How Microsoft misunderstands the concept of user research (& how Apple doesn’t)
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For example, Had they performed a deeper analysis of the motivations and needs of the users, they would most probably have ended up with a completely different solution. They might have had a solution that wouldn’t be held back by assumptions and limitations made in earlier versions of the application.
This article assumes that this is the second version of Windows ever shipped. They assume that this research hasn't taken place at all in the past. That the existing set of functionality hasn't evolved over time. For example the Win7 task bar is the result of this evolution. File managers are a very specific beast though. I get the feeling the author of the blog post doesn't know them very well.
And the author concludes comparing Finder to Explorer. I don't think I'm alone in finding Finder an inferior user experience. And frankly, I think that most users will find the ribbon to be a vast improvement. The mere addition of a more obvious "Open With" button will save me on support calls.
Coke's iconic bottle is not about affordance (though it does have good affordances) it is about signally fun, enjoyment, summer, etc. Coke has literally spent billions over decades to embed that emotional reaction in the American public.
http://www.hnl.bcm.tmc.edu/cache/The%20Pepsi-Coke%20challeng...
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_45/b41070892...
Pour pepsi in a coke bottle and it 'tastes' better ...literally your brain reacts differently when examined with an MRI when you know you are drinking Coke.
Apple's goal is to provoke the same emotional reaction with respect to their design language, and has also spent (billions?) doing so in commercials, actions and design choices over the last decade plus.
No one is immune to this. I have a Mini Cooper. I love it. But it is a direct example of favoring emotion over affordance. As a specific example: There is a bank of identical dip switches just below the radio. They look cool, and fit with Mini's design language. They however have Negative affordance. The switches all feel the same ... "Am I opening a lock? Rolling down a window? Or turning on/off Dynamic Stability Control?" I don't know ... hopefully it isn't they dynamic stability control.
And everything effects emotional connection. Mini's introduction of an SUV!?! My emotional connection to my own Mini is watered down by the company attempting to expand beyond the core idea providing that emotional connection. Is that rational? ... no. But it is real. My Mini still drives like a go kart, I haven't fallen out of love with it, but the existence of a Mini SUV does make me less likely to make excuses for its real failings.
Favoring design language over affordance is the reason for the gut reaction people have when they complain that this has poor design. It is based on an emotional reaction, not on whether it works. Whether it works is entirely besides the point.
If you design for emotional connection people look past actual usability problems. They may even make up fanciful explanations of why it is better (in the face of evidence) because they like it and want it to be better anyway. When you buy something to signal something about yourself there is an emotional need to defend it.
Obviously affordance vs design is not entirely an either or proposition. It is best to have both. Sadly emotional reactions are influenced by extremes. Sacrificing usability to provide the signal of usability can be a successful strategy. Sacrificing the signal of usability to provide usability is a much more difficult proposition.
While I agree, I'm not sure it's really a good idea for a program as conceptually simple as the explorer. The Ribbon was designed to clarify and simplify very complex interfaces and menu hierarchy (Office's), in order to make features both more visible and more accessible.
In Explorer, it seems to become little more than a glorified toolbar with HUGE buttons.
Definitely not sold on W8's explorer, especially not since I find 7's to already be a downgrade from XP's
If you are talking about files that belong to the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X: that's what locate is for, for example - try typing that into a Terminal window.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but when I start up Finder, there's no way for me to start from the root directory. So already, I'm not sure exactly where I am. Then when I start drilling down into directories, etc, there's only one of 4 views that will give me some sort of indication where I am, but not really. I have to concatenate all the directory names together in my head, as well as scroll left and right depending on how deep I am. I can't just cut and paste a location into the terminal window, and I find this really really annoying. It almost verges on useless to me.
1. Starting at the "root" directory. You can control what the finder window initially opens with on the General pane of the Finder Preferences. By default it should be your home folder (/Users/name).
2. Tracking your location. It sounds like you're not using the Path Bar. I believe it's disabled by default. Try View -> Show Path Bar. This presents your current location (in all view types) at the bottom. It also allows for navigational "jumps" to parent locations.
If you have OS X Lion you can open your Finder location in Terminal by enabling a Service in System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts. It's called "New Terminal at Folder" or "New Terminal Tab at Folder." See this Stack Overflow answer for more details: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/420456/open-terminal-here...
-) This option makes navigation much easier, I don't know why it's not turned on by default:
http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/qt/findertip1.htm
-) You can drag any file or folder into a Terminal window - simply drag and drop. You can also simply "Cmd+C" a file, go to Terminal and do "Cmd+V". The absolute path of the copied file will be inserted.
I think this can be turned off, and I think that at some point you turned it off... that's the only thing I can think of because getting to the root of a drive just requires going to the left of the window and clicking on the drive... most of the time (with the default finder configuration.)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2937738
When I fire up my MBP I see such attention to detail, such craft put into the OS, but then I'm continuously hit with how bad many of the user interface interactions are. It makes the experience very uneven.
The common theme from OldNewThing blog is that they usually don't cater so much to power-user audience, since power-users mostly aren't happy with what MS offers them and go for 3rd party tools anyway.
I was one of those power users who hated the ribbon when it was introduced in Office 2007. But my wife and kids - they loved it.
[Edit - since I can't reply to thread below (why is that?)]
I sell an Excel add-in, so I have a different perspective than most power users. The ribbon is a pain to program compared to the old command bars, making me dislike it at first. I've learned to appreciate it, though, because it's a lot easier to convey the add-in's features via the ribbon than it is using 16x16 icons on a command bar.
I think there is a bit of false transference. I program therefore I'm an expert. I can honestly say that my ability at C++ or Emacs never helped me figure out how to do anything in Office. Of course, I use it rarely enough that every time might as well be the first time.
Perhaps I'm odd in that most people make deeper use of Office more often than I do?
It's one thing to slag off Microsoft (unfortunately, they tend to make themselves a fairly easy target), but doing so with no constructive advice to others in the same situation is a bit pointless.
I personally hate ribbons, but I think for the average user they are great, and much easier to use. So I'm not defending Apple here, I'm just saying that It's not all about beauty or slickness; Finder is also powerful, but in its own ways (only if it had tabs...)
I agree that the hotkey for it is not very discoverable, but the default layout for the Finder toolbar has a button for Quick Look (it's in his screenshot, the one that looks like an eyeball).
TotalFinder to the rescue!
Microsoft, seeing that the paste function is the most used, makes the paste button bigger. The problem is, there's a much easier way to do it-- you can drag and drop in windows (at least I hope you can!). Unfortunately, windows users don't know this (by the evidence of them using paste a lot in microsofts stats, and my experiences with average people who are used to windows). By making the cut, copy and paste buttons bigger and more prominent, Microsoft is reinforcing the slower, less intuitive way of doing things.
Finder is not sacrificing usability to look pretty, finder looks pretty because it is more usable. You present users with 100 buttons on every window, and it doesn't matter how big you make them, they're going to have trouble figuring out what they're doing- the whole interface adds a constant cognitive load that slows the user down and increases confusion.
With the finder, there are a lot fewer buttons and its a lot easier to figure out what to do (in fact, most of the arbitrary commands are hidden under one button.) In the finder, they use the desktop metaphor, and you mostly manipulate files directly.
First, there are two possible new-user intuitions about what drag and drop ought to do, and it won't always do what they expect. First, it could copy the file, and second, it could move the file. The default on Windows (and OS X, IIRC) is to copy when the source and target are two different drives, and move if it's the same drive. This is likely to produce the correct result, but it wiil not always do so. If you want one and get the other, you will be unhappy with the result.
If you have learned cut/copy/paste in an application, then you will know the difference between cut and copy, and this will help you achieve the correct result right away. I presume this is the reason for them traditionally promoting cut/copy/paste over drag and drop.
Second, drag and drop is not discoverable. Items on the a toolbar or ribbon are trivially discoverable, but new and unskilled users may not even realize that drag and drop is an option.
This is the advantage of a ribbon populated with commands. Not only are the commands preferred by infrequent explorer users (cut/copy/paste) easily accessible to them, but new users have the even more easily understood option of choosing "move to" or "copy to". Q: How do I copy this file to my flash drive? A: I select "copy to".
You say this like its a bad thing. There is no "right way" to do things. Actually, there is: the most obvious/intuitive way is the right way for a particular user. If people intuitively use Copy/Paste to move files, it makes sense to make that functionality easier to get to. It does not make sense to try to "correct" their behavior in some way.
The real question is - what does success look like? If MSFT is able to prove statistically that users are able to perform file operations quicker, find commands that they never knew existed before, would that validate this design?
I think also that the redesign will be an improvement. Power users can turn the ribbon off and use short cuts.
All My Files just show recently used files (newly added, recently opened) in Spotlight index categorized by kind (not filetype, e.g. all my .py .rb files are grouped in developer category) and they shown up as a flat list without any hierarchy.
I agree that Finder is a bad example, though. (Even though I don't think I need anything more from Lion's Finder.)
Lion isn't there yet there is a strong argument for just using a tablet. The explorer finder and all the other expectations for what is in an OS just get in the way. Most people just want a gadget that gets things done not sometihingnthey need to root and (re)program.
Windows 3.1 had a pretty awesome file acess system for the time win 2000 nt was the best though clean search with predictable results. That is an aside if you need to extensively use search or curate your files something is suboptimal in tour apps.
Microsoft's solution may not be "elegant" or changing their current paradigm, but a paradigm shift is very difficult, especially when you have to accomodate many legacy users. Microsoft's solution always looked (to me) like a decent incremental solution that would work for the Windows user base. What's wrong with that? It may not be as elegant as it can be, but it's definitely not as ugly as so many are making it out to be. And if it works, what's wrong with that?
I actually tend to use the shell for almost all file management tasks. But it seems to me to be an exercise in futility to try and make a file manager app that pleases both users who just "want to find their files" and those who want to be able to organize them in a specific way or for other reasons need more direct visualization of the underlying filesystem.
The Finder is not a maxima in any search space. It's always been terrible (where always == since OSX was first released) and it has not significantly improved over time.
As to Windows's explorer, I've find it regressing over time: I have not found 7's explorer to be superior to 2k/XP's under any metric, instead it's more confusing (menubar randomly hiding and showing), it defaults to completely pointless and insane options (Burn as one third of the sparse toolbar? Really?) and the search UI is a severe downgrade from XP's once you get to your results.
The only use I've had so far for them was confusing me as to how I could edit the address bar to jump to an arbitrary location. I've yet to use these things at all, although I don't mind them much.
Same as the finder's path bar (or the contextual crumbs menu on finder titles), checked out, never used.
Now their focus appears to be changing things so that people will upgrade their OS. This is also unnatural behavior, because frankly nothing really needs to be changed anymore, except adding more device drivers and making the OS faster. Changing things around for no particular reason will likely annoy a lot of long-time Windows users (like me). They are providing the exact same functionality, but are just moving things around, to give the illusion of change and value.
However, I think one strategy they are doing is that by using the "Ribbon" experience, they are trying to keep newer Windows users from being able to migrate seamlessly to Linux or MacOS. Right now, everything across all the OSes is menu based, so there's little friction in migrating. If a new generation of users are used to the Ribbon, then moving over to Mac or Linux will be "annoying" to them.
So I think the article is misunderstanding Microsoft. Microsoft isn't making changes because they want to improve the user experience. They are trying to change the user experience in order to preserve their desktop monopoly by leveraging their new users and preventing a barrier of entry to other OSes. Which makes sense from their perspective because they have the money to do the research, and they manpower and resources to make these sweeping changes.
You're looking for a malicious intent in everything Microsoft does. Isn't it possible that the Windows execs simply believe tha the ribbon interface is an improvement rather?
Your idea also just doesn't make much sense. If switching to the ribbon adds a large barrier to entry, then it's also a large enough change to discourage customers from upgrading to Windows 8.
Changing the user experience, to me is a competitive enhancement. Do you think people actually cared about that much about menus that it needed to be changed? It's really doubtful. It's obvious that they are trying to differentiate themselves from the other OS's with it.
Ribbon was the only major new feature added to Office. Again, it's obvious they were doing this in order to give people a reason to upgrade, because Office is now fully-featured, with very little reason to upgrade. I'm still using Office 2003, and I could probably get away with using Office XP or 97.
In terms of discouraging current users, that's why they have the option to remove Ribbon for older customers, but they will default to the new way for new users. I'm still using the Windows 95 interface on Windows 7.
Hence my point that for new users who tried to migrate to OpenOffice or Google Docs, they would find the menu interface unfamiliar and annoying. I think MacOS is annoying because I can only resize a Window from the bottom right-hand corner, but I'm told they changed that in Lion, which my guess is that it's to appease old farts like me that want to migrate to MacOS. So Apple is doing the reverse, which is to make their OS more palatable (but not completely change) for die-hard Windows users.
Are you sure you're not extrapolating your use case into the audience MS is targeting?
And I'm not sure this is a problem. From my perspective, the ribbon is a huge improvement. Should Microsoft focus on cross-OS metaphors? I want them to focus on improving their product.
There's more shortcuts than ever now. Power users need to realize that the default look should be oriented towards the normal user to make things more discoverable, since power users are the ones than can easily configure things to their liking unlike regular users.
When you're designing an interface for more than 1 billion users, you have to make a lot of trade-offs.