From the housemush:
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solarbird opens IE to check version number for
annathepiper and try to repro a bug and within a minute hates it all over again, just like the very first time.
solarbird goes to SeattleTimes.com to look at a webpage. Gets a dialogue from IE asking if I noticed the navigation bar. Yeah,
that's what I wanted. Clicks "never bother me with this crap again" and dismisses it. Clicks on a story link. Gets a popunder, because of no popup blocking in IE 6. Closes it. Finally looks at the story. Closes IE. Discovers IE opened MSN Messenger Client for
no fucking reason at all. Exits
that. Gets a
SYSTRAY BALOON POPUP saying
no, it's not
going to exit it, it's going to hide it in the
system tray so that I can continue to receive IMs, even though
I wasn't even fucking logged in, and
couldn't, even if that's what I'd
wanted to do. Forces
that to exit.
solarbird looks around the desktop, waiting to see what else happens. ** Am I done now? **
(Added almost immediately after posting)I do actually have a point here. This should have been a five-step action. Launch IE; paste in a URL; hit ENTER; click on a link; close IE. There should have been two information interactions, both of which being the pages on the site I wanted to see. Instead, I had
fifteen steps: Launch IE; paste in a URL; hit ENTER; get distracted by something totally irrelevant to my task; process the interruption; click on a checkbox; click a button; click a link; close the unwanted second window; close IE; discover MSN is launched; close MSN; get told
fuck you, I know better; dismiss that; force exit. And instead of just having two web pages to process, I
also had to process a dialogue I didn't care about, a popunder I didn't want, a second application launching I didn't want, that application
arguing with me, and the system tray. Five extra things, for a total of seven, instead of the two that were actually related to my actual task.
Distractions and annoyances made the task either three times (15:5) or 3.5 times (7:2) as long as it should have been, depending upon how you count, and in either interpretation, distractions and annoyances overwhelmed the actual
task.
This is
wretched design. Not bad;
wretched. And it's the kind of thing that drives me spare about Windows, because you get this
all the time. In Word, after shutting down every "automatic" thing I can find, it still routinely (and not quite 100% consistently) takes four keystrokes to do <RETURN><TAB> equivalent, because it
insists upon trying to guess what I want and getting it wrong. Twice as many keystrokes; the task is equaled by the chaff and interference. Add in that it doesn't quite always happen - sometimes the right thing happens - and you've got an extra process interruption which cuts my productivity a little bit more. Or take today's login to our print server to change its power-savings settings; I didn't keep track of all the distractions, but it threw up desktop-cleanup suggestions (for my
five icon desktop) twice from the systray while I was just trying to go to control panel and change two dropdowns. It also threw up some other systray annoyances that I didn't bother to examine further, because I just wanted to
get done and log off.
From a task optimisation standpoint - from a design standpoint - this is all just
hideous. I would like to hope that maybe, someday, Windows UI will start being designed, and that instead of shipping the peace treaty across six dozen warring PMs all clamouring to get your attention for their goddamn button, Microsoft will ship a presentation that just
gets the hell out of the way and lets you do your job.
I mean, I know - absolutely know - that there are good UI people inside that company. Why don't we ever see their work?
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