Slashdot Mirror
Version Fatigue
An anonymous reader writes "An article in TechCentralStation introduces a useful new term: "version fatigue," which describes what happens when you get tired of learning new ways to do the same old thing with each release of software. This is something that tech designers seem insensitive to, but that drives users crazy. Maybe it's because tech designers are more anxious to be creative than to produce things that users like?"
Nothing makes me happier than a slashdot front page that is pure italics. It looks great in Linux, because there's none of that nasty blurry anti-aliasing to get in the way!
Seriously, though, this article is a load of hooey. "Fatigue?" Please. It is an inconvenience at most. Is anyone complaining because their new Toyota doesn't have to be cranked before driving? Yes, interfaces and feature sets change over time. If you don't want the change, don't upgrade.
UI designers are by and large working for you, not against you. They're the ones who gave us context menus, tabbed browsing, keyboard accelerators, and every other Good Thing (tm) to come out of Redmond. This whining will get you nowhere.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Seriously. My expereince with users and clients is that they don't actually know what they want. They want something changed one day, then when you change it, they want it back the way it was. They change requirements on you in the middle of your development cycle, and can't make up their minds on anything.
But on the other hand, don't fix stuff that's not necessarily broke. If you come up with a better way, make sure it's extremely intuitive - because remember, users are stupid.
Adobe is aweful for this. I dread every photoshop release, I just no they're going to do something complicated and pointless to the interface.
The problem is, interface design is still an art and not a science. What little research that has gone into interfaces has gone completely unnoticed by the industry at large. I suppose there isn't vocal demand for improvement, so it won't happen.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Working extensively with a designer/creative director/art director/etc. has definitely shown me that "version fatigue" is worth paying attention to. Particularly with applications like Adobe Photoshop. I try to stay on top of the new versions and the new features provided by said versions, but whenever I try to get a designer to upgrade, the resistance is magnificent. Changed command keys, different menu hierarchies, basically, different ways to do common things. I have a designer still using Photoshop 5.5 because its the last version she doesn't mind the interface for. Same goes for Illustrator - the "features" added between 8 and 9 (not to mention 10) kept this designer on 8 for over a year after 9 was released.
... but maybe I'm wrong? I dunno.
What I've learned is that when your work (and productivity) depends on a particular flow and interaction with your applications, even the smallest changes can significantly impact that and result in a very sour attitude towards new releases of software.
Now, what's the solution? I keep saying that there's no way for Adobe to add new features w/o incrementally changing the way you interact with the application
On the one hand, the article claims that people don't need to spend a lot of time learning things, because they're so intuitive. And that often people don't do more than scratch the surface. On the other, it bemoans changes in the operation of new revisions of software.
I can't think of any good examples of commodity software whose surface, elementary functions have changed in any massive way across revisions. The cosmetic look-and-feel changes, certainly -- but you can *still* click on that "B" button to get your text bolded, etc.
Besides, if users aren't spending the time in getting to learn the more esoteric functions, doesn't it make some sense to try to reimplement those functions in a fashion that renders their use more intuitive? Even if it's at the expense of the (apparently few) people who have spent the time learning how to use them?
I understand the frustration -- but, well, you can always *not upgrade* if what you have works for you.
Don't underestimate the effect of trying to make users feel like the 130 dollars they paid for the upgrade was well spent -- by completely reorganizing menus and features they certainly make you feel like you got something new.
:-)
At one point in my career I had three different versions of Word on three different machines. It was hilarious dealing with the different versions and how many differences there were, only to find out that, feature wise, they were almost identical.
I really hope the OpenOffice guys have a modicum of self control on this issue now that I've switched over to that office suite
Especially when you are doing a software engineering project for clientele that you don't even know. In trying to establish a UI or base set of commands that seem the most user-friendly, the project designers are going out on a limb and using their own predispositions towards what they consider "easy".
Revisions and subsequent "version fatigue" results when they find out that, no, their intuitions were wrong, the users hate it/can't catch on easily enough, etc. The fact that it is even considered "fatigue" is that the concept of TIMTOWTDI is only applicable to the coder, not the user. They are stuck with what is sold to them, but in a move of consideration and a hope that the software can be more friendly, there is a revision. Different, must be relearned, but hopefully easier to use than the current product.
The biggest issue with this is that beta-testing is not done incremental, but comprehensively, in so many cases. The final result is that the overall amount of bugs that can be reported tend to dwarf "ease of use" issues, which are left to later revisions and version patches. Sad, but overwhelmingly the status quo.
Never attribute to Hanlon that which can be adequately attributed to Heinlein.
The problem is that broke their own rules when going from os9 to osX. Finder commands which have been constant since System 7 changed for no good reason: want to create a new folder? Command-N doesn't do it anymore, that opens a new Finder window - Shift-Command-N is your new keyboard shortcut now. The "stop light" of window control buttons violate their old user interface guidelines on multiple levels. And they even moved the location of "Empty Trash" on the menu bar, so people that went to the menu bar instead of using a keyboard shortcut have to undo all those years of muscle memory training of just going to the last menu item on the right and dragging down...
:)
Yes, it's whining, to a certain degree. I did the same thing when Apple went from System 6 to System 7 and changed how you handled control panels and extensions, and when they went to the "Platinum" puffy Windows-y interface in OS 8.
The changes from 6 to 7 were good for the system, "Platinum" didn't do much for me (I still prefer the clean black-and-white interface of System 7), and osX is a whole new ball game. It's starting to grow on me, and I'm finally learning to go to the Dock instead of the Finder to empty the trash. I'm actually starting to enjoy the Dock now - it's a nice retractable place to put a lot of icons I used to leave lying around on my desktop. I guess change can be good after all
-----
Apple hardware still too expensive for you? How about a raffle ticket?
Let "them" know you're not a terrorist!
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Yeah, there is obviously not a lot of changes to relearn in an OS that still refers to the IO device as a teletype :)
Seriously tho, I think that some programs (Emacs e.g.) get so entrenched that to change the format would be heresy (hell, I got scared when I installed a new emacs, accidentally hit 'end' instead of ^E....and it did what I meant!)
Another reason, taking a more system-wide view, is that UNIX is big on having little bits talking to other little bits, to make one big useful thing. If one of those bits starts speaking a different language, all sorts of things fall over. However, I think that with the fast-moving programs (e.g. KDE, Gnome and their apps) this will become more of a problem, but as GUI programs don't talk to each other so much, this will be restricted to being a user-interface problem.
^X^S
Damn!
:wq
Here's a conversation i had with a "User" about a half a year ago.. it was very eye-opening, appalling, shocking, but.. dead on this topic.
.. i've used them all, and they've done nothing for me. what i think is that win95 will eventually win the OS wars, and we'll be using win95 forever, not this other junk. who wants to relearn everything in 98 or 2k, anyway? bah, nobody."
"Yeah, ya know all these win98, win2k,
and this guy was a fairly competent user, but he just didn't care to have to learn all the new m$ magic that was added each version of windows.
users want computers to be like toasters. you buy a toaster once in '82, and it'll last you until about '97 before it explodes some fateful day when you try to toast a blueberry bagel.
facts are, (in my guess) someday, when computers get a bit faster, software a bit more stable, users are going to get fed up entirely with all this upgrading junk, and just buy something and plug their new "toaster" (computer), in and leave it running in the corner of their house for 15 years straight before they toss it for a new one.
now, M$ will never offer this to users, it'll kill their business model (no money for 15 years!!) -- but linux could do something like this (particularily if "minor patches" were auto-applied.) but anyway, whatever.
think toasters. if the linux desktop can be like a toaster, and linux desktop apps can be like a toaster, we may be onto something.
whatever.
You CAN'T be seen as doing the same thing in the same way as somebody else. That's illegal.
When the menus and options get shifted around from release to release, that's a bit of self-interested protectionism due to people taking out other patents that suddenly make the way you USED to do it illegal.
It comes down to the USPO making money for corporate lawyers who seem to come from Mars or someplace and obviously don't use any of the products. (C'mon they lawyers, they don't need the stinkin' products, unless its a computerized enema bag... Oh, sorry. That's where they get their personalities from.)
The user, the guy that's actually paying for the is the LAST one to get considered.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
One of the main reasons this happens is as a result of focus group testing and other usability testing on the current version.
If you take the current version of most software and do some usability testing with new users, you'll probably find that there are things that could be done better.
But when you make those changes, to please the new users, you're messing with the users who already know how the thing works.
Microsoft Visual C++ is a perfect example. With each new version they move things around - but they have "compatibility" modes for people who liked the old way. Even with the newest Visual Studio.NET you can still pick the old VC 2.x keyboard layout and use it.
That's a pretty good solution, as long as your app is customizable enough that you can use the customization to emulate the previous version...
The only real problem with this solution is that it makes it so nobody else can use your customized version. If I go over to my co-workers desk to try to fix a bug, I can never remember what hotkey to hit to get it to compile..
(Maybe the solution to this particular problem is to make it easy to set a "guest" profile that temporarily overrides the current profile).
Windows is a huge victim of this problem too - the whole redesigned Start menu in XP annoys most existing users, but new users (users new to computers, what few there are - I helped a friend "get online" and got to watch this) seem to like it..
- Steve
At least it doesn't have to sell itself on the point that dumber people can run it :-)
Microsoft had some good standards but they constantly ignore them these days. I saw a quote that thanks to Web application, which forces people to use really crappy UI, and the preponderance of high-resolution with lots of colors and everyone trying to take advantage of it (skinning is just another word for "angry fruit salad"), UI has been set back to about 1984.
.NET, I could write a book about it. The app itself isn't too bad, but in some ways Microsoft has become the worst UI innovator because they are making lots of stylistic changes that have a negative effect on usability. That and their 10-year tendancy to try to minimize the actual usable area of the screen. Why is it that every new version of Microsoft's apps have bigger toolbars, more deadspace (worst of all!) and less actual working area of the screen. The Amiga had it best with menu bars that only came up with a right mouse click... why should that chunk of screen be eaten up by something that is only used for a couple of seconds at a time?
No standards, nothing you can count on. I don't know how many slick curvy shiny little apps I've tried where you're randomly stabbing at everything on the screen because you don't know what's a control and what's just window dressing (e.g., Kai).
And this tendency to make regular Windows apps look like Web pages is just ludicrous. There were so many violations of common sense in just the installation of Visual Studio
Oh well, I've ranted long enough.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
A few years ago I was visiting the software development group of a leading supermarket company in the UK (we're talking big here). I was there to advise them on some OO development, how to go about requirements management that sort of thing.
During a break I saw a couple of people I knew from a previous visit and went over to chat with them. They told me they were going to be in over the weekend installing a new system (I hasten to add I hadn't been involved in any way with it).
-"Oh", I said, "you're going to be busy then."
-"Yes", they replied, "but the users are going to hate us."
-"Why is that? Don't they like the system?"
-"They don't know they're getting a new system. When they come in on monday they'll log-in and find the new system up and running."
-"Oh."
-"We know they're going to hate it."
-"Why's that ?"
-"We did the same thing to them 2 years ago and they hated it then. In fact they've only just gotten used to that system."
What about people stuck doing tech support (myself included)? It's not any fun trying to figure out where the settings went every time a customer upgrades to a new version of something. Common settings should have common menus, regardless of what version you have. It's always a pain in the ass when a customer goes out and upgrades to the latest version of M$ Office and they can't figure out where the mail server settings went in Outlook. Since the company I work for prides itself in our customer service, we try to help customers out when they call, even though we don't officially support Outlook. Each version of Outlook has slightly different menus. I'm sure this is great for places that charge for support, but it's only a drain on the resources for ISPs and other places that provide free support.
I think M$ should change their slogan to, "Where did my menu settings go today?"
Corel made a completely new interface with each version, which is why their product died out.
In fact, as a 'tech' person, I switch versions and machines more often then your average Joe.
.emacs file, and have gotten quite adept at fiddling with window manager parameters in short order to get focus-follows-mouse, and that's about all the config I care to do. It'll just get blown away tommorow, why bother?
My Linux friends are often amazed at how uncool my Linux desktops are, or my emacs config files are, or a whole slew of other things. The reason for that is that I am f'in sick of having to completely reconfigure the system every time I upgrade, or hop machines (which is almost always an upgrade or a downgrade; otherwise I could at least carry my config), or change software packages.
I switched which machine was doing my email processing last week, and I just wanted to copy the config across from one to the other. No dice; one ran exim3, the other ran exim4, which has a whole new, completely incompatible config file. The conversion script was wholly unhelpful for my config, so I had to do it by hand.
If versions weren't changing so often, or if it were easier in general to carry configurations around even across versions (an impossible task in general), I'd be much more likely to actually configure things. As it is, I carry around a *small*
Granted, I'm more violent to my systems then your average user, even more then your average Linux user, but it's still exasperating.
People, it's not a mark of manliness that your program requires text file twiddling to configure. Give me an easy, easy, easy method of at least setting the the basic parameters. Like Mozilla: The basic parameters are in the config box, but there's a lot of obscure ones you need to hit the prefs.js directly. That's fine with me.
And don't even get me started on re-re-re-re-re-re-learning keyboard shortcuts.
They also pushed the new version by sacrificing backward compatibility.
& lr=&ie=UTF8& oe=UTF8&selm=tTSK7.1339%24rY1.143064%40dfiatx1-snr 1.gtei.net&rnum=2s ?q=openrecordset+da o+ado&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&selm=3b993cc9.3218 4196%40news.charter.net&rnum=6
.Net has completely changed the language, effectively killing Visual Basic.i sual+basic+.ne t+killed&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&selm=3a50cbe9.7 644234%40news.clara.net&rnum=6
Every Access version prior to 2000 used DAO (Data Access Objects). In the Visual Basic Library References, DAO was checked.
In Access 2000, they pushed ADO (Active Data Objects), which many have said is more complex and slower. They removed the Library Reference to DAO and sneaked in the Reference to ADO! To make matters worse they duplicated the variable type "recordset" in ADO and DAO, which renders useless almost all Visual Basic Code that worked with a table.
If you used the phrase "Dim x as recordset", you had to do one of the following:
- Uncheck ADO and Check DAO (Forcing it to use the older version)
- OR Check Both ADO and DAO, then search all code and replace every "Recordset" with "DAO.Recordset"
- OR Leave ADO Checked and DAO Unchecked, then search all code and rewrite every line that opened a table.
It's already bad enough that Access Databases start misbehaving when it's shared by too many people or live tables exceed 80,000 records, or the database exceeds 1.9 Gigabytes. At this point you're already thinking about scaling up to SQL server, Oracle, or my SQL.
In addition to that, more and more features are added while the "little Jet engine that could" becomes more and more critical to the operations of an organization.
Does Microsoft think that Access programmers have nothing better to do than get interrupted by every department that has upgraded to Access 2k? How hard would it have been to tell the upgrade wizard to automatically link to the DAO Library and automatically replace every "recordset" with "DAO.Recordset". You might think that it means more money for a consultant but all it does is accelerate the time to burnout. They're getting harder to find every day.
See:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en
http://groups.google.com/group
I've also heard that Microsoft's Visual Basic strategy towards
See:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=v
It's no wonder that companies are switching to open source. Anyone's patience will wear thin after having to jump every time that Microsoft tells them to.
The reason why interfaces keep changing is so that software publishers can sell the same software twice. Users won't "upgrade" to a new version if it doesn't look any different than the old version.
Free software though doesn't need to sell itself. Free software is made to solve a problem, not make money. Big difference. Changing an interface between versions only makes a problem worse, since it's harder for the user to use the software. Instead free software is changed each version to help better solve the problem it was designed for. Just another reason to trust Free and OSS more.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Nothing. Nothing is wrong with a learning mode as such. What really makes a problem is being put back into a learning mode for the same task over and over, which is peculiar to computer software. This makes you less efficient in accomplishing that task than you were befor, for no apparent reason. Making you more efficient is generally notg your goal when using a computer; your goal is to be more efficient than you would be without. Or with the previous model. Or with a typewriter.
Also don't forget that not all learning is learning of explicit knowledge, rules and sentences one could quote in an exam. There is tacit knowledge, there are habits formed in everyday use of a thing, and there are strategies helping to find knowledge in the world when it can't be found in the head. What isn't there is an unlearn button. Learning a new way of doing something after having learned another way very well might be more difficult than learning a totally new thing.
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
If you change your design around so much, you might not have done a good design in the first place. So, you met the deadline, but the design was inadequate. What do you do? You rush for the next deadline, trying to redesign the interface a bit as you go, making it smoother.
Iterate sufficient times, and what you get is version fatigue.
If you had spent enough time in the design phase, possibly with some prototyping, you might have escaped a bit of all these changes.
That said, if you look at Microsoft Word, I would argue that the version fatigue is not that great. Type at the keyboard, change the fonts with the dropdowns, and hit the printer icon. The floppy icon for saving. The looks are slightly changed, but almost everything is done in the same way as before (which is why I'm relatively happy with Word97). Gimme a good reason to get Word XP! If you can, I bet I wouldn't get version fatigue, since the fundamental functionality is relatively stable.
Changing the interface when the interface is flawed is an unpopular but necessary task. Changing the interface for the sake of changing the interface is a PR nightmare.
Stop the brainwash
I remember LOTS of yuppie boomers who learned old wordperfect just fine.. and that's certainly not wysiwig.
Many did, however most management staff did not.
Obscure keypresses, hidden markup codes, they understood it all.. and some were really good at it.
True, WordPerfect was designed from the ground-up to be an "Expert" interface. It was specifically designed for professional typists. Even so, 90% of the users never figured out the more complex stuff like font formatting and tables -- stuff that virtually everyone can do in (say) Word.
What's important to understand is that the move from WordPerfect to Word lead to a fundemental restructuring of who types stuff in American business. WordPerfect was still grounded in the days of personal secretaries and typing pools. With Word, these 'yuppie' managers now have to type their own memos (although you could argue that e-mail was the final catalyst in this trend).
This lead to the immedate drop in admin salaries and training costs, which from a business standpoint was a good thing.
I don't buy this stuff about how unix is hard and other stuff is easy...
Just because people HAD to learn WordPerfect, doesn't mean they liked it. I certainly didn't -- the program basically sucked and relied on the user memorizing a bunch of pointess crap. Even in the context of DOS console apps, WordStar was much more user-friendly.
So, yeah, it's possible for people to learn (say) Emacs. But what's the point in doing so? Defeating the computer? Lowering productivity? Impressing the zitfaced IT geeks?
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.