"So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated."
I love that quote. Shows a common problem: devs, architects and managers designing platforms but never asking users how they want to use it. At least the end results indicate that.
Edit: a link with actual text of the email, not screenshots divided in Tweets..
It's 1/3 surface ad, 1/3 category selection, 1/3 office 365 ad. The categories have a :hover effect, but you can't click the icon - only the text.
What are the top downloads offered?
01 Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.7.7 Update
02 Office Deployment Tool
03 Update for Microsoft Office 2016 (KB5002138) 64-Bit Edition
04 Update for Microsoft Office 2016 (KB4484211) 64-Bit Edition
05 Update for Microsoft Office 2016 (KB5002160) 64-Bit Edition
Given that the updates are close to enforced in the new versions, WTF is that page? The downloading part of that email applies just as well today as it did then.
And "Top download categories > Browsers" redirects you to IE download page which informs it is retired and you should go to Edge download page (which does not have anything to download, just a slideshow about Edge) :)
Then, when someone dares to talk about "personas" or designing UIs to have actual users in mind, developers will rage that it's just bullshit, people playing with crayons instead of doing real work etc etc
I'm a dev. I have asked my product and design colleagues to use personas at my last two roles... and they don't. If I had more traction, I'd get the ads and marketing teams involved too so the models in the ads matched the personas we were designing around.
Obviously it's not all devs, but there is a kind of dev that is exactly like that. Look at the comments on the KDE article [1] that was on the frontpage yesterday. Yes, Linux power-users are for sure a skewed and biased subset of devs BUT they do exist.
I really doubt the issue is devs. If they don't want to tank their velocity they have to open an issue to fix such problems, which will stay open and never looked at.
From spending too many hours a day using Microsoft products, I always thought Bill Gates was the enemy who made stuff was (personally) intent on making me go insane.
It turns out he was on my side and thought his products were garbage too, for all the same reasons.
You have to have worked at a large corporation to understand how every employee recognises a problem, agrees what the solution would be, but a combination of the dilution of responsibility, people moving around all the time, humongous frictions to making any change (endless meetings and committees, policies against moving any finger in the wrong way, processes requiring endless paperwork), and managers focusing on the priority the boss cares about at the expense of anything else, makes that not only a solution is not adopted but the company will keep sailing in the wrong direction until it the problem blows out.
At Microsoft I think the most spectacular example was Windows 8, where I understand everyone internally acknowledged it was a shit product, I heard the guy introducing windows 8 (and who ran the project) had been told he would be fired before he got on stage, but they still went ahead.
He may not be malicious, but has conditioned himself to accept bizarre troubleshooting steps as part of nominal Windows day-to-day usage. He said "I restart every day" as if this were a normal condition.
I recently started using Windows heavily and am shocked at how much software cannot survive multiple launches without restarting, USB devices just deciding they won't connect until you restart, etc. And don't get me started on Windows unable to put a computer to sleep without every program shitting the bed or just totally inconsistent behavior. I know I'm still getting used to the platform but I feel like Windows users are so traumatized by learning this system that they think other systems are equally belligerent and mentally taxing.
> He said "I restart every day" as if this were a normal condition.
To be fair, I think that 20 years ago most people shut down their computers when they weren't using them for more than a couple of hours, and most definitely at night.
(Also, I believe that he meant that he "starts up" his computer every day, rather than "rebooting"/"restarting")
Just wait till you get to deal with developers and sysadmins of Windows boxes, who's first and usually only troubleshooting step is to reboot the system.
It was a bit of both. For example, while he wanted his stuff to run well on his systems, he preferred that the competitors products run significantly worse - or that they don't run at all.
WinXP for me was a voluntary daily restart with the occasional involuntary restart + every 6-9 month reimage from blank to maintain a functional system.
Windows 10 is (relatively speaking) a dream, except for sleep and USB devices being a bit stupid sometimes. SSD's and way shorter boot time also makes the inevitable reboot to troubleshoot way less painful than the XP days.
> It turns out he was on my side and thought his products were garbage too, for all the same reasons.
Except that the results of his management don't say that at all. As far as I can tell nothing happened after this incident. A lot of Microsoft products still have terrible user experiences. Notable outliers are (kind of) the Office apps, especially for macOS (side note: impressive job of keeping backwards compatibility while also modernizing the UX!). Except for Teams, of course.
We must be living in different realms. My work windows experience was entirely Windows + Outlook + Excel + Word. 2000-2010's was horrible - daily crashes, lost work even with auto save, odd formatting artifacts that would vanish with ye olde power off / power on debugging step.
> the results of his management
Maybe he was just a terrible manager, maybe the corporation was just dysfunctional (those two might be the same thing).
When this mail first came to light all I could think was "I wish my CEO was spending his Friday nights trying to use and understand our product, and providing critical feedback and ass-kickings as appropriate". Instead of driving our product (mobile Comms) to be better our senior management were using BlackBerries. Little says "walk away" to potential customers better than receiving mails that end with "Sent from my (competing device)"
I think that kind of thing is the result of when you let developers do things that they think are clever instead of having designers thinking of UX and making those decisions.
I really don't understand this. I guess it's just nostalgia?
When I ran Windows XP it was commonplace to just nuke your entire OS and re-install it every 6 to 9 months because it would just become unworkable otherwise.
Then you have the Windows XP update which you had to run 5 times, each with a reboot before you had all updates.
The fact you required a paid anti-virus to keep your system somewhat safe.
Toolbars. Fucking toolbars everywhere.
And let's not forget to rate the forgotten child: Windows XP 64bit.
Yeah no for me Windows 10 is so much better than any Windows before. It's the first one I would rate as acceptable.
Oh yes, I remember it as the operating system with a toy style, that struggled to redraw windows under load or even move the mouse cursor. It was a huge difference compared to Mac OS X.
Yes, I remeber when a busy system would show a hour-glass mouse cursor to tell you it's busy, instead of just freezing and not reacting to any clicks. I also remember the title bar "this program is not responding". All gone now.
It's still better than Linux where keys gets "stuck" repeating and the mouse freezes too.
Imagine his look if he tried other parts of Windows. They're absolute experts at making user hostile solutions. Either their UX people hate UX or their programmers (/programming managers) completely ignore them or do the opposite of what they say out of spite.
It's funny in 2004 he mentioned that filesystem and registry are a mess. In Windows 11 they are an absolute mess. Thousands upon thousands of files/directories scattered all around the system.
One of the more annoying things with Windows for me is when when Windows Update fails stating that KBxyz failed to install. It is a nightmare to find the right version of the updater from Microsoft's website. In my case, the particular update didn't have a standalone updater. Instructions like the ones provided at https://www.windowscentral.com/how-download-and-install-wind... are a life saver, but how does an end user work their way through this?
Feels like windows has regressed since Windows 7. Usability wise its gotten way worse.
I guess the top was windows 2000, XP, Vista(after some time) windows 7.
Microsoft actually shipped a windows version(win8) which had a touch first interface this got installed on millions(billions?) of desktop computers and nobody liked it. It's insane to think about.
> Feels like windows has regressed since Windows 7.
Ah, but fortunately Microsoft has realized this so there’s a way to access the control panel from the previous version. Every time you click “advanced” you get transported 1 window releases back in time, like a Russian doll. When in doubt, open minesweeper.
Somewhat, yes. They at least have an embryo of a working store now for example. So for the things that microsoft package that do work through the store, that's at least quite functional.
> So for the things that microsoft package that do work through the store, that's at least quite functional.
However, they are shown among third-party apps, a lot of which are scams or low-quality. For all the flaws that Microsoft.com has, I wouldn't expect to find scams or malware on their downloads page.
Looking forward to read by 2040 how absolutely insane we were to share screenshots of text in a 2x2 layout with continuation in "replies" and login pop-ups on characters-constricted platforms.
Really. Atrocious loading times with spinners in three places, a pop-up advertising the Twitter app,a pop-up asking me to log in via Google, a pop-up regarding cookies, all fighting each other, and then I can maybe see the actual tweet at some point. Musk isn't killing this fast enough.
I swear one of these days I'm finally going to install Firefox nightly and jump through all those hoops so I can install any extension I want on mobile, and not just the 5 curated ones from Mozilla, so I can have the redirector to send me to a nitter instance instead.
The character restricted platform is the main reason why people upload screenshots instead of text.
Posting URLs is also not the best idea because users need to leave the site/app to read it which not many people will do and some sites (fb) activeley push down these things in your feed.
You probably mean it in a negative sense. I am of the opinion that the downfall in usability and consistency of Windows 10+ is because there is no CEO at the top ranting about their experience and asking "what the hell went wrong for this to happen." I bet this is the same thing that is happening at Apple right now, with consistency starting to go downhill post Jobs.
The difference between mediocre and outstanding software is a Product Manager at the top that demands a certain level of quality in the final product, and doesn't accept any excuses, though they're willing to accept that a flawed process is what creates a flawed product.
I feel I have been repeating this idea in one way or another on this forum because it's still fringe and almost unheard of in the open-source world, if it were not for Torvalds and his uncompromising stance towards not breaking the user-space, ever, lest you face his wrath. There are not enough BDFL in software worth their name.
I love that quote. Shows a common problem: devs, architects and managers designing platforms but never asking users how they want to use it. At least the end results indicate that.
Edit: a link with actual text of the email, not screenshots divided in Tweets..
https://web.archive.org/web/20210616012008/https://blog.seat...