| Wednesday, February 11, 2004 |
14:57 - "I don't care how it feels, look at the numbers"
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_hillel_tjeerd_2.asp
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Bee-autiful. Here's a cute little circle-jerk at WinSuperSite between two or three Windows UI guys congratulating each other about how much better the Windows XP interface is than Mac OS X.
Hillel: The difficulty for us is that the more [information] goes on the screen, the less simple it feels. We can prove to people that we're easier to use in many cases than anyone else, but yet it doesn't always feel that way. It's a very difficult trade-off to make. For Microsoft, it's in our DNA to say, look, I don't care how it feels, look at the numbers. We're getting 9 out of 10 users [completing tasks successfully] and they're getting 5 out of 10 users. Who's better? That said, we gotta be a little more... We gotta do both. It's not good enough for us to say "We're 9 out of 10 and you're 5 out of 10." We gotta be able to say that we're 9 out of 10 or we're 10 out of 10, and by the way, you know what else, our users feel great about using it.
Tjeerd: That gets back a little bit to what you were mentioning earlier. When you use a wizard, you make it really easy for the people who are unfamiliar with something. Whereas if people are completely familiar with something, and they do this thing every single day, [you want to get out of the way]. In the past, we had often bogged down the latter folks with the easy-to-use UI that steps you through it, and guides you and tells you all about it. People are saying, "I know this, I know this ... I burn CDs every day; don't keep telling me how to do it." And so we're trying to do a better job now.
Paul: This is the Mac myth. The Mac is supposedly easier to use, but in reality it's only easy to use when you already know how to do everything.
[Laughter]
Hillel: Well, everything is easier when you know how to do it!
Tjeerd: [Apple is] great at enabling the optimal scenario, enabling the optimal path. But as soon as you deviate or you have some problems, it gets a little harder. You start seeing people fail.
Paul: Right.
Tjeerd: We've done usability testing and we know, for example, that, yes, [Apple's] UI is very clean and simple, but even the most basic things sometimes are really hard for people to actually discover. It's almost like a game, you know?
Paul: Yep. There is no discoverability in Mac OS X at all. That's just a fact.
Hillel: No.
Sure. I guess it must be that all-important lack of "discoverability" that's behind this story of an "extreme Christian juggling act" that switched to a Mac for making their promotional videos.
Why do we use Macs? About three years ago, my teammate, Bill, and I set out to buy a computer specifically for video editing so that we could make demo videos to promote our ministry/business. We chose a Sony digital editing studio that came with Windows ME. It had an incredibly unstable OS that crashed frequently, but having spent years working on a PC, I accepted that PCs do that. I then had to buy a video-editing program, as the program that came with my computer was more of a toy than a tool for getting real work done.
What happened next was a nightmare. After months of working on the video, I tried to export the video to DV. I toiled endlessly, trying to trouble-shoot the video program, but I could never get the video to export correctly. I upgraded my RAM and spent countless hours on the phone with tech support—all to no avail. It turned out that my Firewire was defective. To add insult to injury, I discovered this one-month after my computer was no longer under warranty, so Sony’s technical support operator would not even talk to me without charging me a fee.
Then God brought a friend named Mark into my life. Mark teaches Linux at the University of San Diego and is a Mac user. He told me about a program called Final Cut Pro 3. I checked it out and was quite intrigued, but as I am quite stubborn, it took another year before my teammate and I finally made the switch to Mac. My teammate used a new PC for his daily computer needs, so when we bought the Mac, our intent was to use it for video editing only. Bill had been an avid PC user for 15 years, but sold his PC a week after buying his Mac, stating, “I hope I never have to use a PC again.”
But... but... don't you guys see? Are you blind? The Dock has icons that jump up and down like a Jack Russell f%$%ing terrier!!! Aaaauugh!
Oh yes, and it also must be the reason why Microsoft's own graphic arts department uses Macs to create stuff like these silly security-consciousness posters (I'm quite sure that the fact that the text they pasted onto the signs isn't properly aligned or proportioned has more to do with the lack of skill of the people who made them, than with the choice of platform).
You know, I'm glad the Longhorn guys have seemingly taken seriously the idea that they might want to rework their UI a little bit to pander a little more heavily to the way the user actually wants to work. But the longer these guys sit in little interview rooms and pat each other on the back over "facts" about nebulous buzzwords like "discoverability" and the unassailability of "wizards" and explanations of why it's better for an IP address to have to be entered in four separate little input areas that you have to click or tab moronically between if you have octets with only one or two digits, in a dialog buried six levels deep, the less progress they're going to make.
Meanwhile, I've clocked the fifth friend just in the past six months to have bought a brand-new 12" PowerBook, and who has gone from "never touched a Mac before" to setting up custom TCP/IP locations and multi-monitor rotating backgrounds in the space of a week, without any more prompting from me than a brief tutorial the first day. I've yet to hear him complain about the bouncing Dock icons.
(Which, by the way, you can turn off. Dock Preferences. Durpy-durpy-durpy-durp.)
UPDATE: J Greely notes:
Oddly enough, the thing those quotes from WinSuperSite most remind me
of are Tog's rants on why OS X sucks rocks compared to the old Mac OS.
Of course, his idea of UI perfection is one of the reasons people like
me were driven away from the Mac platform in the first place...
If Microsoft isn't careful, they'll end up with their own cadre of purists and foot-stamping tantrum-throwers, exactly the kind of people Apple has been so assiduous in brushing aside in the ongoing experiment that is OS X. If they're really trying to rework things for the better, it means really letting go of the old nuggets of received wisdom that have so often caused way more trouble than they've solved.
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Brian Tiemann
