Why do you have to click Start to shut down? | Hacker News Reader

Why do you have to click Start to shut down?

blogs.msdn.com

20 pointsmarketer20 comments

This goes to show the value of actually watching users when they sit down in front of your system. Even though 'Click Start to Shutdown' seems unintuitive to all of us programmers, the usability study showed that it's what people expected. You can't really fault the Windows designers for following the users existing mental model rather than trying to change it.

Usability studies also show the cunning of the average user. It's difficult to know if what you have presented to them is good design or 'good enough' to allow _most_ users to cope. Combine this with people's knowledge that they are in a usability test, most people's desire to please authority figures and the natural skew to any process where you can affect outcome in your favour and usability studies become a mine field.

Windows is an exercise in 'good enough'. That's not a bad thing for a commodity OS. It doesn't mean that it should win any accolades though.

BUt it is far from 'good enough', it is a hindrance to productivity.

The catch is, once they do figure out one way of accomplishing a task -- even if it's complicated, unintuitive, and not really what you intended -- they'll cling to it and base future actions on that point of reference. So you can't "correct" the interface without further annoying the users who already figured out one way to do it.

Miguel de Icaza has an amazing post on this:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-24-1.html

On the Mono download page, available versions for each platform were available as text links, with the platform's logo next to the links. Because of some configuration of the wiki engine they were using, images automatically linked to another page listing all the places where the same image is used. So, rather than clicking on the text link to download the latest version, 95 percent of Windows and Mac users would click on the logo, see the listing of other pages using the logo, scan that textual list for the highest version number (it's near the bottom of the list), visit the page for that one ancient version, and download it.

Aside: Noting that users will only read text as a last resort, and not always even then, I wonder what the success rate is for getting past Firefox 3's "this page's certificate is self-signed" warning. It can't be any better than Mono's.

"We of course feel terrible to all of the 95% of the users that wanted to try Mono on Windows and the Mac and ended up using a two year old version of Mono."

That's humility.

It's still better than "Click Vista Orb to Shutdown" imho.

Is it really that unintuitive to click the start button to start the shutdown procedure?

I think that as tech people, we often forget that the vast majority of people that utilise tech are often less logically inclined than we are.

Or to put it another way, simplicity + attractiveness sells.

David Pogue did an interesting TED talk on this in 06 in which he made a quick stab at the start menu thing at about 10 minutes in. Linked below for reference.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_pogue_says_simplici...

I actually knew someone who could not figure out how to shut down their computer because it did not make sense to them to click "Start" to shut down.

I hope they figured it out eventually, though? It is not that hard a skill to learn.

No offense, but I think there are a zillion other things that would be more important to simplify.

Hasn't Joel even argued that shutting down the computer should be unnecessary in the future anyway?

It ain't the future yet. (Well, for most people anyway; I don't think I've restarted my computer in weeks).

'Hasn't Joel even argued that shutting down the computer should be unnecessary in the future anyway?'

Yes, he was also complaining about there being 9 options to chose from when leaving your Windows Vista computer:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html

Even if 99% of people are smart (or in this case, not dumb) enough to figure out a feature, that doesn't mean that you can guarantee that the other 1% will get it. I'm guessing this user falls in the < 1% category. Maybe it makes for a funny story, but it's hardly representative of a normal user. If 99% of your users figured it out, move on. If Microsoft waited for 100% of their users to figure out a feature, we'd still be waiting for the one guy staring at power button and wondering what to do.

Will the sequel explain why, on Macs, you drag disk icons to the trash can to eject them? That always made me think twice about what I was doing.

As of at least 10.4 the trash can becomes an eject icon when you drag a disk.

I guess that shows you how much that freaked me out.

Because if you want to put the physical CD into the actual trash you have to get it out of the computer first...

The best explanation I've seen is embedded in this http://everything2.com/node/876627

For what it's worth, the first time I used a Mac quite a few years ago it took me a good five or six minutes to figure out how to log off.

I think I just lost a little more faith in humanity. Thanks for that.

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