However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next round of the Surface instead of playing catch up after release.
The tools of the UX design trade are very different. I think the best UX is done with mockups that go into customer feedback sessions. The middle ground is lots of static drawings of UX, which leads to a lot of bikeshedding and not a lot of real data. Obviously the worst is no UX design at all.
In general I view QA as the last line of defense before the customer, if your QA doesn't speak up about ANY issues with the product, technical, UX or otherwise then who will?
Of course, my view of the role of QA in product design may be different from others.
That is why I don't like describing the Test discipline as QA. It's not QA. When I worked in Test, I viewed my role as making sure things work well for the user, which includes 'testing' the specs to make sure there's no scenarios with glaring pain points. I think there's some parallels with the Obmudsman role in acting as the internal customer advocate.
It's the classic QA paradox. The typical hacker world view doesn't prioritize such feel issues enough. Even in today's UX focused world, stylus specific issues aren't widely understood. Combine the dynamics of the Asch conformity experiment, and it makes perfect sense.
Like, say, Gabe? :)
It is admirable, but their work towards a solution will be fruitless. N-Trig's pressure sensitive stylus technology is vastly inferior to Wacom. Sure, most people can't tell the difference, but most artists can. Sure, artists can still produce professional quality work with an N-Trig stylus, but the experience of using an N-Trig stylus is substandard.
Microsoft improved nearly every aspect of the Surface Pro 3, but their switch to N-Trig was extraordinarily stupid. I'd rather have a slightly thicker, slightly more expensive device than one with a less than perfect stylus. I hope they continue to improve things by switching back to Wacom in the future.
With their Bamboo/Intuos/Cintiq products, Wacom can avoid the accuracy falloff problems by including an enormous margin around the edge of the active area. On a portable device like the Surface Pro 2, they weren't able to do that and it showed.
There are certainly tradeoffs in going to N-trig, but I don't think it's fair to portray it as inferior to Wacom's tech in every area but cost.
The move to N-Trig hypothetically fixes both of these. Early reviews/videos say that corner accuracy is greatly improved, and the lack of a separate digitizer layer allows a thinner optical stack, reducing parallax (and allowing the device overall to be thinner).
Driver support has historically been an issue, but msft seems to be improving things significantly.
There are fewer levels of sensitivity and hovering doesn't work quite as well, but I am overall reasonably optimistic about the switch.
http://surfaceproartist.com/blog/2014/6/9/n-trig-closing-win...
When I was at MS folks were working super closely with Atmel (touch panel vendor for most early Win8/RT tablets) and really pushed the limits of their technology. There was a tight feedback loop there and I personally had found issues which eventually were solved via iterations of back-and-forth with Atmel and with software tweaks to work around hardware limitations.
It may not happen over night, but I suspect they're doing the same thing with N-Trig and pushing them to improve the experience in a way which other PC/tablet vendors never have or would. So don't assume that just because other OEMs haven't cared enough to get the most out of N-Trig's text that Surface doesn't have a shot at doing better.
Any Microsoft employees listening: Go ahead and pack it up. Someone on the internet has told you all you need to hear. It's fruitless. Literally nothing you do will work, as this post has clearly pointed out. Look to this non sequitor full of opinion presented as fact for all the info you need: Until you switch to the hardware that OP knows is superior, your work will be for naught. Sorry.
As a couple of people pointed out, Wacom has a major disadvantage as well. It really sucks that it loses its accuracy at the edges of the screen, but in spite of that I still find the experience far superior to using an N-Trig stylus. I have come to this conclusion after using many different devices with different kinds of digitizers over the last decade. I also frequent a few of the major online digital art communities, and they all seem to agree with me. Perhaps the N-Trig fans are just quiet, but I'm inclined to think the lack of representation is due to the fact that artists enjoy using Wacom products.
I'm not sure why you feel the need to be so childishly hostile. I wasn't aware that expressing an opinion in an anonymous online community where people gather to have casual conversations was frowned upon.
To their credit, I've made similar mistakes in my career.
It's understandable for one engineer to overlook it, maybe even a whole team but for an entire division of design, engineering, QA, marketing etc? Something is rotten in their process.
I would assume MS is not shipping products directly from the engineering lab to the factory, so for something glaring to get all the way to the customer then there is something wrong in their process that failed to correct for human error.
They are not supposed to be worse?
QA should have had a short window to study this type of issue but is it something that they would delay shipment over?
Basically I would expect the product to ship on schedule unless there was a really critical problem and that there wouldn't be slack in the schedule for weeks of refinement. Component orders may be place 6 months ahead to secure supply so it is hard to flex the schedule without causing inventory problems not to mention messing customers about.
Based on my experience in a CE company that wasn't Microsoft.
I ended up in a conference room with about half a dozen people from the Surface team. More rotated in and out as I worked. I drew and talked for two and half hours while they watched and took notes. Within the first thirty seconds they realised how frustrating the home button placement was.
What did you mean? You don't mean that if X makes a mistake that you made first, that mistake is a credit to X, do you?
I could have phrased that a little better. Perhaps "I've made similar types of mistakes that were obvious in retrospect, so I have a hard time faulting them" might be a better way to say it.
Automation should catch one class of problems but real world usage is necessary to catch a whole different type of issue.
I found the experience invaluable in helping me to understand why I found virtually every hardware and the vast majority of software products extremely painful to use. And how much I appreciate Steve Jobs for showing us how it's done.
I'm not the only one, I've noticed other people having the same problem.
I have no idea how this design became ubiquitous. It does not work for me at all.
It is, but it isn't some trade secret, they could open source this and have 1,000s of people converging toward the solution. Why are they so hung up and being The Ones Who Deliver The Software And The Hardware?
I'm all for supporting open source. But seriously, it took me about 20-30 hours to get my FreeNAS setup working (the way I wanted) (getting the hardware together, configuring... lots and lots of configuring). And I'm definitely not going to say that that project is "end user friendly".
I really really love open source projects but I'm willing to put down that they don't always meet the end user in an appreciable way without a serious and committed company behind the product making it end user applicable (android, et all). Otherwise the open source project will fit the needs of the people that work on it (engineers) and that's about it.
They can barely manage a team of their own engineers to get this product out. Throwing more guys at it isn't going to help necessarily. Not without significantly more overhead and more managers. I think mystical man month definitely still applies to open source projects as well.
that and microsoft is just not good at managing open source. And I can't imagine anyone would want to work on the windows kernel without being paid to do so >_>
For the same reason that Ubuntu and Firefox are?
Personally, I think the SP3 is probably the best PC for digital artists, but I'm disappointed in how little they worked on making the stylus user friendly.
SP2 is likely the best portable computer for digital illustrators. You can still have an SP2, but if you're like me, you're bummed out that SP3 means that the accessory ecosystem is stuck as-is for the SP2.