N00bs vs Windows 8: We lock six people in a room with new OS The design of Windows 8's user interface - The Interface Formerly Known as Metro (TIFKAM) - leaves non-technical users yearning for the good ol' Start button. The Reg can report that finding after some rather non-scientific tests in which we offered different folks their very first experience of Windows 8. We chose …
"Their hotcorner and mystery meat rubbish is simply bad design"
I have been lead to believe that Apple are the good design gods - they have hot corners too. Oh and Linux has similar available too. Therefore. by your very own logic, all 3 main desktop operating systems suffer the same "meat rubbish and bad design". Which poorly designed OS do you use?
"Apple are the good design gods - they have hot corners too. Oh and Linux has similar available too."
I don't know about apple but the key word in your linux statement is "available", you could add as an option to make the point abundantly clear.
This is what pisses me off as a developer. MS could have easily achieved their 'touch first' design goal, their new minimalistic style goals in many no-brainer methods which don't fly in the face of 30 years of HCI research.
You could write an eassay on the obvious and logical ways in which MS could have done this. As such it makes it obvious that the whole design has been skewed to a high degree by a bullying business and marketing philosophy.
They don't seem to understand that it is also possible to attract and retain customers through pure exellence rather than using restrictions and bullying which is only possible because of their dominant pre-installed OS monopoly.
They really should start considering changing their name to the Syrius Cybernetics Corporation.
I should have added...
User configurability is the key.
If I could by Win 8, but skin the gui to look and behave like any of the following (whether that ability was supplied by MS or purchasable from a 3rd party supplier)
win2k
XP
Win7
TIFKAM (I can't think of it as any other name!)
Some other GUI or paradigm.
I wouldn't hesitate to purchase one or even two copies.
But i'll stick to the various perfectly functional existing OSs used in our house
(2xMints, 1xXP Pro, 1xXP64, 1xWin7, 1xUbuntu[non-unity])
GNOME 3 has a hot corner equivalent to Microsoft's that is used to get to the Activities screen, but GNOME puts it next to an "Activities" button so the user who is unaware of the corner has something to click on. In other words the functionality is discoverable and it's likely the user would find the hot corner in time too since they'd be mousing up that direction in time.
Windows 8 doesn't have a button. What makes this really stupid is MS *did* have a button and people are looking for it but it's not there any more. This is just stupid behaviour. It wouldn't have affected the task bar in any way to put some button in the corner. Perhaps when Microsoft get around fixing Windows for the desktop they'll reinstate it. At present, it's just one more annoyance in an OS designed for tablets first and traditional computers as an afterthought.
My 15 year old goddaughters laptop died (it was an old XP model) so I bought her a nice new lenovo with 750GB hard drive partitioned into 2, i7 processor and graphice card so it could do for her into uni which she plans on doing.
I left windows 7 on drive c: and added windows 8 on drive d:, showed her a couple of things for about a minute and left her to it.
After a month she uses windows 8 almost exclusively as "Its faster, starts my games faster, shuts down and starts faster and its easier on a laptop than windows 7 with aps as they work beeter with swipe an have bigger buttons".
Its the same as everything, we "oldies" are used to a style of OS with windows that has been fairly constant all our computing lives, youngsters etc are used to several UI's with xbox, ps3, wii, windows, android, iOS etc and to them its "just another UI" so they just use it. I have used windows 8 myself for several months and find no real difference between working on it at home than using XP at work, its just a UI that you get used to and get on with it the same as someone using windows at work does when they get home and change to their apple laoptop or iPad.....
Never having used Windows Phone or Windows 8, am I correct in guessing there is no colour coding to the background colour of the tiles, and the colours are in fact chosen in a random-and-pleasing manner? Seems like another violation of fundamental user interface principles if so...
"fundamental user interface principles"
Yep. T...AM goes against many of their own documented principles. Well until they get around to throwing ithe current versino away and replacing it with a T...AM version that is.
This new interface is ailmed at 'basic users'. By this I mean those who want to do a bit of browsing, email and maybe create a document or two. For them it might be a winner.
Their new UI model does not suit my way of working one little bit so I will not be using it. mind you neither does Unity or Gnome 3(yet). So I'm sticking with Windows 7 modded to give me Windows Classic with quick launch and Gnome 2.
I know I am not alone as other IT professionals I know have expressed just as much dismay at the new TellyTubby interface in W8.
I'd like to nuke the people in Redmond who thought that this UI is a good idea AND were then allowed to make it the default. Pah!
A reasonable idea if handled with the dexterity and thoughtfulness of a white dog turd. Why didn't you stick Windows 8 on a PC instead of a Mac? Or install Splashtop and let them use Windows 8 through an iPad for the touchscreen experience? Still, the premise of the article and the experiment is an excellent one and I was please to see that after the coaching, which as others have pointed out would have been given prior to logging on had they actually purchased the OS, they were all able to use the system and found no issues with it.
Closing a TIFKAM app may not be THAT intuitive but you do get a wee had appearing that suggests you can grab it then I suppose you would quickly figure out the drop off the screen to close part. Good article and without the usual snyde pish - liked it.
Remember how Windows was sold as the system you could just sit in front of and use. Not like that illegal Linux thingy with all those obscure keyboard commands?
http://blogs.windows.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-48-metablogapi/4667.Keyboard_2D00_shortcuts_2D00_for_2D00_Windows_2D00_8_5F00_5756566F.png
I wonder how long it would take test subjects to discover Windows-U (Ease of Access center - whatever that is)
Amazing that given how much the test was stacked to make things as difficult as possible (running in a VM on a Mac, wrong browser installed for some users, Office hidden on tiles off screen, users asked to save to the 'desktop' rather than the default location of 'My Documents'), the conclusion was still "Our small sample therefore seems to indicate that civilians will occasionally strike trouble, but will generally enjoy exploring Windows 8 and TIFKAM."
I had to install Windows 8 in a VM to look at a reported IE10 issue with our webapp, and I couldn't believe how annoying the interface was -
First off returning to Metro, I I jammed my mouse into the bottom left corner to get the Metro button, then moved it to the centre of the button to get a good click on it (because that's how I roll), and it just bloody disappeared! It was hard to get used to keeping the mouse in the exact lower left, and how the hell are you supposed to do that with a touchscreen?
Then there was MetroIE, I literally couldn't work out how to get the address bar, I tried doing the usual phone scrolling to the top or bottom, nada! It was only after my co-worker was trying random things that they found it, you have to press RMB on an empty part of the page (as RMB is STILL the the context menu on links), who the hell decided that trash and again how does that even work if you're using touch??
Finally it came time to turn the VM off, where's the shutdown button? Is it in that symbol on the charms menu that looks a bit like a power symbol? Nope. Is it in settings? Nope. Oh, wait, what about power settings? Yes that's it, Settings > Power isn't the power options, it's the shut down menu (Where the actual power settings are I don't know or care).
All in all Windows 8 feels like it's been thrown together by idiots who didn't even bother testing the UI themselves, and needless to say I won't be using it on any computers I own ever.
"All in all Windows 8 feels like it's been thrown together by idiots who didn't even bother testing the UI themselves, and needless to say I won't be using it on any computers I own ever."
I have to say that I felt exactly that way when I first tried Win3.0 and from then on that feeling never left me.
I came to conclusion very quickly that MSFT developers are indifferent to the products they develop and either do not use them themselves or do not even know how the target customers are supposed to use them. They seem to just go through the checklists of things - "OK, it does this, this and that, job done". <Alt-F4> to exit a program - WTF?
Some people just need to learn to adapt to change. What I found saddening was this:
“Microsoft needs to put some tutorials in this or it will frustrate a lot of people.”
“Microsoft will have some kind of introduction to this, won't they?”
So I'm guessing that you didn't let them watch the welcome video which explains how to use the UI then?
It's nothing like Win95 all over again. Windows 95 was a really, really rubbish OS, but I remember quite clearly the first time I used it. Yes, it was different to previous "consumer" versions of Windows before it (which were a complete mess, UI wise), but there was at least some attempt at being logical and intuitive and I very quickly found my way around it.
Obviously, going to "Start" to stop the computer was very illogical, but nothing like as stupid as hiding things off the side of the screen with zero indication of their very existence.
As for people crying about the welcome video not being shown... lots of people, possibly even most people, will first experience Windows 8 without seeing that video. As the article shows, they will be confused and at least slightly irritated.
Why should anyone have to adapt to this kind of change? It's pointless and unnecessary.
Yes, it will, if <u>you</u> install it. If some guy in a factory somewhere in India installed it, made an image, restored that image on 2000 machines then performed some mass script to update the product keys on each machine, and you happened to buy one, this looks like you're out of luck.
Look for 404's comment below regarding such an OEM-provided upgrade.
Nope. What is shows is that people who work in IT have the confidence to blame a bad interface when they see one, whereas those outside IT are more likely to blame themselves for being "poor with computers".
With Win8, MS have actually hidden many important elements and deliberately neglected to put any visual cues in to point to the hidden stuff. This is a text-book example of what we have *known* to be bad UI design for several decades. No amount of hype will polish this turd up to a shine.
Win 8 will quickly gain traction in the casual user market, particularly among those using a touch screen device. It sounds as though your sample quickly got used to its quirks on a mouse-driven computer, but I'd imagine that over time they'd notice more hangups (especially as someone earlier in this thread noted, if they'd been using a 'real' installation and told to shut down the computer - hiding the relevant option is likely to lead to people using the hardware shutdown - i.e. pressing the physical power button...)
Given the 'traditional' desktop is relegated to an application rather than the default shell (which is apparently now called either "Windows 8 UI" or "Modern UI"), it seems as though Microsoft want to wean people off using it over time and increase the prominence of the new UI (which of course can only run applications pre-selected by Microsoft). The new UI version of IE is presumably intended to try and recoup some market share, even though they haven't improved it in line with rival browsers and it apparently won't support plug-ins or extensions (I wonder how well it will cope with HTML 5?).
So while they may gain some traction against iOS and Android, they seem to have ignored that both those OS' have different "big brothers" with different UIs for running on desktop machines: OS X in the case of the fruity company, Linux (in one of several dozen different flavours) in the case of more open environments.
I can't imagine many companies rushing out to buy Win 8 for their desktop machines - besides which, any company worth its salt would be waiting for SP1 anyway. So it's unlikely to be as big a disaster as ME, but may possibly be another Vista.
Oh, and incidentally, apparently the internal version number is Windows 6.2, indicating that there's still a lot of Vista (6.0) and Win 7 (6.1) code left....
From reading it seems that you cannot exit programs and that they just sit open in the background? Is this correct? If that is the case I can see all kinds of privacy issues appearing like when someone switches back to the browser that the other person had open on some dodgy website and thought they had actually closed. Or easier ways for malware to steal your data.
Please correct me if I am wrong on this.
So to summarize,
08yr old female -- had trouble finding non-obvious features (context-switching hotspot, hidden scrollbar)
12yr old male -- no real trouble
22yr old female -- had trouble finding non-obvious features (context-switching hotspot, hidden scrollbar)
30yr old male -- no real trouble
40yr old female -- had trouble finding non-obvious features (context-switching hotspot)
70yr old male -- no real trouble
There's definitely a pattern here. It could just be a side-effect of the small sample size, but there appears to be a class of people who will have serious trouble with Windows 8's hidden pieces. Did Microsoft just not engage them in their user testing, or is there some institutional bias in play here?
In any case, I think Microsoft should revisit how their user interface is skewed to discriminate against these people, who through no fault of their own have even digits in the tens-place of their age...
Steve, you're over-reacting. What is going on here is that people with an even digit in the tens-place are less inhibited about just asking for help when they get stuck with something that is obviously brain-dead. Consequently, they get marked down as "got lost".
OTOH, those with an odd number in the tens-place are too proud to admit that they are stuck and start flailing about randomly until they stumble upon the solution by chance. Whereupon they declare that they knew where they were going all along.
Been thinking about this test for a while now.
Some have criticised the use of an Apple computer. While not the typical case, I don't see this as bad, since they've at least plugged a USB mouse in. A standard USB keyboard might've been a good idea, then they'd have the logo key (sorry, I refuse to call it a "Windows" key) marked in a meaningful manner. (I realise that Command is equivalent at the hardware level.)
As for not apparently running the tutorial, a couple of thoughts:
1. A first-time user of Windows 8 may not necessarily get to see the first-time users' tutorial as they may be using someone else's already set up computer (e.g. at an Internet cafe or at a friend's house)
2. Given they were running on a VM; perhaps a way they could achieve this, would be to set things up, create a new user account, then use the snapshotting feature to make a snapshot at this point so they see the tutorial. Then when the next user comes along, you just roll-back to the snapshot.
3. A lot of users will (perhaps foolishly) click away the tutorial, much like how we all click away the balloons that invite us to "Take a tour of Windows XP", as if none of us have used that decade-old OS before.
If I could I would punch everyone on windows 8 dev team in the balls or the vag!
A third rate moronic tablet OS does not belong on a laptop or PC that is not a touch screen, ever!
The fact you have to use keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures to get to things that you previously could do with just a mouse is foolish. The have taken 30 years of learned and taught behavior and rotated it 90 degrees for no good reason. They have increased the number of steps to do things in many cases by 50%! This is progress? I think not.
Want to search, instead of going left and down to where the old start button was, now you go up and right?
Why? For no other reason then to be different.
This reminds me of the days when people converted from WordPerfect to Word, but in reverse.
And who came up with the color scheme? a blind person in need of some ugly contrast theme?
"Mkay. WTF do I do now?".
->1st laptop - Gateway (Acer) NE56R (deal! $100 off Staples coupon on clearance= $239 out the door +free win8 upgrade). Intel Pentium B950 2.10Ghz, 4GB ram, 500GB hd, full kb, 15.6" screen, mult-iouch touchpad, Upgrade was seamless through Gateway upgrade assistant - kept her apps & data. Burned .iso for reinstall.
->2nd laptop - HP Elitebook 8440p ($300 Craigslist) Intel Core i5 M520 2.40Ghz, 6GB ram, 250GB hd, 14" screen,multi-touch touchpad. Started upgrade after logical thought after starting first on using Microsoft's Upgrade Assistant - only retained my data but finished first.
While I saw the tutorial on start up, my wife did not. I just handed it to her and said "Your password is the same". We spent the next few (enjoyable) hours finding out the different ways to do things (while I reinstalled my apps), overall we like what Microsoft has done with Win8. I can still do my IT work with it and the wife can do whatever it is she does (FB and the like). - we also note that having the same interface across desktop/mobile/tablet, will make it easier for consumers to buy into it easier. They can pick up anything from Microsoft and know exactly what to do.
Food for Thought: If you consider that TIFKAM is an active desktopish start menu and the desktop is still there, it's easier to conceptualize Win8 (although I think the desktop tile should be active so you know whats on over there, just saying)
;)
You install Classic Shell or similar. Then its pretty much windows 7 with a few nicer control panels and it boots a fair bit quicker.
TIFKAM helpfully opens on one monitor if you have multiple monitors enabled if you want it and plays nice with the other desktop. The built in apps are OK and very responsive.
All in all have I wasted my £25? Maybe, but it works well enough and with classic shell installed the metro interface doesn't intrude, and on multiple monitors can actually be useful.
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