Re: My usability experience - Asa Dotzler should be fired

On Aug 17, 8:39 am, Asa Dotzler <[email protected]> wrote:

Petter Andersson wrote:
> > That was an exercise of pointing a shotgun at a perfectly functional
> > UI (WinXP), firing, and seeing where everything lands. Whole thing
> > felt quite arbitrary - not to say futile.
>
> I think you don't know or you're discounting what actually happened with
> Vista. Vista user experience was fairly well designed, but there was a
> war between the .Net/CLR (Avalon) platform and the win32 platform and
> there were some overly-ambitious behind the scenes platform goals like
> winFS (remember that?). Because they couldn't pull off a new front-end
> in .Net/Avalon and all that, they had to restart development back on the
> classic win32 platform and that put them behind. Once behind, they were
> in a position where they needed to ship before they could get all their
> features polished.  But the features were good. They're the backbone of
> Win 7 which is the best thing Microsoft's ever shipped.
>
> > Firefox 4.0, IMO, did bit of the same. I see nothing wrong with old
> > Back/Forward/Reload/Stop/Home arrangement, with tabs below address bar.
> > (Actually, tabs above address bar is less efficient arrangement to
> > anyone who has back/forward buttons in their mouse; such person has no
> > need to reach for back/forward buttons, but tabs get more/most frequently
> > accessed and "on top" is simply a slowdown at that point.)
>
> All reasonable things to discuss in a usability forum. What this has to
> do with whether or not the version number appears in the Help->About
> dialog, I'm not at all clear.

I'm talking about shuffling things around for the sake of shuffling
things around "because we can" or "we believe it will be more trendy
this way". In Vista/Win7's case, I agree the architectural under the
hood changes (such as drivers being ring3) were for the better, but
why, oh why, should UI be all scrambled around? Since the days of
Netscape, browsers have looked the same. For comparable amount of
time, Windows UI has looked the same. That's easily 15-16 years worth
of "muscle memory", or usage through spinal cord reflexes so to speak.
Any UI change should target to giving more clarity, more power to the
end-user, instead of hiding things and making user guess "where did
they put feature N now...?". Microsoft had a convenient set of
guidelines as to UI design and what you should expect to find and
where. They were the first to violate against these guidelines, with
Internet Explorer 7 (which did look completely out of place vs. rest
of programs back in its day). More came with Windows Media Player 11.
Everyone else just sort of took it from there, and now this disease is
even with Firefox, to a degree. I guess what I'm saying, if a browser
still resembles Netscape Navigator 4.71 + Tab Bar, then all is well
and everyone feels right at home :)