Monday, October 22, 2012

Do You Want to Feel Clueless? Try Windows 8

BI explains:

The New York Times's David Gallagher invited 5 people to try Windows 8 and filmed them while they did so. One of the five people seemed to like the look of the design ("Awesome," "This is so cool,"). But figuring out how to actually go about doing things seemed to confuse the hell out of everyone--including the person who liked the design.


Here are some of the quotes:
  • "I don't like this design."
  • "I think it's really confusing."
  • "Some of it feels intuitive once you've already done it, but it doesn't feel automatically intuitive."
  • "It should be easier. I shouldn't have to think about it."
  • "Beats me." [In response to a question about how to print something]
  • "I felt like the biggest computer user amateur ever. It made me feel stupid."



9 comments:

  1. "Some of it feels intuitive once you've already done it, but it doesn't feel automatically intuitive."

    Huh?

    Spoken like a true English major.

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  2. Well, let's see:

    Put 5 people that never touch an iPad into it without any introduction or explanation. Or any of the Android tablets.

    How is this different? There is a learning curve there, as it was with any version of Windows. People forget quickly, how Windows XP has been resisted very strongly due to it's user interface changes also...

    http://www.zdnet.com/windows-8-is-the-new-xp-7000006095/

    (shrug!)

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    Replies
    1. I had never used a Mac before I got my iPad, and used it flawlessly within minutes. My mom is a tech novice, and used her iPad easily. My dad had barely used a PC and uses mom's iPad all the time.

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  3. Machines training men. So wrong on so many levels, and so common.

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  4. I really want to take 20 years of PC proficiency and flush it down the toilet.

    If I wanted to learn a new O/S, I'd switch to Linux. Then I'd know Microsoft wasn't logging all of my activity whenever I signed on to use my PC

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  5. Companies like Microsoft and (especially) Adobe ran out of things to do years ago. Now they just make changes so they have something to market. In the process, they are fowling up what was previously done right.

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  6. We used the Windows 8 Preview when we were doing some software development that can use the new hands on interface. When I saw what was going on I then read some reviews. I then immediately called everyone in my family and told them that if they own Microsoft stock they should sell it immediately. Unless they provide a path for back office users they are going to have a debacle on their hands.

    Speaking of which, why is it they do not understand that they are a backoffice company? And that they OWN it. The changes they make are damned near retarded because they are trying to copy things they do not understand. For example the XP file explorer worked to perfection. By Win7 they had tweaked it so that if you double click a folder in the left pane, it dropped that folder to the bottom of the window, hiding its contents. Huh? They then tried to claim it was a feature. Amazing. Have to install a third party utility to get the old behavior back. Or how about the new ribbon interface in Office 2007 and 2010? It actually takes many more clicks to do the things you used to accomplish effortlessly.

    Microsoft's introduction of multi-tasking computing to the back office was one of the reasons that productivity soared in the 90s and oughts. Everything they have done in the last 5 years (Ballmer, cough cough) actually decreases productivity. I would guess it has reduced GDP by at least a couple tenths and Windows 8 will make it worse.

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  7. Adobe's Lightroom is a gastly example of "change" which makes everything that used to be easy into a linguistic multi-click nightmare. We use to "save" files and "export" into a different format. In Lightroom, save is called export and and giving the file a name requires opening a new dialog box and then a sub-dialogue box in order to "edit" the name. There is a nightmarish system of "collections", "libraries", "catalogs", and "albums" for storing photos which pretends that computers are not already file systems (files / folders) and that Adobe has just invented filing photos. When files are saved (oops, exported) they land in folders (oops, libraries) not chosen because the clowns at Adobe have decided they know where you should put things better than you do, and so files land in two places, yours and theirs. Adobe's main talent seems to be inventing formats that are incompatable with previous versions of the same software, for instance Illustrator which has a new version every year or two which produces files that cannot be read by the previous version, so more fools will update in order to communicate with their fellow fools. It's an amazing racket and they are rapidly losing business to free software such as Inkscape and Gimp.

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  8. Hey, don't forget Adobe morons trying to patent every font and every wiggle in every font so they can sue anyone who makes a letter that might resemble theirs. Adobe must be mostly lawyers with a few 'developers' doing their bidding.

    ReplyDelete