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seldo: This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it. The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot: Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. 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. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph: Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right? Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.

seldo:

This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it.

The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot:

Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. 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. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph:

Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?

Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.

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bvckup:

Just a quick post to share something that seems obvious in retrospect, but took a while to notice and fix.

A mailing list for those wanting to follow Bvckup and Bvckup 2 progress has been up and active over a year now. Subscribing to the list triggers a typical confirmation email with a…

We gave the test participants a list of assignments to perform, one of which was inserting a link. What really surprised us was, that almost no one could figure out how to insert a link. We decided on testing the link icon out of context together with other icons regularly used in CMSes and text editors, and the results were really surprising.

This is something that takes many years to mature in a designer, because the relationship between visual elements is not as obvious as it is in code. I’m not only talking about consistency, but the profound understanding that each element competes for attention, and that by making an unimportant element “shine” you are detracting from the rest of the elements.

You can show a techie-early-adopter a fairly crude wireframe and they will get it. However, if your target is a fashionista, you need to have more polish, otherwise the lack of visuals will get in the way of an honest reaction about the core value proposition you are trying to test.