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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?"
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
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
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.
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.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.