Skip to main content

The UX of Windows 8

Jensen Harris, the Director of Program Management for the Windows User Experience Team, gave a really compelling talk where he explained the work his team had done in crafting the UX for Windows 8. They knew they needed to shake things up and re-imagine some concepts that had become stale. They threw out the Start menu and built a cool new tiled interface.

He talked about how important it was to sweat the small stuff. For example, he talked about the herculean effort it was to eliminate a little blue flash in the boot sequence the first time you power on a device straight from the manufacturer. His point was that the seemingly small stuff REALLY matters when we're creating an experience for a user. A little bit of sand in my hamburger is going to spoil the whole experience. 

I had to compare my own experience as a user of Windows 8 with the description I was hearing from Harris. I thought it still had a lot of rough edges and it was an uncomfortable melding of two paradigms that made it uncomfortable for the user who wasn't always sure which paradigm was in operation. My frustration was pretty well captured by Brian Madden in a post today. 

And then there's that whole problem of having the Tile interface mode and the desktop mode which are side-by-side and not at all related. It's like two OS virtual machines side-by-side. How are regular users supposed to understand what the [heck] is going on? Even worse is that Internet Explorer exists in both modes, yet the two versions are different. They don't even share bookmarks! So I can use Tile mode IE which is all nice and touchy, then maybe I want to use Word. I click on the Word tile and I'm flipped over to desktop mode to run Word. Now I want to go back to IE. Hey cool! There's an icon for IE on the bottom of the screen in the desktop mode taskbar. I click IE and it launched, but it's "different" IE. The menus are different and the URL bar is on the top. And I have no bookmarks. And my tabs aren't open anymore. WTF? 
Sure, as a geek I understand that I'm now running desktop IE and not Touch IE, but how's a regular user supposed to know that? I set this thing down while running Word and came back later. I hit the power button to wake it up, logged in, and clicked the IE icon on the bar. Was I supposed to remember "Oh yeah last time I used this I was in desktop mode, so I have to remember that this IE is not the one I want. I have to switch back to Tile mode then launch IE." 
Seriously people?

As I embark on my own journey's to craft great user experiences, I want to learn from Harris' failure with Windows 8. It isn't enough to sweat the small stuff if the big stuff has serious problems. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making People Feel Stupid: A Cardinal Sin in Design

People will go to great lengths and inconvenience to avoid appearing or feeling stupid. A great example of when design makes a user feel stupid comes from Alan Coopers 1999 book The Inmates are Running the Asylum on page 24. Cooper is talking about the keyless entry system on his car keys. "The large button locks the car and simultaneously arms the alarm. Pressing the button a second time disarms the alarm and unlocks the car. There is also a second smaller button labeled 'Panic.' When you press it, the car emits a quiet warble for a few seconds. If you hold it down longer, the quiet warble is replaced by the full 100-decibel blasting of the car alarm, whooping, tweeting, yowling, and declaring to everyone within a half-mile that some dolt--me--has just done something execrably stupid. What's worse, after the alarm has been triggered, the little plastic device becomes functionally inert, and further pressing of either button does nothing. The only way to stop that ho...
Post a Comment
Read more

Hammers and Nails: Technology Push Design

"We need to refine our requirements first, before we look at tools." This is a common phrase that I hear. While I sympathize with the sentiment, I think it is frequently wasteful. I suspect that we'd get to the right requirements faster by looking at tools already available in a given problem space. Pushing the concept further, is it foolish to find a cool technology and then look for ways that that technology can apply to current problem spaces?  What if you don't even recognize you have a problem space? Without a constant search and openness, we'll miss many serendipitous opportunities. Here is BYU professor Larry Howell discussing this issue. I often enjoy doing something ... that is sometimes controversial. In this approach, rather than starting with a need, you start with a new technology and you search to identify a need that it can fulfill. This second more controversial approach is called "technology push design."   You can imagine t...
Post a Comment
Read more

How much will you remember?

There is a commonly passed around "stat" that, according to a blog post I recently read, isn't true. You've probably seen it or heard it. It is said that people remember: 10% of what they read 20% of what they hear 30% of what they see 50% of what they see and hear 70% of what they write and say 90% of what they say as they do The blog author says: Quite where these numbers come from is a mystery to many, and indeed it is difficult to understand what 90% retention actually means… 90% of what for how long? As a model it looks and on first thought appears to be credible, however as many of us will know some people have almost 100% retention for a considerable period of time if they read something, others teach others from a structure or procedure which they themselves do not understand! Thanks, RapidBI, for pointing out this common misconception!
Post a Comment
Read more