting in the real world.
The actual user story is always: find what I'm looking for. Google got it right with GMail and informal searching - screw manual organization. Power users should be able to set up structures, but typical computer folks don't need that.
Oh my. That reminded me of a colleague of mine who thought I was doing "black magic" when I converted from "text to columns" in Excel. Guess what, she has a PhD in Geography. That really emphasizes your point.
For me, the problem with the ribbon has been (the times I tried to use Office 2010) that there are some more "advanced" commands (like, inserting a cross-reference to a Figure or Table) which became quite hidden away in the Ribbon. Specially, since in the old toolbar mode, I could add buttons to the actions I used most (I actually have a button for text-to-columns in Excel, or to bring the "insert cross reference" in Word, among others).
From my experience, the ribbon does not give you that ability.
Actually, every time I have to use the ribbon (my institute's laptop has office 2010) I start imaging an addon which "learns" what are the most used commands and configures the "Home" (or another) ribbon tab showing icons to access those commands. Surely, someone must have already thought of that no?
Actually, every time I have to use the ribbon (my institute's laptop has office 2010) I start imaging an addon which "learns" what are the most used commands and configures the "Home" (or another) ribbon tab showing icons to access those commands. Surely, someone must have already thought of that no?
This is similar to what MS did with pulldown menus in the pre-Ribbon days. It sounds like a great idea but it turns out to be a terrible one in practice. During the critical "newbie" phase, as a user begins to work with the program, the UI never seems to look the same twice. Tasks that should become reflexive never lose their dependence on the brain. At the same time, more advanced users are left wondering what interesting features they might be missing.
You really, really do not want a UI that changes behind your back, or in ways that aren't explicitly commanded. Resorting to discrete novice / expert modes is a venial sin in UI design, but "personalized menus" is a mortal one. It's about the worst thing you can do, and IMO there's no reason to think it would be any better in a ribbon-oriented model than in a menu-driven one.
(Edit: I do agree that restricting the adaptive menu scheme to a specific ribbon tab might be a more promising approach than monkeying with the structure and layout of the standard tabs.)
Your computer science class isn't a good representation of the market. + It's not because 90% knows how to use a browser that they know how to use explorer, right click & use CTR/ALT
I think this is a very subjective viewpoint, which is understandable considering the website we're on, but it still overlooks how huge the PC market really is, along with the Windows userbase, and the nature of a lot of its users. There's a huge segment of the Windows userbase who will always be beginners at computers, and their habits and methods are usually mindblowing to any "knowledgeable" user. One such example was the mass of people who typed "facebook login" into Google any time they wanted to log-in into Facebook, and got thoroughly confused and angry when the first hit suddenly led them to ReadWriteWeb's article on Facebook's log-in, filling the comments section with cries of where is the log-in, what is this crap, shitty re-design, let me in!, etc.
Because of users like this, Microsoft is where it is. Any big revamp, and they'll just get millions of confused customers who suddenly can't make sense of the most basic functionality. It is Microsoft's own doing that they made their users get used to interfaces like this, but it's not as easy as just scraping it and throwing up something new.
It's also easy to forget that Windows has a userbase 10 times its nearest competitor (which is to say this brings in challenges which competitors might not face).
According to Microsoft's data, more than 85% of the command usage in Explorer is through keyboard shortcuts or context menus. Clearly, it isn't that hard to get used to using context menus and keyboard shortcuts.
It seems to me that a lot of people here on HN are simply using this issue to talk about how much better they are at using a computer than the ordinary person, who is apparently quite inept. Unless there is convincing evidence that people that incompetent are still a significant fraction of the userbase, we should stop designing desktop software to accommodate people who are not able to master the use of an iPad.
>"Clearly, it isn't that hard to get used to using context menus and keyboard shortcuts."
What this may show is that it is mainly experienced users who use Explorer. And based on my personal experience, I believe this to be the case - most people do not know what Explorer is for, let alone how to use it efficiently.
The reason for using the context menu use in my case is that most options are available only from the context menu...e.g. "edit", "extract [from zip] all", etc. and it is only through many years of trial and error that I have developed any efficiency with the context menu - this is because the problem with context menu operations is that they require enough experience to recognize the context and remember what [hidden] commands will be revealed by a right-click.
The advantage of the ribbon is that context menus are made visible when the context is entered, thus allowing less experienced users explore options more easily. Also, the issue with traditional context menus is that they are a mixture of fixed elements [cut, copy, paste, properties] and context specific items [extract all].
This is a classic case of misinterpreting the data - 85% use it because the only way you can copy, without using a context menu or a keyboard shortcut is by holding down Alt and then clicking on the Edit menu.The point is, people use keyboard shortcuts & context menus because they have to today.
This is the danger with reading too much into simple data - just because 85% of the people do X, it doesn't mean that X is good. Do you expect the data to show that people don't copy paste because its not intuitive? No, in most cases they 'have' to learn it, and figure it out by asking a friend, but they don't enjoy the learning process (and indirectly, resent the platform itself).
Everyone who struggled with the concept of right clicking eventually learnt it - the problem is not that right clicking or context menus are impossible to learn. It's that they're not a natural way of interaction, and should be eliminated whenever possible.
You shouldn't have to learn to use a menu to do what you want, especially when 80% of the time you just need 4 actions.
The simplicity of modifiers (tap, double tap, swipe) is what makes touch platforms like iOS very intuitive. A direct, clickable button ensures that novice users can accomplish simple file management tasks by learning a single modifier (the click).
When I browse, I prefer to open pages from hyperlinks in new tabs. For example, if I google something, each result I pursue gets its own tab. Doing that in ios was not at all intuitive, and only discoverable by happenstance. (And it is VERY klunky, but that's another story).
Editing is also a pain in the ass on it. It is a wonderful os for very simple tasks, but as the complexity grows it is very limiting.
A lot of people have addressed a mistake in your reasoning (selective bias, only way to do things, etc...). Another point is that context menus aren't touch friendly. The ribbon works surprisingly well for touch.
Assuming the usage data is from Windows 7, the nonexistent usage of menu is probably largely because the menu is entirely hidden unless you know that hitting 'alt' brings it up. And that is a much newer hidden feature (Win7 era, maybe Vista with early signals in XP) than context menus (at least since Win95).
Besides touch-friendliness, ribbons have huge benefits in discoverability. People can't use features they don't know exist; ribbons organize features into browsable, meaningful panels so they can be found, related to each other, and used. The article seems to entirely miss this point.
Actually, I think you missed the point of the article instead. It never argued that having buttons for common functions is bad but instead that some of the most bizarre and rarely used functions, e.g. Invert Selection, are showing up in a major UI element targeted largely at novice users.
The "copy to" and "move to" buttons, seem to be some variation on the old "send to" command, which is currently available via both right-click and menu bar. (For those not familiar with Windows: if I select a file, the "send to" options are: compressed folder, create desktop shortcut, documents, fax, email, burn to DVD, network directory.)
Personally, that's an command that I never use; not sure how popular it is with the Windows userbase in general.
It is one thing I love to show "normal" people. They can use it to easily copy files to eg USB sticks or even select images to send by mail. These are tremendously useful for those people.
Fair enough. Usually, when I copy files to USB I have 2 windows open and drag from one to another.
The "send to" email, however: I don't think you can use it with any web-based email, correct? Do people usually have Outlook set up on their machines these days?
Yes, here's a place they really could have done something cool with the UI, and spiffed up a be-cobwebbed corner of Explorer.
In XP, there's a folder that you can put folder and program shortcuts in, that will populate the send to menu. In fact, this essentially is my quicklaunch method when using XP. Just put a link to notepad2 in there, and you can view anything in ascii. Rinse and repeat.
It's so useful in fact, that they might have been able to bring it into wider usage, and maintain continuity with older Windows, by adding a context menu such as 'Make me a send to place', which would add a shortcut to the clicked folder or application into the send to menu.
To me on OS X, the Finder sidebar and Dock are the rough equivalent. 90% of my Finder work is selection and dragging to the sidebar, or Dock, the same thing I would use send to on Windows for.
>(For those not familiar with Windows: if I select a file, the "send to" options are: compressed folder, create desktop shortcut, documents, fax, email, burn to DVD, network directory.)
There's one more: if you have a bluetooth adapter (or a laptop with embedded support), it shows a 'Send to Bluetooth device'. I find this very useful for sending files to my phone.
I love "Send To". I keep a link to Notepad2 and a hex editor in there (and sometimes Emacs) so that I can easily use a real editor or get a hex dump. It's kind of like "Open With..." except that it's always in the menu and somehow Open With... might not pick up the program you want, so you have to waste time traversing the directory tree.
they're on the toolbar in Vista and Win 7. In XP they're not on the toolbar but they're on the side bar that is shown by default.
Edit: Vista/7 may not be completely true, but it's certainly that way on my untechnically-minded mother's laptop - probably the result of context (e.g. in a library of pictures) or a setting somewhere.
What makes you think that new computer users who can't remember "non intuitive" concepts like right clicking and context menus will know what cut/copy/paste on files does?
Again, cut/copy/paste are technical terms - the intent a user is likely to form is, I have this word file here, and i need to put it onto this USB drive here. The large copy to button in the ribbon accomplishes that task nicely.
Remember, its not that user's cant remember right clicking, its that they shouldn't have to. Why should you need two different types of clicks, and 2 sub menus to Send a file to a drive, when you can accomplish it with a single click and a single sub-menu (as is demonstrated in the ribbon)
Making the initial learning curve simple will have implications on the overall feel & appeal of the operating system, but this is something that is difficult to quantify with simple software metrics.
> Making the initial learning curve simple will have implications on the overall feel & appeal of the operating system, but this is something that is difficult to quantify with simple software metrics.
Ok, but the file system metaphor with its files and folders is unintuitive. New users get lost or just don't get that metaphor. You won't make anything easier for them by putting bigger buttons into the toolbar when they can't imagine for what those buttons might be used.
Alone the metaphor of "copying" a file is so unintuitive. If my mother wants to take a look at the photos she took with her cam she sure won't think about "copying" them.
My point is: MS is trying to fix the wrong problem. They should think about getting rid of end user facing file systems instead of bolting bigger and brighter buttons onto a horribly user unfriendly application like the explorer.
Came here to say this, only I don't work for Microsoft. He takes you guys' research that says most people use it from the context menu and uses that to say that it should continue to be that way. It's like, since when are companies not allowed to try to improve their UI? Just because most people use it there doesn't make it the best option.
The UI, is apparently customizable. From the Team Blog:
"We knew that using a ribbon for Explorer would likely be met with skepticism by a set of power-users (like me), but there are clear benefits in ways that the ribbon:
-Exposes hidden features that they already use but which require third party add-ons to use in the Explorer UI today.
-Provides keyboard shortcuts for every command in the ribbon, something many people have been asking for.
-Provides UI customization with the quick access toolbar, taking us back to a customization level that is basically equivalent to Windows XP."
It will depend a lot on the specific product. For example, I'm sure that Eclipse very rarely runs with fully default settings. Consumer products will run in more of a default state, until they get very important to people's lives (I've noticed an increasing awareness and ability with Facebook privacy settings among non-technical friends in the last year).
I'm getting off-point here, but did anyone else get annoyed that the MS blog post used bar charts when they should use pie charts to compare relative percentages?
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
The problem with this idea is that for the majority of users "taste" is the last thing on their mind. Functionality and ease of use are the only things that matter. Having common functions up front in your face is in fact easier to use than having them hidden away.
It takes a certain level of skill using a system before you're capable of appreciating higher level constructs such as "beauty". As an analogy, we all have seen poor coders whose code is poorly formatted, sloppy looking, and just plain ugly. But when you ask them they're just not capable of noticing this. Its that their minds have not elevated past the details to see the big picture. It's the same way with most computer users.
Well, in general I agree with the comments saying that the review missed the point about reworking the Tool/Menu bar so that people start to use it more
I still think, it's too crowded, and will benefit from a mode selection (i.e. Advanced with all these button, Basic with only the most used ones and Custom )
Microsoft UIs current state is, in general, cluttered and broken.
I agree with this blogger, and my reaction was similar when I red the original post on msdn.
Having been absent from microsoft office (or any office like application for that mater) for many years, I recently got to use recent versions of microsoft products such as Word, Outlook, etc. The ribbons were a big facepalm, I didn't know such bad things exist, a few co-workers of mine said that they find them practical. I spent an average of 20-40 seconds each time I needed to click one of those buttons, even after many months of usage.
The buttons are jammed together in a rectangular area in ridiculous amounts. Some ribbons have close to 20 buttons, this will never be intuitive, it's just not visually easy to identify the buttons. Also, often a button is on the other site, all the away across the window in a far far away ribbon.
I never managed to use any microsoft OS after XP. Did the users really need other MS OS after XP? Quite frankly, I cannot find sinigle advantage of using vista or seven.
PS: The screenshots have something of a 1998 charm, I think it's that overlayed info. mspaint?
Everyone I know loves managing their files, so it's great that Microsoft is finally improving Windows Explorer!
WRONG!
For the hundreds of nerds complaining that they don't have access to the file system on their iPads, there are millions of normal people who are delighted by a computer that they can use rather than manage.
How much longer can Microsoft keep making a 20th century operating system? What's going to be the great innovation of Windows 9? Yet another reshuffled toolbar driven by all of their wonderful data?
Well, the iOS way would be that documents would end up in a place that is shown when you open a word processor, and that pictures would end up in a place that is shown when you open up an image navigator.
I have a set of documents, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. I also have a set of pictures, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. My USB drive already has a set of documents and a set of pictures, and I'd like to get a subset of the documents and a subset of the pictures onto internal storage so that I can plug out my USB drive afterwards and still access them. Can you come up with a way of doing all that that doesn't involve a filesystem or a poor imitation of it?
I'm not sure what type of "documents" you're referring to, but the images could be handled as with any other media import upon attaching the drive – i.e., within the image browsing app. As for moving images to the USB drive, that's an export from the image browsing app.
I'm not sure what type of "documents" you're referring to
Aha, therein lies the rub. These documents could be essentially arbitrary files, and there's no substitute to a general purpose file manager for them. Writing an app for every single file format that could be present on the USB drive is highly inefficient compared to the usual file manager.
My basic point is that filesystems are a well-established standard, and practically everything on your computer supports them. If you'd like to deviate from such a standard, you'd better have a very good reason for doing so.
I think the point you're missing is that most people only manipulate data that clearly belongs to some application. So, for most people, the relevant application managing their data and abstracting away the underlying file system is a valid option.
If that doesn't work for you, then okay. You're not most people.
Oddly, Microsoft used to be app centric and moved to being file centric with Windows 95. The idea being that you cared less about the app and more about the document you were using. Apple is going back and saying you care about the app as the dominant focus.
This is interesting. For example, my mom knows the document she wants to open is her 2009 tax return document. The fact that it is a PDF or she reads it with Adobe Reader -- I'm fairly certain she doesn't know. If I were to layout every application she has installed and told her to find the one to open to access her tax documents I honestly don't think she'd have a clue. She'd probably try Word. I suspect she's not alone on this.
I'd bet that nine times out of ten, she's going to open that PDF as an email attachment. Then it's up to the OS to match the file with the app. I often think that email is the real file system today.
The tool drives the user. Your mom works this way because, as you said, windows 95 is file oriented. If it were app oriented as Mac OS X is, I bet she would have the opposite behavior.
If the file type is arbitrary, and doesn't correspond to an app, then you're using your internal hard disk as a file store. There are better solutions for that.
You're missing the point. iOS devices have file systems. The simple fact is that people just don't understand them very well. Most normal users just put everything on their desktop because it's the only way they can ever find them again.
Maybe you can provide a practical example of a case where you need to move files onto your system that can't be opened by any of the applications installed on your system. I can't think of a single time I've needed to do that. Files don't have inherent value. They're only useful if you have software that can make use of them.
Maybe you can provide a practical example of a case where you need to move files onto your system that can't be opened by any of the applications installed on your system.
I never said the files couldn't be opened by any of the applications on my system -- I just said the files couldn't be managed by any of them. Note the very important difference.
Regardless, here's an instance that came up just a few days ago: I have multiple computers and have software to deal with a certain file format installed only on some of them. I needed to back up the contents of a USB stick containing some such files on a computer that didn't have the software.
Ok, didn't expect I had to do this on HN but here goes:
-> Write code,
-> Dump logs to app.log, app.err
-> Is there an err browsing app you're aware of ?
If that ever happened to someone on HN, the consequences:
-> If apple implemented something so broken, some nutter would explain to me what extension to use.
-> If MS implemented it, there would be a #1 post on HN with the title "MS file management is broken beyond repair and company is irrelevant"
I expect to be downvoted for this but it is impossible to have a fair discussion about Microsoft products.
"...write code..." Congratulations, you are part of the less than one percent of the world workforce that are developers. As a developer, even I only need full filesystem access when I am developing, which is a fraction of my time. Having full filesystem access is an important use case, you can have it. For the rest of the world, it is a usability barrier.
I think others have explained this, but I'll give it a try anyway.
Plug an SD card with photos on it into the iPad camera connection kit, and plug that into the iPad. The Photos app opens, you tap the photos you want to import, and you're done.
Your other cases are simple extensions of this example. The fact that an iPad can't do this right now with more file types or with a USB drive is not an inherent limitation of the approach.
You really think we should write an app for every file type? As a developer who believes in abstracting common code out, I find the notion frankly idiotic.
I'm not saying you don't need a filesystem. There are other ways to interact with data besides a file browser.
On the iPad, I can use the official Photos app (or any of the other photo apps) to get my photos where they need to go, whether that's a phone, computer, website or printer.
I don't read my email by going into the "My Emails" folder on my C:\ drive, I access my email through a UI specifically made for accessing email.
I don't manage individual contact files, I access my contacts through an address book app.
I don't manage individual music files, I use iTunes.
Most operating systems already encourage separating files by type, I'm taking it a step further by suggesting that 90% of users would be better served by many type-specific file browsers than a single general purpose one.
I would say you're out of luck then. What good are those mkv files if you don't have an app to read them?
There are a lot of things I'm used to doing on a computer that I can't do on an iPad. Everyone has their examples of things that make X inferior to Y. Apple has shown that they can be successful by offering less of "business as usual" while slowly introducing new ways of doing things.
The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be. Is rearranging toolbar buttons really going to bring delight to people around the world? How does this help the guy who is miserable at his job because he's forced to use a 10 year old PC running Windows XP? How does it help the person who lost all of their vacation photos because they downloaded a photo editing app that turned out to be a virus? How does it help a four year old that's learning to read?
I would say you're out of luck then. What good are those mkv files if you don't have an app to read them?
I have a really nice app to read them called Media Player Classic -- I just don't have an app to manage them. Writing apps to manage every single file type I have is very inefficient compared to using a general purpose file manager. You abstract out often-used code rather than copy-pasting it all over the place, don't you?
The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be.
The fundamental definition/theorem/axiom/whatever of computer science is the Church-Turing thesis. We haven't come up with a practical notion of computability more general than that, so it is by default the state of the art. Following from that, I think a computer should be a real-life manifestation of a universal Turing machine -- something that can run anything computable (taking into account resource bounds but also providing all the resources it can) without being beholden to another entity. Anything less is an appliance, a toy, and is not fit to be called a computer.
Files without a dedicated application will be the exception rather than the rule. Movies, Photos, Documents, spreadsheets, databases, music, books; you will usually open in a dedicated application. It's not hard to envisage an improved UI for files that do not have a dedicated application: they could be presented in a view showing all the files that are not associated with a program, for manual association. From then on, the system would know which file types to present along with that application. In addition, it goes without saying that full access to the underlying file system should be possible for developers and those that need it (which will be a tiny fraction of the userbase).
It's a ridiculous idea IMO because when I want to copy 2 docs, a jpeg and an html file from one device to another, I'd have to open three separate programs in order to carry out the task.
With a dedicated file manager, you open the one program and do it all in one step.
My wife and I split the cost of an iPad last month, and we absolutely love it. There are a few things that really make me shake my head in frustration, but whatever, no product is perfect.
And last week I managed to score 2 32gb touchpads at the $150 price -- with the thought that we'll play with one for a week or so and see if it fits in our family. If not, we'll give both away at Christmas.
The touchpad just made me love my iPad2 more. It's nice enough, and will be a great gift for my mom and her dad, but it doesn't hold-up to the iPad2.
All that being said -- I sorta think of my primary computer as an oven to my iPads toaster-oven. The iPad can do a lot of the same things, and several things it can do far better than my oven and far easier.
And apple doesn't even want me to replace my oven -- they're producing toaster ovens by design.
What that means to me is that there's a lot of design decisions that work on a toaster oven that just don't make sense on an oven.
Well, yes, Apple designs products for rich people in the first world who have always-on fast internet (have you seen the sheer size of Apple point updates?!). Microsoft designs far more inclusive products.
Well, they might have fixed it then. All I know is that I balked at the 1GB OS X update waiting for me.
And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.
The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries. You will find tons of PCs running Windows in not-so-rich countries, orders of magnitude more. That is exactly my point.
The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries. You will find tons of PCs running Windows in not-so-rich countries, orders of magnitude more. That is exactly my point.
New technologies tend to be adapted by first world countries first. This was as true of the original IBM PC as it is today for the iPad.
But the iOS model of syncing everything to the cloud or whatever is simply incompatible with the current realities of those countries. Microsoft's taking that into account rather than just shrugging it off.
> The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries.
At very least in Bangkok, which is obviously not belongs to rich first world countries, I can see iPad (and Galaxy Tab) everywhere on a train or even in a not-so-expensive restaurant. My not-so-rich neighbor bought an iPad few weeks ago and ask if I could help him setup Wi-Fi, etc.
Maybe I have an Apple-fan Attraction Field turned on or something, but I've found iPad-availablity around me to be pretty amazing. It's hard to deny that Windows-running PCs are still orders of magnitude more but it's still amazing.
Apple is on an incredible roll in Thailand. Our tiny town of Tak just got its first superstore ... and an Apple (iBeat) store at the same time. Dumbfounding.
The size of Windows 7 SP1 is based on how many updates you already have. It's generally 60-100 MB. Only the absolute full ISO download is a gigabyte, and most people simply won't need that. Not to mention that non-SP1 Win7 kept getting security updates for quite a while.
To add to the other voices here, it's massively popular in Eastern Europe not so much as a computer replacement but as a symbol of wealth, regardless of whether you actually possess any.
I was just thinking this myself. Windows 8 is moving towards a tablet-like structure, they need to go all the way on this and get rid of the filesystem for 90% of users.
Open almost any Windows laptop, and you'll see users who basically think of the hard drive as a file dumping ground. You'll see files stored on the Desktop, or everything just goes into one big directory. How many conversations have you had where you ask "Where did you save the file?" and the reply is "I don't know, just the place that it says when I press save"?
Windows should have had a services infrastructure, where programs explicitly define an export (how to access files the program has generated) and import (which files the program can handle). Users don't really think of files by directory but by type, either Word documents or photos or whatever. The file system should just be a dialog box which is essentially a search. "Show me Word documents I edited in the last 5 days." "Show me all my photos that I took in Hawaii." That's how users think about data.
Interesting idea! There is no indication of what "My Documents" contains. What do I put in there? What is a "document" anyway? I'm frequently annoyed by files being saved somewhere I don't remember, or into huge folder hierarchies where I troublesomely navigate into. This is just simply stuff a user shouldn't need to think about. Couple your suggestions with a proper realtime search engine like we have with http://www.voidtools.com/ and this could be good.
My Documents is the worst possible solution to "I can't find my files."
First of all, they designate only one part of the visible filesystem as "safe", when it should be the opposite. Everything that's obviously accessible should be safe, and system-critical stuff should require going elsewhere.
Secondly, there is nothing personal about "My Documents". Every program routinely dumps files there that you can't do anything with directly. Game saves are the worst offenders here. They're cryptically named and you can't double click them like every other file.
And then people complain that normal users don't understand files.
Mac OS X already has that, but I still would not like to see the filesystem hidden from me. It's just too valuable idea for it to go away and it takes us further away from general computing to turning our computers into appliances owned by our OS vendor.
I think the idea of the parent poster is that there would be no file system (at least not in the sense of a tree hierarchy of directories), just a large database with some SQL like language exposed through the GUI.
Even though Mac OS X filesystem is not a relational database, it does support a query language that allows you to search for built in or user defined attributes and their values.
This search functionality is available system wide (Spotlight search box), from any file open dialog or from the command line. For example things like this are possible:
Find me all pictures I tool this year and where I used flash, and aperture f4:
kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1
You type this in either spotlight or search box on open file dialog. You can do the same from the command line
The nice thing about the mdfind command is that you can restrict the search to a directory of your choice only.
Some people pay good money for photo organizers on Mac OS X, not knowing they already have this functionality built in. And finding what attributes are available is not that hard either:
I wasn't necessarily heading in that direction, I just meant modifying how data is presented to users (and, in fact, the platform APIs too). I guess once you reach that abstraction, it doesn't really matter whether it's a filesystem or WinFS or whatever else.
I would say having logically named directories and a strict HIG could solve this.
When I hit "Save" on a Mac, the file picker shows me a field where I can type a file name, and a drop down where I can choose between "Documents", "Pictures", "Movies", etc. or the last directory this particular program saved a file to. Most of the time the application will even pick a sensible default location. Only if I click the small arrow at the right of the drop down to I see the advanced file chooser.
On Windows, when I hit "Save", I get the advanced file picker by default. Unless the application is smart enough to set a sensible default location -- which most Windows applications are not -- the Windows file picker defaults to Desktop. This is the reason most people have all kinds of shit on their Windows desktops.
I can search for files on Windows now, so at least Windows has one thing right.
Yeah, many users even don't understand the file system metaphor. MS unleashing the full fury of cut/copy/paste/files isn't really helping user experience.
But MS is a highly engineer dominated tribal culture. I don't see how they can overcome that. I guess the windows explorer will survive another decade.
The writer of this blog uses a picture of the Golden Gate bridge as the background image on the page. As someone who lives near the bridge, I can affirm that at any given time, more than 50% of the bridge is empty; that is, less than half of the bridge's surface is covered by cars or pedestrians. Clearly this is a complete waste of resources, and we should just get rid of the empty half.
Also, what is up with those suspension towers and all those cables? Does anyone actually cross the bridge at those great heights? I say cut them up and stick them underneath as support piers, so that they're not obstructing the view or (more likely) sticking out of a fog bank and creating a hazard to passing aircraft.
Well, i wouldn't want you to overthink it...but they're not so far apart.
Games have the best UI; ideally a game will only show you the bare minimum of information required, and make the play experience as smooth and intuitive as possible. But games also have very narrowly defined win/loss conditions, and even in sandbox games (like Grand Theft Auto) success means that that players in the middle of the normal distribution are able to complete the game and interested enough to spend time doing so.
For creative or productivity software, the definition of success is open-ended, because while designers can anticipate the kind of tasks/problems users will want to perform/solve, the end product of their labors is fundamentally unknowable, rather than waiting within the software to be discovered by the diligent user (player). Sure, Michaelangelo used to say that the statue already existed within the block of marble and his job was simply to reveal it, but you should probably see that as an early example of successful branding rather than a design document. A game is like a theme park ride insofar as the riders may change but their interaction with the ride is highly constrained. An application is more like a civil engineering task insofar as it has to bear a substantial amount of traffic, but its job is to facilitate rather than fulfill. You want those things available on the toolbar, even though many of them may not see regular use, because it's the easiest way to signal the availability of such functionality. The relative utility distribution of toolbar buttons or menu items follows Benford's law just like everything else.
If your ridiculously large intellect can stop applauding itself for one second, I hope you can find time to read this.
That was probably the largest amount of psychobabble condensed into 2 paragraphs I've ever seen. Seriously, your first point was extremely over-simplified and you were called out on it, rightfully. I could make your first argument about anything. Watch: "Only 50% of people went out to eat this weekend. Clearly, we should get rid of 50% of restaurants." or "Only 50% of cars are driven on any given day. Clearly, we should just git rid of 50% of the cars."
Your first point was a miss, and chetan called you out on it. Then, you insult his intelligence and go into a psychobabble rant about little to nothing that applies. Jesus dude, come down a peg or two.
My first post was a joke, to emphasize how silly I thought the UX critique was. Complaining that software and civil engineering are not the same is so obvious as to be trite.
I stand by my point above, though. Call it psychobabble if you like, but I like my metaphors. Shoot me.
I completely realize that. My point was to show how easy it was to make that critique with such an over-simplification, which was chetan's point as well.
And your argument starts off with some random assumption that "games have the best UI". You can't lead into the rest of your argument with some random tidbit you assume is true. Some games have great UIs, some have shitty ones. Largely, it's irrelevant to your point, whatever it may be.
Most people are perfectly capable of drawing the necessary inferences from a generalization. If I say that 'cows have four legs', this is not to deny the fact that some cows come up short in the leg department. Games with shitty UIs tend to fail rapidly in the marketplace, because few people want to play a game with a shitty UI.
There's a reason that I included qualifiers like 'I wouldn't want to overthink it' and 'ideally...' and 'players in the middle of the normal distribution...'. The reason is that I'm sketching out a philosophy of UI design in only a few sentences, and want to signal this to people who are reading. You seem determined to interpret my remarks in the most literal and narrow sense possible, to the point of completely overlooking the contextual qualifiers that accompanied them.
The concept of the ribbon - tabs with buttons grouped by function - has a lot of advantages in theory. Obviously you can have bigger buttons which is always a good thing, and you allow each button to have sub-buttons which actually works out really well. I personally think Microsoft is on the right track from a high level perspective.
The problem comes in the implementation. The graphic design is just horrible. Where is the grid? Where is the white space? What the hell is that round button that replaces the file menu? The title bar just looks awful.
If they could clean it up graphically I really think it could be just as nice as anything on Mac OS X. Ask yourself this, if Apple had come out with the buttons on tabs in the exact same groupings but done it in a gorgeous way, who would be complaining about it? We'd all be heralding it.
I think the ribbon concept is inherently flawed because no human brain can remember such an overwhelming amount of information (what command in which function group in which tab).
Limit the need for Explorer/Finder/etc. altogether. For those cases where it is needed limit top level UI elements to the most commonly used items. Move the rest to either a toolbar or a contextual menu.
You know, I just checked Finder and realized that not only does it not have the things showed in this mockup, but that I have never missed them.
If you have to give me steps, then I think you've missed the point of the Ribbon!
The Finder has a lot of places you can perform operations on a file: the menu bar, the toolbar, the Get Info inspector, and the context menu. All the Ribbon does is turn them into buttons and put them in the same place. There's no remembering how to do stuff - and yes, some people can't remember how to do basic file management - because it's all done from the same row at the top. I could say the same thing about "Every function in the Finder I can do without having to use menus".
The problem has more to do with the excessive number of available commands. My suggestion is to cut the clutter and avoid hierarchical UI elements altogether, regardless of their nature.
You don't remember it, you develop muscle memory. I couldn't tell you what most key combinations are in Visual studio, but I'm always able to press the right buttons in the right context.
The best way to 'fix' Windows Explorer is to focus on improving usability of the OS such that Windows Explorer isn't something average users needs to use. Focusing on improving it is focusing on the wrong problem, IMO.
Having said that, I think the author of the post seems to ignore the fact that Microsoft's research shows that not many use the menu bar currently (because currently, the menu bar is hidden by default). By adding the ribbon, I assume their goal is to improve that statistic, and in turn make it easier for users.
iPodObserver site appears to be the only place that was emailed by "Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla" to say that this was a Microsoft-produced video. Everyone else simply quoted them. So the authenticity of [1] looks highly implausible.
Maybe this is an ingenius plan by Microsoft employees to revamp the company from inside out (or outside in?). But seriously, the kool-aid drinking types are probably really flustered by your post, as they think the ginormous waste of screen space is the best thing ever invented. sad
Simple usage statistics aren't especially valuable if you don't look at the overall picture as to why features are used (e.g. who would cut and paste if they understood how to move?). I'm not sure if either side is properly analyzing the available information.
Actually, copy/paste makes a lot of sense. Having to frequently copy or move files from one place to another, I got used to ctrl-c or -x a file, then go to a different directory, and ctrl-v. The appeal, I think, is that I don't have to use the mouse (which employs a time-costly drag operation).
Dragging files into directories is also cognitively expensive - e.g. you have to make certain that you are dragging exactly into the right folder which can be about 15 pixels high, depending on what view you're using. It requires hand-eye coordination which becomes unnecessary with simple copy/paste operations.
BUT, for beginner users, I agree: users have a hard time grasping the concept of a copy/paste buffer anyway, and with files it gets abstracted one more level. For more advanced users, they use keyboard shortcuts, so the buttons don't really need to be there.
_They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research._
This hits the nail on the head when discussing the UI decisions made. If Microsoft had included the top 10 commands in an organized manner, plus a few more from their data, it'd probably be fine.
There's a huge difference between have never used and will never use. Microsoft's data is about past usage; the article makes an unjustified extrapolation from that to future message. This extrapolation is particularly relevant when discussing a feature that largely serves to improve discoverability - if the features make sense together, putting them together and making them visible may help users get more out of the software.
It would be interesting to find out how many people say "I never knew the file manager could do that" when they fire up Windows 8, even when the feature has been there since NT4.
Usability of this (and anything, really) would improve dramatically if in each system there were one correct way (based on selection by scientific usability testing) to initiate each task.
The "helpfulness" of providing "n" ways of doing the same thing is an illusion and only undermines the ability for users to establish a shared context which can be used to make user actions more automatic for the experienced and easier to teach to the inexperienced.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 284 ms ] threadAlso most "normal" users do not have a single __init__.py I like the new Finder but I rarely use it... ack FTW!
It's hard to claim that the context menu is good UI. The fact that so few people use the menu bar means that it's currently useless and needs to be reworked. It's not as if they're replacing the context menu with the ribbon, they're replacing the currently-unused menu bar.
Small nitpick: "Burn" doesn't show if you click on the main options of the left tree ("Favorites", "Libraries", etc).
I find it interesting because it clearly shows something changed on the last couple of years, we still remember how important burning something was, right?
If you don't have anything selected you only get Organize and New folder. If you select a PDF you get Open with X, Print, and E-mail added.
Because every file can technically be "burned" when you have a CD burner it shows up all over the place.
I actually think that overall this a big improvement. Minimalism can go screw itself when it costs me hours of free labour :)
Secondly, the actions are being moved from the context menu to the ribbon. Most new computer users find it very hard to remember additional, non intuitive actions like right clicking & context menus. Each of these is a 'modifier' that power users are used to, but which make the mental model of file manipulation much harder for beginners to wrap their heads around. They have to remember to apply these modifiers to see if the functions they want exist. Moving the functions into a contextually aware ribbon will make life much easier for these users.
Third, Move, Copy, Delete & Rename occupy the center of the ribbon. These are the most used commands (by far) and rightfully occupy center stage. Power users will call it clutter, but it will be extremely helpful for beginners.
[Disclaimer: MSFT Employee, but I do not work on Windows]
I didn't realize this. In fact, if I were asked to guess, I would have answered that most new users would pick up pretty quickly how to use context menus, especially if the context menus had related commands like file manipulation if in Windows Explorer (is it still called that?), or formatting if in a text document, etc.
Hell, rats in a cage can learn what to push in order to eat, so I would have thought that people would be able to learn this. Of course, it would help if they were told somehow and didn't have to discover it.
(since we're on topic: I'm an MS employee. I do not work on Windows Explorer)
For new users I might agree that they could figure out a right click because everything is new. But for users where everything is familiar ("I've always done it this way"), it gets much harder to break those expected actions.
Second part is about explorer itself. While it might seem like a common utility (even necessary), I find it very rare for a general user to know about it (my wife does not, nor my parents, siblings, their friends,...but my wife's father does). Once they see it, they have no idea what to do. Copy a file? Really, they have no idea.
All of those actions require knowing how to [delete], [open folders], [drag and drop].
Their old MacOS Finder was clear and simple - my wife would spend hours arranging her work in coloured folders, each of which opened in a window whose shape and position she had chosen, and was meaningful to her. It was a powerful tool that enabled her to arrange and group her work.
Now, both Apple and Microsoft compete with each other over how bad they can make their file system interface. Microsoft wanted to do away with the filesystem in Longhorn, and Apple have actually done so in iOS.
Is this progress??
You're absolutely right. I don't have the citation on me right now, but spatial mode has been found to be easier to grasp for new users in every single test ever. The only reason it was dropped was because (1) Windows Explorer, (2) power users whined about too many open windows and (3) a lot of people got used to URLs opening in the same window thanks to web browsers, so people sought to apply the same principles to file browsers.
Spatial mode used to be default on GNOME for a long time. There, too, it was dropped because of the same reasons.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager and http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html
The problem is that there's no global switch to force Finder in spatial mode coming from anywhere, anytime. This results in a messy affair when suddenly a non-spatial Finder pops up because you never opened that folder directly and previously put it in spatial mode.
You can easily have two Finder windows open on the same folder, meaning you lose the immediate recognition that spatial mode gives you. My personal take - they should have two types of Finder window - a spatial "folder contents" window and a folder-browser (probably in column-view) that only shows folders and maybe a preview of the files within.
So you can navigate quickly/enter file-paths in the browser, but to actually use a folder, you enter spatial mode, so you have the instant recognition of where you are.
(1) the NeXT team won the culture wars and the file browser was introduced on NextStep.
Wonderful though Linux is, it's applications are not consistent or mature enough to support a totally document-centric UI. Microsoft could achieve that with Office, but they would probably be accused of over-integration, and hit with the anti-trust stick.
Disclaimer: I believe the best UI for a filesystem manager was Windows Explorer 98, the last iteration with perpetual, irrevocable and non exclusive root access, with Norton Commander as its only rival.
From the moment we cared about maintaining our system's safety from the user's "big fingers syndrome", it all went down (starting with hiding file extensions) to the atrocities we now have to deal with. And yes, I put Seven's Explorer in the same basket as Finder and the likes of Nautilus, mostly due to /that/ horrible folder scrolling bug that MS refuses to hotfix.
Now the idea that you actually have more problem with experienced users is interesting. I can see that in myself (damn new microwave!). But I still feel like it's no harder to learn, however, than what a bunch of icons are supposed to represent. But once it's shown, then is it really hard for them?
Seems like the problem is one of discoverability, not complexity.
Spending 2 years in hell doing phone tech support for an ISP after high school was probably the most valuable career experience I've ever had bar none.
Nothing has prepared me for making and selling software to regular people better than this experience. Entire assumptions about how users interact with computers, ones based on my own experience, were rendered useless.
The ways regular people think about technology is endlessly fascinating because it very rarely has anything to do with how I think about technology.
At my day job, we eventually decided to put our development lead as tier-2 tech support because we couldn't get this across. He receives every single piece of support mail we get and is asked to respond to a pretty good percentage of them.
It's been a 2 year, very difficult, education for him.
Experiencing the mind of the typical user day after day has caused some major changes in his UI design philosophy. Don't bury things in menus, limit the number of ways you can do something, walk users through set procedures, etc.
There's a bunch of different approaches to interface design and many of them don't work well. We've all seen the beautiful but hard to use designs made by professional designers, and the control-panel-of-a-spaceship design made by developers.
It seems that what both cases miss out on is spending time working with and understanding the average guy on the street. Or rather, good interface design means spending lots of time optimizing for regular users.
Seconding. Especially before Windows 7 added Explorer as a pinned item by default, the less-technologically-literate persons I know would simply called it "My Computer", and used it in the large-icon, single-paned view. On one occasion while helping a friend find a file, I opened Explorer and switched it to the Details view option. Between that and the folder hierarchy in the left pane, I guess it looked different enough from "My Computer" that my friend was used to and I was given the reaction "Wow, you're really in the guts of the machine, now."
Apple has learned a lesson here. They are now heavily optimized for ease and comfort of purchase.
I would argue that THIS is what made Apple's OS hang on all those years it was in the severe minority. There is a segment of the population that wants only one mouse button to click, not 3, not 3 plus CTRL or ALT or etc. Apple did end up having to rely heavily on their option key to extend functionality but at its root the UI was designed so that the average user could do things in a simple, straightforward way. MS sees visually exposing commands to the user as their way to do it and while I may not entirely agree, I don't think it's without merit. My kudos to them for also letting me as a "power user" collapse the "newbie visual noise" off my screen and drop what I want on a custom quick access bar.
Remember: don't let your status as a power user cloud your view of how your grandmother might want to use her computer. There are FAR more 'grandmother' grade users than there are us.
I was a HUGE Apple fan for the early Macs. I totally get what you are saying. But we LOST in the workplace. It was just too slow for the other folks in the office to use (of course, the real death blow was having only a graphics mode to the display so the typing was dreadfully slow-- and the secretaries wouldn't use them- but that's another story).
But I get your point. That's why I phrased my response as I did. I have never done UI/UX testing- maybe the parent has and was sharing his insight.
But if we are all just speculating, I've got to throw out a shout for the other point of view. Yes, too many (how many is too many? I don't know) and it gets to be like using VIM. But two buttons? Seems like it should be ok.
Trust me, I agree that this new ribbon is very cluttered and contains too much visual noise, but in turn I don't mind exposing things visually to the end user. I hate MS Office with the ribbon, but I deal with people all the time who love it. Just let me turn it off :)
That reminds me of the first few times I tried to learn vim.
Now though, any other editor that's not Vim or Emacs feels like that...
Well she no more typical a computer user than you are I would think. I like to see a curve of typical computer users age distribution (but I understand it would be a little skewed if it's hard for the older generations to use computers).
I feel that ribbon is designed for a select group of new users who need that kind of help. And I hope it's easy to disable it. It's fine for Microsoft to use something like this as a default mode as long as power users are able to turn that stuff off.
This is what turns me off on OS X, there is often no way to do certain more advanced things. Or it's hidden so well it requires hours of searching on the web for what plist to modify.
1. Why?
2. `rm huge-file`
The shortcut for move is Cmd-Option-V, if anyone wants to know.
Just double click on one of the tabs.
In a desktop OS, you have a seemingly infinite set of modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Double click, click, right click, Ctrl + Shift), which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they must be learned and remembered.
And now even those are getting out of control:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/gestures.html
Pretty soon I'm going to run out of fingers, and these certainly aren't easily discoverable.
This same pattern continues on iOS devices. They don't ever use complicated gestures, certainly not as the only way to accomplish something. The most complicated gesture you need is pinching.
The new iOS 5 has gestures to switch apps and get home, but those are really like keyboard shortcuts since the home button is still there and offers a simpler alternative.
Easy? Maybe for some. I bet the same people who have to be told to right-click also have to be told how to work their bluetooth/wifi connection (and never bother to turn it off to save battery).
But I'll grant you this point if s/easy/possible/
I'm sure there's a few more buried in there that I haven't discovered. (Like swipe backwards to delete an item from a list)
The actual removal of abstraction (mouse) have made it much easier to use it. This is why my son at 2 can use the ipad and he can't use the mouse and keyboard for the desktop and laptops.
I have no doubt that this UI, though cluttered, will help users out but I question whether this is ultimately the best solution.
I think that you overstate the importance of turning off wifi and bluetooth. Those are power user options, for sure. When you're trying to conserve battery power, you're trying to streamline how you use the device, which to me, smacks of 'power user'.
The flipside to that argument is that it is ridiculously easy to browse a web site, check your email and play Words with Friends and Angry Birds. These are the things that the majority of people care about... not whether or not a given physical interface is active or not.
Android devices on the other hand, need constant fiddling. My Droid would barely last a day with everything turned off, and with wifi, etc. turned on, it would die after only about 6 hours.
Disclaimer: I don't own an iOS device, so don't know how intuitive it might or might not be.
The only reason to turn off the cell radio but not the wifi radio is to conserve battery, which again puts you well outside the use case of the typical apple user.
(In fact, I just got off a plane, and the announcement is "electronic devices must be off, not in airplane mode. that's for after we're in the air.")
In my experience, this is rarely enforced.
And you are right, of course, in that ios allows most people to do the things they most care about very easily-- that's probably the takeaway. If you do that, then, apparently even if the other stuff is hard, people will probably figure out how to do it when they need it. Somehow.
ie there's an inductive leap between "I want to delete all files except this one" and "I can select that one file and then invert selection before deleting". At minimum it requires you to know what "invert selection" means. Ordinary users may take a different, more fiddly, path.
I don't know if that's the case here. My intuition says it is. However, in my optimistic heart I hope Microsoft did a bunch of usability testing and determined that ordinary users do grasp an "invert selection" concept more often than not.
That's how design for mass-use user interfaces works, right? By evidence-driven testing, not by what the programmer/designer thinks makes sense? Clings to idealistic belief.
The dangerous button is much easier to find than the fix-it button. One is right there, with your files. The other is someplace else, related by metaphor alone. Once you have selected the recycle bin you then have to search through your very long deleted file list, select the file you want, select another button to restore it (which appears in the same place as a different button existed before selecting the file), and then navigate back to the place you were expecting the file to be. We're talking about users who can't figure out a menu, but they can perform this multi-step task. I can easily see a new computer user screwing this up.
Next time you look at the context menu of a removable drive, see that "Format" is right there with the eject menu item. One should be used every time you use the drive, the other very rarely and only when you're sure. The latter should be removed to a sub-menu under "advanced", or similar.
Myself, I'd make it harder to delete things and a lot easier to find them again.
Or maybe two. One to go from selected file to all other files, and another click to get back.
Selection only comes handy when you will be doing something to several items at once. Thus, the selection function could be turned on via a menu item or a button: it's a totally different operating mode where you click on or drag around the items to select them.
As someone who has done a fair amount of tutoring seniors on basic computer usage, I have a large amount of anecdotal evidence to indicate this is definitely not the case for them. Depending on the person, I would sometimes try to not show them context menus or keyboard shortcuts at all and just teach them how to use the File, Edit, etc. menus.
There are people who just want to learn the correct order of incantations so that they can check their mail and do things with their photos. And that's okay! Trying to show them that that there is more than one way to do a given action often just leads to confusion as they meld them together (right click on Edit..)
I have seen a fair amount of people with a similar approach as well, but my largest body of personal experience comes from the tutoring, which is why I mentioned it.
I have been seeing the same thing with research colleagues.
What a lot of us in IT or related fields do not "get" from normal users is that the way they "see" the icons and pictures in the computer is completely different from what we do. We have a "mental model" of what Word or Excel or Firefox is doing. Some of us have a more accurate and detailed model than others.
But "normal" users only know what they see and what will happen after they do something (either because they have done it before or because we told them, and they trust us). For them, there is no more meaning to "click on the File menu" than if a Scuba diver told you to "check your SPG every 10 minutes".
Methinks that kind of summarizes the issue: Microsoft doesn't seem to realize it's not 1995 anymore. "Beginners" are no longer a big market, and people are more comfortable with "discovering" software interfaces, as proven by the success of web apps, Apple, etcetera.
Tons of people struggle with things as simple as sending emails, or adding music.
Things like moving files around directories is black magic to them. Directories are black magic to them. The problem I see with this solution is two-fold:
1. The people who understand this stuff will be comfortable using context menus.
2. The people who don't understand this stuff will be just a stymied by the "move to" being in the ribbon versus being in a never-seen context menu.
However, what I would imagine MS is hoping with this is that the people in category two will gradually slide up to category one (well, more like 1a) because these things are in their face all the time.
Microsoft's solution is more akin to the way animal researchers teach apes to recognize arbitrary symbols. It's a subtle and pernicious form of vendor "lock in", because when you try to move those users away from their comfort zone in Outlook or Windows Explorer, they feel lost.
Personally, I think Microsoft and "people who can't be bothered to learn their tools" deserve each other.
The actual user story is always: find what I'm looking for. Google got it right with GMail and informal searching - screw manual organization. Power users should be able to set up structures, but typical computer folks don't need that.
For me, the problem with the ribbon has been (the times I tried to use Office 2010) that there are some more "advanced" commands (like, inserting a cross-reference to a Figure or Table) which became quite hidden away in the Ribbon. Specially, since in the old toolbar mode, I could add buttons to the actions I used most (I actually have a button for text-to-columns in Excel, or to bring the "insert cross reference" in Word, among others).
From my experience, the ribbon does not give you that ability.
Actually, every time I have to use the ribbon (my institute's laptop has office 2010) I start imaging an addon which "learns" what are the most used commands and configures the "Home" (or another) ribbon tab showing icons to access those commands. Surely, someone must have already thought of that no?
This is similar to what MS did with pulldown menus in the pre-Ribbon days. It sounds like a great idea but it turns out to be a terrible one in practice. During the critical "newbie" phase, as a user begins to work with the program, the UI never seems to look the same twice. Tasks that should become reflexive never lose their dependence on the brain. At the same time, more advanced users are left wondering what interesting features they might be missing.
You really, really do not want a UI that changes behind your back, or in ways that aren't explicitly commanded. Resorting to discrete novice / expert modes is a venial sin in UI design, but "personalized menus" is a mortal one. It's about the worst thing you can do, and IMO there's no reason to think it would be any better in a ribbon-oriented model than in a menu-driven one.
(Edit: I do agree that restricting the adaptive menu scheme to a specific ribbon tab might be a more promising approach than monkeying with the structure and layout of the standard tabs.)
Also, do you realize that the Ribbon is customizable in Office 2010, in the same way toolbars were customizable in Office pre-2007?
Because of users like this, Microsoft is where it is. Any big revamp, and they'll just get millions of confused customers who suddenly can't make sense of the most basic functionality. It is Microsoft's own doing that they made their users get used to interfaces like this, but it's not as easy as just scraping it and throwing up something new.
It's also easy to forget that Windows has a userbase 10 times its nearest competitor (which is to say this brings in challenges which competitors might not face).
Jesus, the amount of Microsoft-bashing in on this article is insane.
It seems to me that a lot of people here on HN are simply using this issue to talk about how much better they are at using a computer than the ordinary person, who is apparently quite inept. Unless there is convincing evidence that people that incompetent are still a significant fraction of the userbase, we should stop designing desktop software to accommodate people who are not able to master the use of an iPad.
What this may show is that it is mainly experienced users who use Explorer. And based on my personal experience, I believe this to be the case - most people do not know what Explorer is for, let alone how to use it efficiently.
The reason for using the context menu use in my case is that most options are available only from the context menu...e.g. "edit", "extract [from zip] all", etc. and it is only through many years of trial and error that I have developed any efficiency with the context menu - this is because the problem with context menu operations is that they require enough experience to recognize the context and remember what [hidden] commands will be revealed by a right-click.
The advantage of the ribbon is that context menus are made visible when the context is entered, thus allowing less experienced users explore options more easily. Also, the issue with traditional context menus is that they are a mixture of fixed elements [cut, copy, paste, properties] and context specific items [extract all].
This is the danger with reading too much into simple data - just because 85% of the people do X, it doesn't mean that X is good. Do you expect the data to show that people don't copy paste because its not intuitive? No, in most cases they 'have' to learn it, and figure it out by asking a friend, but they don't enjoy the learning process (and indirectly, resent the platform itself).
Everyone who struggled with the concept of right clicking eventually learnt it - the problem is not that right clicking or context menus are impossible to learn. It's that they're not a natural way of interaction, and should be eliminated whenever possible.
You shouldn't have to learn to use a menu to do what you want, especially when 80% of the time you just need 4 actions.
The simplicity of modifiers (tap, double tap, swipe) is what makes touch platforms like iOS very intuitive. A direct, clickable button ensures that novice users can accomplish simple file management tasks by learning a single modifier (the click).
Editing is also a pain in the ass on it. It is a wonderful os for very simple tasks, but as the complexity grows it is very limiting.
Maybe that's the moral of this thread.
Besides touch-friendliness, ribbons have huge benefits in discoverability. People can't use features they don't know exist; ribbons organize features into browsable, meaningful panels so they can be found, related to each other, and used. The article seems to entirely miss this point.
Personally, that's an command that I never use; not sure how popular it is with the Windows userbase in general.
The "send to" email, however: I don't think you can use it with any web-based email, correct? Do people usually have Outlook set up on their machines these days?
In XP, there's a folder that you can put folder and program shortcuts in, that will populate the send to menu. In fact, this essentially is my quicklaunch method when using XP. Just put a link to notepad2 in there, and you can view anything in ascii. Rinse and repeat.
It's so useful in fact, that they might have been able to bring it into wider usage, and maintain continuity with older Windows, by adding a context menu such as 'Make me a send to place', which would add a shortcut to the clicked folder or application into the send to menu.
To me on OS X, the Finder sidebar and Dock are the rough equivalent. 90% of my Finder work is selection and dragging to the sidebar, or Dock, the same thing I would use send to on Windows for.
There's one more: if you have a bluetooth adapter (or a laptop with embedded support), it shows a 'Send to Bluetooth device'. I find this very useful for sending files to my phone.
http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/7784/emacss.png
People who use Windows are, for the most part, not new computer users. More and more the new users go to a Mac, tablet or smartphone.
The point of that article is that people already use hotkeys and context menus. So building a bigger menu and toolbar is crazy.
Nobody knows about them for one reason - they are useless.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/5e5xN.jpg
Edit: Vista/7 may not be completely true, but it's certainly that way on my untechnically-minded mother's laptop - probably the result of context (e.g. in a library of pictures) or a setting somewhere.
But they had to be put there by the user. :)
Remember, its not that user's cant remember right clicking, its that they shouldn't have to. Why should you need two different types of clicks, and 2 sub menus to Send a file to a drive, when you can accomplish it with a single click and a single sub-menu (as is demonstrated in the ribbon)
Making the initial learning curve simple will have implications on the overall feel & appeal of the operating system, but this is something that is difficult to quantify with simple software metrics.
Ok, but the file system metaphor with its files and folders is unintuitive. New users get lost or just don't get that metaphor. You won't make anything easier for them by putting bigger buttons into the toolbar when they can't imagine for what those buttons might be used.
Alone the metaphor of "copying" a file is so unintuitive. If my mother wants to take a look at the photos she took with her cam she sure won't think about "copying" them.
My point is: MS is trying to fix the wrong problem. They should think about getting rid of end user facing file systems instead of bolting bigger and brighter buttons onto a horribly user unfriendly application like the explorer.
"We knew that using a ribbon for Explorer would likely be met with skepticism by a set of power-users (like me), but there are clear benefits in ways that the ribbon:
-Exposes hidden features that they already use but which require third party add-ons to use in the Explorer UI today.
-Provides keyboard shortcuts for every command in the ribbon, something many people have been asking for.
-Provides UI customization with the quick access toolbar, taking us back to a customization level that is basically equivalent to Windows XP."
But at this stage it looks so very very bad, and remind me the open office mouse with 30 buttons.
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
It takes a certain level of skill using a system before you're capable of appreciating higher level constructs such as "beauty". As an analogy, we all have seen poor coders whose code is poorly formatted, sloppy looking, and just plain ugly. But when you ask them they're just not capable of noticing this. Its that their minds have not elevated past the details to see the big picture. It's the same way with most computer users.
If Microsoft has no taste, Apple certainly has rotten taste in my opinion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_a-gn0dYmk#t=1m14s
I still think, it's too crowded, and will benefit from a mode selection (i.e. Advanced with all these button, Basic with only the most used ones and Custom )
Having been absent from microsoft office (or any office like application for that mater) for many years, I recently got to use recent versions of microsoft products such as Word, Outlook, etc. The ribbons were a big facepalm, I didn't know such bad things exist, a few co-workers of mine said that they find them practical. I spent an average of 20-40 seconds each time I needed to click one of those buttons, even after many months of usage.
The buttons are jammed together in a rectangular area in ridiculous amounts. Some ribbons have close to 20 buttons, this will never be intuitive, it's just not visually easy to identify the buttons. Also, often a button is on the other site, all the away across the window in a far far away ribbon.
I never managed to use any microsoft OS after XP. Did the users really need other MS OS after XP? Quite frankly, I cannot find sinigle advantage of using vista or seven.
PS: The screenshots have something of a 1998 charm, I think it's that overlayed info. mspaint?
On a side note, the quality of comments has gone down while the know-it-all undertones have sky rocketed.
WRONG!
For the hundreds of nerds complaining that they don't have access to the file system on their iPads, there are millions of normal people who are delighted by a computer that they can use rather than manage.
How much longer can Microsoft keep making a 20th century operating system? What's going to be the great innovation of Windows 9? Yet another reshuffled toolbar driven by all of their wonderful data?
I have a set of documents, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. I also have a set of pictures, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. My USB drive already has a set of documents and a set of pictures, and I'd like to get a subset of the documents and a subset of the pictures onto internal storage so that I can plug out my USB drive afterwards and still access them. Can you come up with a way of doing all that that doesn't involve a filesystem or a poor imitation of it?
Aha, therein lies the rub. These documents could be essentially arbitrary files, and there's no substitute to a general purpose file manager for them. Writing an app for every single file format that could be present on the USB drive is highly inefficient compared to the usual file manager.
My basic point is that filesystems are a well-established standard, and practically everything on your computer supports them. If you'd like to deviate from such a standard, you'd better have a very good reason for doing so.
If that doesn't work for you, then okay. You're not most people.
This is interesting. For example, my mom knows the document she wants to open is her 2009 tax return document. The fact that it is a PDF or she reads it with Adobe Reader -- I'm fairly certain she doesn't know. If I were to layout every application she has installed and told her to find the one to open to access her tax documents I honestly don't think she'd have a clue. She'd probably try Word. I suspect she's not alone on this.
Maybe you can provide a practical example of a case where you need to move files onto your system that can't be opened by any of the applications installed on your system. I can't think of a single time I've needed to do that. Files don't have inherent value. They're only useful if you have software that can make use of them.
I never said the files couldn't be opened by any of the applications on my system -- I just said the files couldn't be managed by any of them. Note the very important difference.
Regardless, here's an instance that came up just a few days ago: I have multiple computers and have software to deal with a certain file format installed only on some of them. I needed to back up the contents of a USB stick containing some such files on a computer that didn't have the software.
-> Write code, -> Dump logs to app.log, app.err -> Is there an err browsing app you're aware of ?
If that ever happened to someone on HN, the consequences:
-> If apple implemented something so broken, some nutter would explain to me what extension to use. -> If MS implemented it, there would be a #1 post on HN with the title "MS file management is broken beyond repair and company is irrelevant"
I expect to be downvoted for this but it is impossible to have a fair discussion about Microsoft products.
Plug an SD card with photos on it into the iPad camera connection kit, and plug that into the iPad. The Photos app opens, you tap the photos you want to import, and you're done.
Your other cases are simple extensions of this example. The fact that an iPad can't do this right now with more file types or with a USB drive is not an inherent limitation of the approach.
On the iPad, I can use the official Photos app (or any of the other photo apps) to get my photos where they need to go, whether that's a phone, computer, website or printer.
I don't read my email by going into the "My Emails" folder on my C:\ drive, I access my email through a UI specifically made for accessing email.
I don't manage individual contact files, I access my contacts through an address book app.
I don't manage individual music files, I use iTunes.
Most operating systems already encourage separating files by type, I'm taking it a step further by suggesting that 90% of users would be better served by many type-specific file browsers than a single general purpose one.
How do I tell iTunes (or any other music player) to import some of the music on my USB drive? iTunes doesn't even allow you to do that with iPods...
There are a lot of things I'm used to doing on a computer that I can't do on an iPad. Everyone has their examples of things that make X inferior to Y. Apple has shown that they can be successful by offering less of "business as usual" while slowly introducing new ways of doing things.
The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be. Is rearranging toolbar buttons really going to bring delight to people around the world? How does this help the guy who is miserable at his job because he's forced to use a 10 year old PC running Windows XP? How does it help the person who lost all of their vacation photos because they downloaded a photo editing app that turned out to be a virus? How does it help a four year old that's learning to read?
I have a really nice app to read them called Media Player Classic -- I just don't have an app to manage them. Writing apps to manage every single file type I have is very inefficient compared to using a general purpose file manager. You abstract out often-used code rather than copy-pasting it all over the place, don't you?
The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be.
The fundamental definition/theorem/axiom/whatever of computer science is the Church-Turing thesis. We haven't come up with a practical notion of computability more general than that, so it is by default the state of the art. Following from that, I think a computer should be a real-life manifestation of a universal Turing machine -- something that can run anything computable (taking into account resource bounds but also providing all the resources it can) without being beholden to another entity. Anything less is an appliance, a toy, and is not fit to be called a computer.
With a dedicated file manager, you open the one program and do it all in one step.
And last week I managed to score 2 32gb touchpads at the $150 price -- with the thought that we'll play with one for a week or so and see if it fits in our family. If not, we'll give both away at Christmas.
The touchpad just made me love my iPad2 more. It's nice enough, and will be a great gift for my mom and her dad, but it doesn't hold-up to the iPad2.
All that being said -- I sorta think of my primary computer as an oven to my iPads toaster-oven. The iPad can do a lot of the same things, and several things it can do far better than my oven and far easier.
And apple doesn't even want me to replace my oven -- they're producing toaster ovens by design.
What that means to me is that there's a lot of design decisions that work on a toaster oven that just don't make sense on an oven.
:) Now please forgive a somewhat clunky analogy.
What is interesting is that Apple and MS have two totally opposed philosophies in handling the issue of the user not understanding the file system.
And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.
Well, they might have fixed it then. All I know is that I balked at the 1GB OS X update waiting for me.
And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.
The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries. You will find tons of PCs running Windows in not-so-rich countries, orders of magnitude more. That is exactly my point.
New technologies tend to be adapted by first world countries first. This was as true of the original IBM PC as it is today for the iPad.
At very least in Bangkok, which is obviously not belongs to rich first world countries, I can see iPad (and Galaxy Tab) everywhere on a train or even in a not-so-expensive restaurant. My not-so-rich neighbor bought an iPad few weeks ago and ask if I could help him setup Wi-Fi, etc.
Maybe I have an Apple-fan Attraction Field turned on or something, but I've found iPad-availablity around me to be pretty amazing. It's hard to deny that Windows-running PCs are still orders of magnitude more but it's still amazing.
Open almost any Windows laptop, and you'll see users who basically think of the hard drive as a file dumping ground. You'll see files stored on the Desktop, or everything just goes into one big directory. How many conversations have you had where you ask "Where did you save the file?" and the reply is "I don't know, just the place that it says when I press save"?
Windows should have had a services infrastructure, where programs explicitly define an export (how to access files the program has generated) and import (which files the program can handle). Users don't really think of files by directory but by type, either Word documents or photos or whatever. The file system should just be a dialog box which is essentially a search. "Show me Word documents I edited in the last 5 days." "Show me all my photos that I took in Hawaii." That's how users think about data.
First of all, they designate only one part of the visible filesystem as "safe", when it should be the opposite. Everything that's obviously accessible should be safe, and system-critical stuff should require going elsewhere.
Secondly, there is nothing personal about "My Documents". Every program routinely dumps files there that you can't do anything with directly. Game saves are the worst offenders here. They're cryptically named and you can't double click them like every other file.
And then people complain that normal users don't understand files.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-fil...
See: http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/TagFS/ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/WinFS
and many more.
This search functionality is available system wide (Spotlight search box), from any file open dialog or from the command line. For example things like this are possible:
Find me all pictures I tool this year and where I used flash, and aperture f4:
kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1
You type this in either spotlight or search box on open file dialog. You can do the same from the command line
mdfind -interpret "kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1"
The nice thing about the mdfind command is that you can restrict the search to a directory of your choice only.
Some people pay good money for photo organizers on Mac OS X, not knowing they already have this functionality built in. And finding what attributes are available is not that hard either:
mdimport -X
prints the entire metadata schema.
When I hit "Save" on a Mac, the file picker shows me a field where I can type a file name, and a drop down where I can choose between "Documents", "Pictures", "Movies", etc. or the last directory this particular program saved a file to. Most of the time the application will even pick a sensible default location. Only if I click the small arrow at the right of the drop down to I see the advanced file chooser.
On Windows, when I hit "Save", I get the advanced file picker by default. Unless the application is smart enough to set a sensible default location -- which most Windows applications are not -- the Windows file picker defaults to Desktop. This is the reason most people have all kinds of shit on their Windows desktops.
I can search for files on Windows now, so at least Windows has one thing right.
But MS is a highly engineer dominated tribal culture. I don't see how they can overcome that. I guess the windows explorer will survive another decade.
Also, what is up with those suspension towers and all those cables? Does anyone actually cross the bridge at those great heights? I say cut them up and stick them underneath as support piers, so that they're not obstructing the view or (more likely) sticking out of a fog bank and creating a hazard to passing aircraft.
Games have the best UI; ideally a game will only show you the bare minimum of information required, and make the play experience as smooth and intuitive as possible. But games also have very narrowly defined win/loss conditions, and even in sandbox games (like Grand Theft Auto) success means that that players in the middle of the normal distribution are able to complete the game and interested enough to spend time doing so.
For creative or productivity software, the definition of success is open-ended, because while designers can anticipate the kind of tasks/problems users will want to perform/solve, the end product of their labors is fundamentally unknowable, rather than waiting within the software to be discovered by the diligent user (player). Sure, Michaelangelo used to say that the statue already existed within the block of marble and his job was simply to reveal it, but you should probably see that as an early example of successful branding rather than a design document. A game is like a theme park ride insofar as the riders may change but their interaction with the ride is highly constrained. An application is more like a civil engineering task insofar as it has to bear a substantial amount of traffic, but its job is to facilitate rather than fulfill. You want those things available on the toolbar, even though many of them may not see regular use, because it's the easiest way to signal the availability of such functionality. The relative utility distribution of toolbar buttons or menu items follows Benford's law just like everything else.
That was probably the largest amount of psychobabble condensed into 2 paragraphs I've ever seen. Seriously, your first point was extremely over-simplified and you were called out on it, rightfully. I could make your first argument about anything. Watch: "Only 50% of people went out to eat this weekend. Clearly, we should get rid of 50% of restaurants." or "Only 50% of cars are driven on any given day. Clearly, we should just git rid of 50% of the cars."
Your first point was a miss, and chetan called you out on it. Then, you insult his intelligence and go into a psychobabble rant about little to nothing that applies. Jesus dude, come down a peg or two.
I stand by my point above, though. Call it psychobabble if you like, but I like my metaphors. Shoot me.
There's a reason that I included qualifiers like 'I wouldn't want to overthink it' and 'ideally...' and 'players in the middle of the normal distribution...'. The reason is that I'm sketching out a philosophy of UI design in only a few sentences, and want to signal this to people who are reading. You seem determined to interpret my remarks in the most literal and narrow sense possible, to the point of completely overlooking the contextual qualifiers that accompanied them.
The problem comes in the implementation. The graphic design is just horrible. Where is the grid? Where is the white space? What the hell is that round button that replaces the file menu? The title bar just looks awful.
If they could clean it up graphically I really think it could be just as nice as anything on Mac OS X. Ask yourself this, if Apple had come out with the buttons on tabs in the exact same groupings but done it in a gorgeous way, who would be complaining about it? We'd all be heralding it.
How is the ribbon any different to a hierarchial menu bar? (See the Gnome drop-down menu or the iOS Settings Menu).
You know, I just checked Finder and realized that not only does it not have the things showed in this mockup, but that I have never missed them.
Strange.
I can give you the steps, if you'd like.
The Finder has a lot of places you can perform operations on a file: the menu bar, the toolbar, the Get Info inspector, and the context menu. All the Ribbon does is turn them into buttons and put them in the same place. There's no remembering how to do stuff - and yes, some people can't remember how to do basic file management - because it's all done from the same row at the top. I could say the same thing about "Every function in the Finder I can do without having to use menus".
Having said that, I think the author of the post seems to ignore the fact that Microsoft's research shows that not many use the menu bar currently (because currently, the menu bar is hidden by default). By adding the ribbon, I assume their goal is to improve that statistic, and in turn make it easier for users.
"Microsoft Designs the iPod Package:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9HfdSp2E2A
[1] http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/article/Microsoft_Confirms_i...
Simple usage statistics aren't especially valuable if you don't look at the overall picture as to why features are used (e.g. who would cut and paste if they understood how to move?). I'm not sure if either side is properly analyzing the available information.
Dragging files into directories is also cognitively expensive - e.g. you have to make certain that you are dragging exactly into the right folder which can be about 15 pixels high, depending on what view you're using. It requires hand-eye coordination which becomes unnecessary with simple copy/paste operations.
BUT, for beginner users, I agree: users have a hard time grasping the concept of a copy/paste buffer anyway, and with files it gets abstracted one more level. For more advanced users, they use keyboard shortcuts, so the buttons don't really need to be there.
This hits the nail on the head when discussing the UI decisions made. If Microsoft had included the top 10 commands in an organized manner, plus a few more from their data, it'd probably be fine.
It would be interesting to find out how many people say "I never knew the file manager could do that" when they fire up Windows 8, even when the feature has been there since NT4.
The "helpfulness" of providing "n" ways of doing the same thing is an illusion and only undermines the ability for users to establish a shared context which can be used to make user actions more automatic for the experienced and easier to teach to the inexperienced.