> The Product Manager in charge of this feature should be immediately fired.
I hate this kind of writing. It undermines the otherwise good point the author has.
I hate this kind of writing. It undermines the otherwise good point the author has.
I think the underlying point of the article is that the experience of using Cortana could be improved, and Microsoft should be providing explicit next steps at every phase so that you aren't left wondering what's going on. I'd agree with that. But claiming someone should be fired is ridiculous, especially considering that the author still doesn't know what the feature does and it could still pleasantly surprise him. It may just need an additional dialog explaining what to expect next.
I assume the feature gives you desktop notifications when the package transitions between tracking stages, and even if that's all the functionality it provides it'd still be more useful than manually checking the tracking website yourself.
Also, there is a happy path where Cortana does pick up things like tracking numbers from email automatically without having to manually enter them into the Notebook. Though it's easy to miss that happy path, because it also surfaces primarily as cards on the Home tab. (Though Outlook.com now has deeper, more direct, integration than that, showing the tracking cards directly above the email; Outlook (OG) has something like that in Preview, though not yet Cortana connected, and the Windows Mail app looks like it will pick up the feature eventually, too.)
Example A: MS trying to funnel all system settings through the search box. If that can't find it because I didn't type in the correct "1996 adventure game"-style keywords, I now have Control Panel (legacy), the Settings app (Win 8+?), and a hodgepodge of single-purpose Metro-ized settings pages.
It's only marginally better. So far nothing has been better than AutoCAD's approach, for me - all GUI commands are echo'd into the command-line as you do them, so you can see what commands you're using if you want to key them in later. Negligible hotkeys because the commands work so well and are more memorable than hotkeys.
Google proved many years ago that average users are more than happy to use a search bar as their primary user interface to everything. I've seen so many users that to go to any website never use bookmarks, addresses, shortcuts, anything, just type it vaguely into a search bar, and that's been some of their norm for a decade or more.
It makes sense for Microsoft to front-and-center the search box because that's what users use the most. That's what Google has been doing for its entire existence. It's about as dumb and simple a UX as possible.
Beyond that it's a "Why not both?" situation. A search bar isn't very discoverable, but it is easy and typically "does what the user wants", eventually, depending on how much effort goes into the "man behind the curtain". But you can have search and try for a discoverable UX at the same time. The Settings app many deride is something like Attempt #15 at making Windows settings discoverable. For better or worse, with as many settings as Windows has, making that discoverable is a herculean task, if not a sisyphean task. Every attempt has annoyed some people. The Control Panel has always been painful to use. The Settings app tried for a somewhat clean break and of course there are ton of opinions on it, because it moved cheese and its so different (though is it really?) from the Windows 3.1 Program Manager folder some people seem to expect still frozen in perfect amber from when they first learned to use Windows... There's no pleasing everyone, and there's no perfect path to discoverability or usability.
There's no "smart" path on either side; one requires currently unimaginable tools to read people's minds based on tiny text fragments they through into the void of a search box, and the other to anticipate every users needs and somehow make them all discoverable exactly when the user needs them. (One requires telepathy/telempath and the other prophecy, perhaps.)
I mentioned a "happy path", but that's extremely subjective. (One user loves it if search works great; another if they know just what to click; a third if they have a good CLI to automate it; etc.) It's also clear that there are many more fewer happy paths, than paths in general, and nearly impossible to "pave" all the really good paths for people.
The issue with MS post-ribbon, and I would say this applies to Settings as well, is that I've yet to see them form a good answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the Ribbon?"
Strictly heirarchal menu items were an initial GUI effort I remember, begat ribbon "everything available behind the scenes / set up your own menu bar", begat "let us find it for you".
The issue being there seems little thought in intelligently mediating a discovery action, to wit that I can describe the thing I'm looking for but the system lacks a representation in which I can do so in.
Magical search box discovery affords no such path, because the functioning of the system is deliberately obscured from me. I simply have to try guessing another key phrase associated with the thing I want.
And therein lies my gripe: I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.
Personally, I think most of the ribbons are extremely discoverable, but obviously your mileage may vary. I agree though that the search boxes for ribbon functions should offer a "teach me to fish" moment of maybe somehow helping you see how you missed that option in the ribbon. Office at least uses the same icons consistently between search and the ribbon so you could potentially get used to the landmark and eventually figure out the sign posts along the way (and Help documentation still exists and is also in the search results).
> I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.
The Ribbon (and most everything else in this post-Ribbon era) was extremely influenced by user telemetry to figure out what users were actually using day-to-day. It was designed in coordination with user studies to observe how to make it as discoverable as they could. It didn't just come out of thin air in some ivory tower specification, it was prioritized as much as anything else by telemetry from users.
Similar for Settings, I'm sure the things that are moved into the new application and out of the old Control Panel are being prioritized by telemetry. It never surprises me that the users that most often complain about their "favorite" most commonly used settings not getting migrated most often don't have telemetry on.
If any option is buried in an archaic path, that's not a well-formed system of discoverability to me.
I could care less that the top 90% of functionality is front-and-center, because I'm still going to use the remaining 10% once a week. And if it takes 100x as long as finding something on the ribbon and requires non-intuitive logic (because see previous comment about deprioritizing deep discoverability), then that's what I'm going to remember.
If something isn't on the ribbon or in any of the subdialogs it's almost certainly because it's deprecated and only still exists for some obscure compatibility reason.
As for Windows Settings, it's unfortunately weird not for some principled or philosophical reason, but just because they're still not done reimplementing all the features and use cases they want from Control Panel into the new framework.
In spite of my nitpicking I agree with your general point.
Am I using it wrong then? I don't dive into Office if I can avoid it, but just yesterday there was some Powerpoint function I needed that didn't appear on the ribbon.
Had to pull out the "everything" right/left boxes, add it to the ribbon, and then I could use it.
I know they've been trying to fix that with context, selected-object specific tabs that appear, but it still has a ways to go.
It somehow feels like MS is actively trying to destroy this product.
If MSFT offered me £100k right here, right now I’d turn it down.
I don’t use that plugin anymore. Electron is dope because it actually delivers on the “one UI across all OSes” but the number of abstractions and the performance hit for this is staggering. It’s not that it needs to be this bad — I don’t think that there’s some specific problem in the technologies, it’s that it /is/ bad in practice. But whatever, my home desktop has 8 cores, 32GB RAM, ~2GB/sec disk reads, and 100mbit internet, so it works with about the same responsiveness as a normal app under Win95 on the hardware of the day.
https://www.forbes.com/2005/04/19/cz_rk_0419karlgaard.html Still as relevant as ever.
Now whether it is warranted in case, I cannot judge as I don’t use the product.
It's just a bit extreme considering you submitted it to HN, where the people directly involved actually have a chance of seeing it.
Why is it that this is acceptable for Microsoft to publish? It's not and what makes it worse is that it often gets abandoned. If they had a history going back and finishing this or making it better I'd give them a pass, but I doubt without something bordering vitriolic appearing on HN/Medium no one will care.
I think that's the real complaint. Doesn't anyone care about the experience anymore? I feel like it's only Apple who both cares and has executed a strong long term plan for this. I opened my iPhone X and that thing worked. I actually love all the little things they added. It is hard to do that, but it's these little things which make the product special or down-right frustrating when they don't.
The same people saying you shouldn't reproach clear and obvious incompetence are the same people calling you, the author, "some random idiot"... in this very comment section.
Broken UX flows like this are usually distributed among a bunch of different teams (each with their own PMs) so that no "the product manager" actually exists, and it's organizational seams you're running into. In many cases the individual PMs on each team are well aware of the problems with the overall flow and want to fix them, but find it hard to make room in their "day jobs" for coordinating with other teams to actually do so. So if anything I bet many of them are happy your post could give them more ammo to push prioritizing fixes.
I'm only somewhat familiar with Cortana but I think your example broken flow crosses four or five teams’ feature areas, and I know that some of the problems you identified have had solutions proposed/designed/even prototyped by various teams for years now, but I guess so far nobody's managed to get all the teams to commit to any one particular solution.
IMO though the biggest sin in your story wasn't that a broken flow for a feature existed, but that someone decided to push/spam a notification that led to said broken flow (and that someone else set up an incentive structure that drove that decision).
People who perform poorly at their jobs should either be transferred to another position or terminated. Why is this a controversial position?
If you are the product manager in charge of Cortana, you failed big time. Again, this should be incontroversial.
First, because some random idiot on a blog post does not know whether the person "performed poorly at their job" in general. He just has a specific gripe. The other person might have done miracles in other parts of Cortana. There are such things as shipping priorities, and they're not determined by random blog posts or comments.
Second, because people deserve chances for improving. Anybody at any current position has "performed poorly" at this or another project earlier on. Terminating or transferring them only makes sense if they don't get to improve, which a random blog post can't determine.
>If you are the product manager in charge of Cortana, you failed big time. Again, this should be incontroversial.
That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments.
I'd say the _Product Manager_ of Cortana has performed poorly at their job if the released product (Cortana) is bad. And yes, Cortana is bad.
> Second, because people deserve chances for improving. Anybody at any current position has "performed poorly" at this or another project earlier on. Terminating or transferring them only makes sense if they don't get to improve, which a random blog post can't determine.
Cortana was first released over 3 years ago. That is plenty of time for a chance at improvement.
> That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments.
Companies should base their decisions on customer feedback, and so far all the feedback I've seen on Cortana is that it's downright terrible.
Customer feedback on Cortana has been nearly universally negative. You don't need my post or comment to see this. Google around and see what you find.
Maybe not enough to call for a firing of some likely very talented people, but also not enough for you to label the complainer an idiot.
So you're not ok with holding employees responsible for their work product failures, but you're ok with calling people with strong opinions about said failures "random idiots"? Hooray hypocrisy.
> That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments.
So companies shouldn't take customer feedback into account when making product decisions? That seem like a pretty bad plan.
I fail to see the hypocrisy. A mis-implemented feature (which might not even have been considered or prioritized at all) doesn't mean a "product failure" -- whereas someone not only failing to understand that, but also recommending the firing of a person they don't know because some pet feature they were looking for wasn't implemented well, does imply a certain idiocy.
It's like someone asking for a waiter to be fired because they didn't like a particular part of their dining experience, and somebody calling said person an idiot. Even if they're not (which is more probably the case), they're being a jerk, and that's what the second person want to imply.
>*That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments.
"So companies shouldn't take customer feedback into account when making product decisions? That seem like a pretty bad plan."
It also sounds like a bad deduction from what I've wrote.
Nor does someone calling for a firing on a blog actually threaten a livelihood.
An unrelated end user of a product should have no power over a persons work status just because they don't like the product.
> the greater good
subjectivity at its finest
So, this PM decided to put into a production environment a feature that interrupts a customer's workflow for no good benefit. It doesn't even benefit Microsoft, so he's not even being a bandit.
This is the very definition of stupid. Hurt the other guy, hurt yourself, for no benefit to either [1].
So, why would or should any employer continue to pay a person who performs such an obviously stupid action in a production environment to continue in the same position?
We may have a right to jobs if we continue to produce output that benefits the customers and employer, not simply because we continue to exist. Start harming your customers and/or employers, and why should you continue to receive their resources?
The question was whether or not some angry internet person should be responsible for the livelihood of a developer of a product they are having difficulty with.
Indeed, if more "angry internet people" (with good clear points like this one) actually provoked performance reviews, we might have better software.
Quit the sophistry. The guy had a real point and you're merely trying to make distracting noise.
Ill quit the sophistry when you stick to arguments that make sense.