Bill Gates Knows Bad Usability

And points it out about his own products.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

Disambiguation

Software shouldn’t confuse me, and cause me to circumvent it to find out information about what it’s asking me to do. It should disambiguate between similarly named components, and make the results of my actions perfectly clear.

Windows XP doesn’t always do this:

My USB drives have names. Why not name them so I know what I’m ejecting? Instead, it’s back to Windows Explorer to figured what is mapped to Drive(F) and Drive(E), respectively.

.NET Fail

Captured by a co-worker. Classic.

Adhering to Global Controls and Patterns

Software should follow common patterns–not just visual design patterns, but interaction patterns as well. For example, in Windows ctrl+c should always map to copy selection, no matter the software one is using.

Foobar2000 is a much beloved music software package, offering a flexible, highly customizable interface for advanced users (and the best response time of any music player out there).

However, sometimes it confounds. For example, I often create playlists on the fly. I would expect “delete” to remove a highlighted item from my playlist.

Instead it does nothing — which is better than deleting the item from my hard drive (which would be beyond bad usability) — but is still bad for two reasons:

1. It breaks with the global pattern
2. Because it does nothing, it leaves us hanging (hit it again! hit it again! Huh? what? Confused!)

Windows Media Player does a better job, conforming to expected behavior. If only it were as fast.

Anticipating My Every Move

Some goodness here.

I love Firefox for many reasons (as I’m sure we all do). One reason inparticular is that it believes me when I tell it I download something. So, when I click a link to an MP3, for example:

Downloading an MP3 from RCRDLBL

It starts to download the MP3 before I have even chose a place to put it. Sometimes it has complete downloaded before I click “OK.” Presumably, it downloads to cache, and then moves the file to whatever director I select.

IE does not do this. It patiently waits for me to select my directory, and then downloads the file, costing me extra seconds/minutes/hours. Why? What’s it waiting for? Is it assuming I made a bad decision?

Good, usable software knows us and anticipates our every move. Bad software does not.

Forgetful Applications

My org runs on Microsoft Exchange, which we use for email, calendaring, IM, etc. Two or three times a day I have to stop what I’m doing and reenter my password. Proof:

Of course, this is all tied to my domain log-on. If I’m still logged onto the domain, why must I periodcally reenter my credentials? Bad usability…