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Comment by intsunny | Hacker News Reader

> How do you deal with Microsoft's crap on a daily basis? Any similar stories?

Based on this very recent comment, even the creaters of Windows do not:

This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.

I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

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> Based on this very recent comment, even the creaters of Windows do not:

I made a joke about this after the Windows 11 update introduced the new right click menu, meaning things like 7zip and my file reputation tool where all an additional click away for no apparent reason other than putting bigger spacing and more icons.

That just had to be designed by atleast someone who doesn't power use Windows, and maybe even daily drives a different OS

Microsoft broke their own right-click menu integrations in Explorer by doing this. "Open with Code" and "Open with Visual Studio" have both been relegated to the "Show more options" submenu.

It absolutely boggles the mind that any of this was shipped. This is Beta level software.

I have a feeling that larger businesses use the concept of 'data driven design' as a cost saving measure because it's easier to make decisions based on a few pie charts than it is to actually spend time with your users.

An issue like this would come up almost straight away if someone was actively observed while using the OS.

Well, if you want to go down this road, let's really talk about the entire right-click menu paradigm. I do almost all of my development on a personal MBP, but I make sure that my work PC laptop can _do_ everything I would need it to do for my job. On this minimally-functional, bog-standard corporate Dell machine, it takes about a third of a second to bring up the right-click menu. Juuust enough time to make you wait. There are TWENTY-EIGHT menu items, NINE of which are sub-menu openers. The menu is so tall that it takes 7/8ths the height of the screen, so I can't reliably know at what item the cursor will be lying at when it appears, and I have to think about it. This supposed "convenience" has now become an actual impediment to productivity.

I suppose I should be thankful. Before the last refresh, there were so many items in the right-click menu that it was taller than the internal LCD could display, and I would need to scroll to get to the bottom.

Sure, the Mac has right-click (and I don't like how it embeds a possibly-very-long file name on the "compress" item), but the entire _way_ you work with files on a Mac doesn't rely on it. Windows has centered it's workflow on right-click, so their right-click menu is critical to using it in anger. Every time I need to do something on that machine, I'm just glad to stop and go back to my Mac.

EDIT: I used Windows Explorer for these figures, because that's what everyone has. I just did the same thing in Directory Opus, which I use as a replacement. It took longer to open the right-click menu, and has 4 more items.

I should run a poll: how many items are in your right-click menus in Explorer? How many of them are just "convenience" placeholders for things you would normally be doing with dragging-and-dropping between targets IN THE PROGRAM? How many are "convenience" items for compression-related tasks? I suppose I could remove a bunch of these right-click menu item targets if I did some research on how.

Microsoft's error was the dynamic DLL part of the whole thing. They should have used a simple rules engine with which programs can register an icon, text, and an action. Processing ~1 KB of contiguously stored rules for each right-click would take less than 1ms even on the slowest budget laptop running on battery.

There are many similar design decisions in Windows that cause many orders of magnitude slowdown. For example, start menu indexing is also absurdly slow, despite processing only about 100 KB of data in total.

For extra items in the right click menu to appear, Explorer has to load dlls and ask them if they want something to appear.

If one of the dlls is slow to respond, Explorer can’t show the right click menu. Even though 99 out of 100 times you right click the desktop, it wasn’t to open that ‘ati settings utility’ or whatever a driver added to that menu.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the reason they removed the items from the main menu wasn’t both to make it less useful to add crap items and to make it less painful if they don’t load quickly.

I use Win10 on work and Linux at home. Last week I had to help some "not-so-tech" guy to copy and paste files in the Win11 File Explorer. Now there are just Icons for copy, paste etc. But there are two kind of computer user. The one who just use the shortcut and the other with the menu. But now they search for "copy" or "paste" but now there is no menu entry. There are just Icons on top of the context menu. So a less technical user has with just Icons a much harder life.

And the problem with icons is you can no longer tell someone over the phone, "click copy" or "click paste". Now it's something like, "click on the icon that looks like a clip board" or "click on the icon that looks like multiple pieces of paper" followed by "nothing happened" and then trying to figure out that they clicked on the wrong icon because they still couldn't figure out which icon because it wasn't something obvious like text, it was a subjective icon.

Maybe some blind people could sue Microsoft? I can only imagine that it has gotten harder for screen reading software.

If anyone from Microsoft is reading:

If this is true, find a way to FIRE THOSE PEOPLE OR FORCE THEM TO USE WINDOWS!

I don't care how great they are (on paper), or how kewl MacOS is, they should either walk the walk or get out. I'm sure there still are more than enough designers willing to work on products used by 1 billion people.

I'm also shocked to hear that designers at Microsoft are designing features for Windows on a Mac. I presume these are 'UX Designers' or 'Interaction Designers'.

Imagine the opposite scenario for Apple and how absurd it sounds: designers at Apple designing features for MacOS or iOS using Windows OS laptops.

This prompts the following question: What design apps are the Microsoft designers using on a Mac that they can't use on a Windows machine? (Is it Mac-only Sketch?)

"What design apps are the Microsoft designers using on a Mac that they can't use on a Windows machine? (Is it Mac-only Sketch?)"

The main designer tools, as far as I am aware, are bundled in the Adobe suite and that works on windows, as well as Mac.

But there are tons of other designer apps, that are Mac only - but I would assume it is mainly a designer thing to have Macs - they have been succesfully marketed (and to some excent were designed) for creative folks.

It's ironic that Microsoft promote their Surface Book models with pen pressure screens as ideal for all artists and designers. Except for their own designers who appear to prefer Macs.

I was amused recently sat with a bunch of IBM consultants that had mac books and couldn't get them to work with the conference video screen. If only they'd had the foresight to develop some kind of compatible PC.

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