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?

ATM Fail

see more pwn and owned pictures

Heh.

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.

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.