Perfect example of unintuitive Microsoft workflow | Hacker News Reader

Perfect example of unintuitive Microsoft workflow

dendory.net

37 pointsdendory33 comments

1. There is no magical flag that allows all mail sent by anyone at Microsoft to hit your Hotmail inbox: that could easily be abused, and for many users it would defy their expectations. I've sent your post along to the people responsible for spam filtering in Hotmail, though, to take a look at.

2. It looks like you were using Chrome to try to open a document in the OneNote client? For better or worse, you have to have a plugin to do that today; there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your PC.

The plugin we have gets installed with Office 2010 and works on IE and Firefox. It does not currently work in Chrome, which is probably why you saw the issue.

That's not to say that the metapoint is lost on all of the folks who work on these features, and we try very hard to make flows work with no edge cases. Even for a company like Microsoft shipping often requires tough compromises, though, and unfortunately you hit some of the rough edges in our experience we haven't yet been able to address.

(Disclaimer: If it wasn't clear already, I work on some things related to this flow.)

For #2, couldn't a custom URL protocol launch a program?

Yes, but in this case (at least for IE) the plugin has been installed all the way back since Office 2003. The custom protocol handler would only work in newer versions of Office.

As always, tradeoffs abound.

Can you sniff for the plugin? If so, use the plugin when available and use a custom protocol at other times. Office 2010 could get an update to handle the protocol and Office 20next could just drop the plugin entirely.

"there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your PC."

What happened to file type associations? Even with the Adobe Reader plugin disabled, my browser gets enough information from the OS to offer me the choice of saving a PDF or opening it in the standalone Adobe Reader. Why can't that work for OneNote files?

When you open Office documents from SkyDrive or Sharepoint, the goal is to open the remote copy, not to download it. This enables such niceties as letting multiple people edit the document at the same time, etc. while still using the full Office clients.

So just download the equivalent of a bittorrent tracker file, containing all the information necessary for the standalone client to connect. Sure, it adds another filetype to the association database, but that's not a very big price to pay.

That was my first thought as well, and I still think it's a decent idea. The main drawback is that Bob Someguy might not understand that the file he's got is just a link. If that's the case, he's going to be confused about why it's updating online when he's editing his 'local copy', annoyed when he can't work offline, and possibly lose data when he edits an actual local copy thinking he's got a link.

Those problems can be mostly solved without much trouble. First, if the user chooses to open the file instead of saving it to their downloads folder, then it will be downloaded to a temporary folder and you don't have to worry about the user finding it again and trying to re-open it. Either way, it makes sense for the standalone program to remove the downloaded file the first time it is used to successfully establish a connection, and instead store the connection information in an internal library, presented to the user in a way that makes it clear that the files are online.

Deleting a user's file without their understanding is generally a bad idea. e.g. Bob saves the file to his Downloads folder and opens it. The next day he wants to open it again only to find that it's missing. He eventually learns that he has to re-download every time. Microsoft gets blamed for the 'bug'.

If you design your app's UI properly, it will disabuse the user of the notion that files that are not stored on the computer should be accessible through the local file browser. When using the Amazon MP3 downloader, I doubt people expect to have to re-open the .amz file every time they want to listen to that album. They learn to find their music in iTunes or Windows Media Player. This model should work just as well for OneNote, which already handles most file management internally.

Does Amazon actually delete the amz file?

> 1. There is no magical flag that allows all mail sent by anyone at Microsoft to hit your Hotmail inbox: that could easily be abused, and for many users it would defy their expectations. I've sent your post along to the people responsible for spam filtering in Hotmail, though, to take a look at.

Magical flag? No. S/MIME certificate? Yes. They already sign their apps and have UAC verify those signatures; why not their email?

If you have a system that sends automated mail, it would do you well to test it with common email hosts (particularly the one provided by your company). Maybe they did, and this one got through anyway.

there's no browser-native way for a website to launch a program on your PC.

I played a game called Vindictus a while ago, and it did just that. I'd click a link on their webpage, and it would launch the executable. I'm not sure exactly how the mechanics work, so unfortunately I can't describe it in detail.

1- I've never seen a company's automatic emails be flagged by its own mail system, that's pretty impressive.

2- I'm actually using Firefox, and I had 2 instances of that plugin installed for some reason, and it still gave me the error. Although my main point is that the error dialog doesn't tell you the real problem.

And btw I like OneNote, it just seems I won't be using the desktop version.

1- I've never seen a company's automatic emails be flagged by its own mail system, that's pretty impressive.

It's as fair and annoying as having downloads blocked from Microsoft's website on a freshly installed server. (On one hand, at least they treat their site the same but on the other hand, it's putting yet another needless hurdle in the way of what I want to do. If I didn't trust Microsoft why would I be running Windows at all?)

You don't need a plugin to open a program. Just set the mime type and file extension, and let the OS pick the program.

Or at the very minimum you download a small file (not an exe, a data file), and let the user double click it to open the program associated with it.

18 minutes to download and install? Evernote takes like what, 2 minutes? I imagine there's an eloquent reason for that as well. Not to be snarky, but i would just love to see some of the discussions that take place these days at Microsoft.

Probably because it was the whole office set of programs that was being downloaded. No idea of there was an option to just download Onenote but should have been there.

Looks like "Microsoft doesn't understand user experience" articles are becoming popular again on Hacker News.

I would like to remind people that even a design focused company like Apple do softwares with crappy user experience (think iTunes).

User experience is hard to get right and what you would consider a good user experience might not be a good one for your neighbour: some prefer clicking on buttons, some prefer clutter-free UIs with keyboard shortcuts.

Are you crazy? iTunes has one of the best user experiences of any app on the market today. Period.

Yes I agree, with two exceptions - first when clicking somewhere opens a new itunes sub-window (who wants that?) and second they changed the reveal-in-finder command from apple-R to shift-apple-R

Other than that it rocks (literally)

As a music listing app, perhaps (although it's not my cup of tea). As an app and music store browsing and iPad management and syncing app it's pretty damn horrific.

I don't think that these HN posts can be dismissed as cyclic griping and finger pointing / laughing.

1. Any company that produces bad UI should be called on it, particularly when that UI is going to impact such a large number of people.

2. I have a sense that it's not just anti-MS griping because, after all this time, after seeing the ascendency of design centric products, we find MS is still incapable, on an institutional and management level, of improving. Indeed they are getting worse at this.

3. If MS had produced something truly impressive, I think you'd see some honest, if not muted, clapping from even the anti-MS crowd. I'm no fan of MS (or Apple in many ways), but I'm a fan of trying hard and doing good work. This seems like neither.

P.S. You are right to point out Apple's failures. iTunes is a beachhead product that they are terrified of abandoning or altering lest it kill the golden goose ecosystem (they have no qualms about killing the golden goose of other people's ecosystems, cf the pro apps series, in the name of usability, though I think their success record there is spotty at best). It is an experience nightmare as well. I also hate the direction of the faux-natural-ui garbage in iCal and elsewhere in the system. Apple isn't hitting all homeruns on the UI front, even if they have raised the bar.

edit: spelling, more words.

You don't fancy Metro UI? It's easy to say Microsoft is this or that but in the end we are talking about a big company with many things going on. Windows Phone 7 is good, as is Xbox, and these came from the same company that does some other mistakes like every other company.

Metro UI is certainly one of the most interesting and progressive UI developments to come out of MS. I like a lot of the thinking in it. The fact that this explorer UI can exist in the same company is a tell. It demonstrates that MS's silo structure, while theoretically creating creative competition, simply results in missed opportunities.

This is the real lesson from Apple. It's not just that there has been a top down design martinet running the show (that's obviously key); it's that there is a real ethos of design and perfectionism (at least in terms of UI/UX) that not only functions as a guide internally, but which is so strong and clear and implicit in the apple ecosystem that the developers of apple apps have internalized it successfully. It's not just the apple HID guidelines; it's much, much deeper than that.

I absolutely loathe the centralization and control Apple imposes on content. I am in fact a rabid Linux user. But this lesson from Apple can't be ignored.

Metro is one silo in Microsoft learning the UI/Design lesson. What they need is a design ethos, and that is much more difficult. It requires leadership, time and most of all consistency. The latter factor is almost the antonym of Microsoft.

I completely understand what you are saying but I have my doubts having a design centralization is the way to go. We see now that OSX is getting closer and closer to iOS thus getting OSX less usable and discoverable (try to use Finder only with the left mouse button like most people do; the scroll bar gone by default; etc). I have the feeling having Windows 8 (for computers) being created by the same people who did Metro UI (for mobile devices) is not the way to go.

I'm in agreement with these points. I'd extend your point by saying that centralized design "control" has a major risk.

Apple devs definitely follow the design principles espoused by apple, but the problem is the design is starting to go bad. Apple has confused pretty and faux-real with good design.

The desktop experience needs to be shaken up and I'm glad it's happening, but I don't like what's being produced by either iOS/Lion or Win 8.

My classic Mac snafu was iSync way back in 2005, after iSync on my new iMac running 10.4.0 after asking if I wanted to sync my SE 610T, it wiped out my phone's entire address book (it assumed the iMac had the canonical list ... of 0 entries).

I did hear they resolved it in a later release of 10.4, but I was pretty annoyed.

Apple does tend to fix bad uses cases like these much quicker, as they have limited configurations of OS deployments to address... this is by design also.

Pretty much any time I try to download anything from Microsoft's websites they are a mess and make almost no sense. Everyone who is a web designer and responsible for web design at Microsoft should be fired immediately.

One example of Microsoft's ridiculousness is their hosted Exchange services -- http://www.microsoft.com/online/products.aspx I signed up for it some time last year. I couldn't get it to work with Outlook 2010. Their answer, call tech support. I don't sit on the phone to talk to just anyone, and I damn well don't sit on the phone to make hosted web services work with a companies desktop platform.

Another example is Microsoft Adcenter. Adwords was more advanced in 2005. A 6 year time gap for technology is unheard of. Virtually impossible for them to play catch up at this point. Their desktop software, Adcenter Desktop, running on their own operating system, Windows, crashes all the time. Ooops. The usability of the Adcenter web interface compared to Google's is like receiving a massage verse walking on glass. Its painful.

The sad thing is, Microsoft sits on a pile of very very valuable assets. Even with slightly above average management their business could stand to benefit enormously from Google's antitrust problems. The adcenter platform should be free money raining from the sky for them. But it won't be. And that is too bad because we need real Google alternatives.

well good points but what does it have to do with intuition? wrong word perhaps?

This reminds me of Bill Gates 2003 complaints about trying to get Microsoft Movie Maker installed.

http://boingboing.net/2008/06/25/bill-gates-2003-flam.html

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