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Microsoft Vista User Interface Guidelines Published
SEMW writes "Microsoft has published the preliminary Official User Interface Guidelines for Windows Vista. Highlights include Top 12 Rules for the Windows Vista User Experience — and the use of screenshots from Windows XP as examples of what not to do. The full guidelines are as yet incomplete, but what is there makes for interesting reading."
So I guess we can take these rules as a fairly good indicator of what interface features the next version of Office will NOT follow. It's been my impression that whatever interface guidelines MS publish, they always seem to very rapidly diverge from them in the own applications.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
It seems these "guidelines" focus more on drawing attention to the user's choice of OS, rather than actually doing anything to productively assist the user in their work without becoming an annoyance in the process. Granted, a couple of these rules are borrowed from the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines, but the majority of them actually contradict the ideals Apple tried to enforce back in the early days of the Macintosh. (That's not to claim Apple has been any better about this in Mac OS X, which changes its look in every other major update.)
If you thought Clippy was bad before, just wait until he *becomes* the OS that is Windows Vista.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Step One: write an app for the Mac.
Step Two: get your UI reviewed by Apple's user interface evangelist, John Geleynse.
Step Three: make all the changes recommended by Apple.
Step Four: write a windows app that comes as close as you can get to your Mac version.
Or, you can do what the people who wrote Visio or that guy who ripped off Delicious Library did, and just laboriously copy an existing app knowing that you'll never make it quite the same on Windows.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
From the article:
Mind your icons, not your buffer overflows. Great! Will exploits follow the Vista guidelines too ?
The first - the design guidelines (10 out of the 12 listed) are focused on appearance rather than on functionality. Making sure your icons look great (#4) comes long before producing a clean interface (#10).
The second is that this document carries a severe undertone of "make sure your app only works on Vista, and looks out of place on anything other than Aero". The entire document keeps saying "use Vista only API whenever you can" and "visually design the application to look out of place when not using the Vista UI" (with a few exceptions).
I guess this is how MS are trying to fight the competition formed by previous OSes being good enough. They try to make sure new applications don't work on them any more.
Shachar
Rule 12 should be that applications shouldn't play the take focus game (my #1 beef with Windows). But on a plus note I was very happy that they discussed how to use modal windows correctly. If only developers would listen though. For those developers who don't listen I say (not really, it was the movie Heavy Metal): "Hangin's too good for 'em. Burnin's too good for 'em. They should be torn into little bisty pieces and buried alive!"
Vista user experince... for crap. I spent the past couple of months testing this OS, and when my gaming XP boot feels like a safe haven, I know that something is definitely wrong. For migrating XP users, the interface feels counter-intuitive. Even more telling, my college-going roommate has only ever known Red Hat (thank you very much, he has only ever known linux on the front-room computer), and for him the simplest task, like installing Firefox (where's the package?) was torture (not to say there has been a change here). I became so frustrated with ctrl-esc,r yielding a "r" in the ever-so-laggy search sub-start dialogue (instead of a run window) tonight that I just blew out the whole partition. I actually wanted to run iexplore for once! I am downloading Mandrake 64 now, thank the creator.
I found Vista to be too heavy on the eye candy, and it seemed that "power tools" and control panel received heavy design attention, while the ~deeper~ apps like regedit and msconfig are the same old barf. Vista = skinned XP != new OS. Meh. Shiny? Yes. New? No.
FairTax baby!
Sorry, but I very much appreciate either a help or a readme to tell me what to look at if I can't get something working. Yes, I am perfectly capable of finding the readme.txt in the folder where the program was installed, but why hassle? If I really wanted to get rid of it I can always delete the shortcut, right? Same goes for links to websites that deal with troubleshooting. If the program doesn't work, you can't access the built-in help or links.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
The guidelines are actually quite good. Some are arbitrary, such as button text capitalization schemes, but they are almost assuredly the same schemes used by the windows developers, so that arbitrary decision can be made consistently and your program doesn't look like the Aero equivalent of a web page with 18 point yellow text on a teal background with a midi clip.
nobody
Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules for user interface design has been around for years (pre-dates Windows 3.x, in any case). Any UI designer should be conversant with these rules:
i sino/rules.html
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/almstrum/cs370/elv
Am I the only one who doesn't want a "user experience"? If I'm getting an "experience", the damned user interface is getting in my way. I just want to get the job done, not have an "experience".
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I disagree. All these extra shortcuts necessitate the need for an extra folder and this adds another layer of navigation which makes the start menu less usable for the 99.9% of the time when you just want to run the program.
One of the worst misfeatures of Windows (and its developer community) is the retarded design of dialogs. AFAIK the pre-Vista API has a bunch a simple functions to do Yes/No and Ok/Cancel dialogs, but nothing to label buttons sensibly. So it's quite common to have a dialog with "Yes" and "No" buttons, and and huge text explaining what these options mean. Despite the fact that every at least semi-decent article or book about dialog design recommends to use verbs for button labels.
I recently read that Vista finally offers an API to easily change the button labels. Yeah! And guideline 5 (Use task dialogs for new or frequently used dialog boxes and error messages) specifically recommends:
Yeah again!
However, above this guideline we can see a screenshot of the classic, super retarded Windowesque "Save changes? Yes/No/Cancel" dialog.
I suggest for the final document they just copy this dialog from any random Mac OS application and put a Vista theme on it.
Now if an application were written properly this wouldn't be an issue -- the application would have a thread dedicated to UI work and in theory the interface should be highly responsive, but you're trusting all the application developers to implement their programs properly and not even Microsoft is capable of setting a good example. Their OS would almost not suck if they'd just fix this one design flaw and I'm going to keep blowing this horn until they do.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you're replacing a 97 Wizard, you should use an Aero wizard. If you're writing a new app, please do not use a wizard. They're obnoxious, and send the message: "We didn't know how to organize your options in any sort of logical way, so here's a powerpoint that lets you fill in the blanks, masquearding as a UI."
Wizards are like many UI constructs; they are often abused but they can be very useful. Access data import Wizards, installation Wizards, Visual Studio database creation Wizards, etc.
Whenever you need the user to enter a series of logically grouped options before you can begin to do what the user wants a Wizard is the way to go. It's either going to be a Wizard, or a large unwieldy dialog box.
I think Microsoft's suggestions here are all good, but of course if you're the sort of developer that has to read them you're probably the sort of developer which doesn't care about the UI and won't implement them anyway. Which is a shame, because the UI can go a long way to make your program better.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
This tendancy annoys me more and more with ever release of Windows, for many reasons:
1) Most everybody knows what "duplex" means. Why not let those who don't learn what it means instead of pretending the word doesn't exist, and encouraging people to forget.
2) When I am on the phone with a user, I can say "look for the options that says something like "Internet Connection Sharing". Most users will not find the goal-based option, as it does not include the word "sharing".
3) I know what I'm looking for. I know what it was called in NT4, 2000, and 2003 server. Now I have to read paragraphs and guess that "Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection" is Internet Connection Sharing and not Web Proxy.
4) It encourages the user to not learn about the very complex piece of equipment he just bought. If you provide a good searchable manual instead of dumbing everything down, the program will be easier to use, and the user will learn more.
Imagine if your grill didn't say "Ignite" above the red button, but "Make the fire start", or if your toaster didn't say "Toast", but "Make your bread crispy", or if your car didn't say "ABS", but "Automatically remove and reapply pressure on the brake so your car doesn't skid. Don't pump your brakes".
This is slashdot, so I need to reference either Orwell or Rand:
Or are they trying to reduce English to a smaller set of simple words that everybody can understand? Double-plus ungood.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
No, that is NOT the current OS X menubar layout. If you click "file" you can find an option to close the _file_ but not the application. You need to click on the application name to find the option to close the application. In Windows, the option to close the application itself is found, as the parent noted, inside the file menu. Totally wrongheaded.
RE: Programs like McAfee constantly bugging the user: Indeed. I'd like every notification box to include a "STFU" button, that when pressed, will suppress that notification from coming up ever again. In addition, we can add a "complaint box" for the computer where it can log what it's unhappy about, and the user can check the box when desired (or when they think something is wrong).
Computers should be seen and not heard. No, Windows, you may not eat at the grownups table until you learn to behave.
maybe because microsoft markets to non-technical end users who don't have and don't want to keep the Geek OED on their desktop?
Windows needs an option that you can select at install time: "I'm not an idiot. I know what I'm doing. Give me all the rope I ask for." The results would be:
No Fischer Price interface.
No dummy descriptions.
Show all files.
No, really, all of them.
Yes, even the ones in WINNT and Program Files.
Classic control panel.
Classic task bar.
Classic start menu.
Nothing prefixed with "My ".
Don't create any user accounts other than Administrator in the installation.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete login.
No stupid animation to help me search.
No stupid yellow boxes pointing to the system tray and telling me things like "You should sign up for Passport" or "You should run windows update."
Only ask me if I really meant to do something if I am permanently deleting files.
No Wizards for anything.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Error log files should be provided for these cases. The single line of rapidly flashing text will either be ignored by most users or be cause for alarm (because a lot of very important/cryptic stuff is happening rapidly.) IT pros are already used to log files. I have, in fact, noticed more and more applications are providing logs of what occurred during lengthy operations and these have the capacity to provide much more useful information than a status bar. MS is right on this one, what they forgot to say was where such additional progress information should go.
I agree that from a helpdesk perspective, this is going to cause issues, but from a 'can the user get themselves through the first hour without reaching for a book of computer terminology' perspective it's probably more of a win. I am not sure which choice is better - it feels to me like either way you go you get problems. But given the general design theme MS is trying to achieve (not alienating the user with cryptic text) this rule is at least consistent.
"Optimized for" is not equal to "design only for." This rule is treated more completely in the detailed rules for Vista UI design. 800x600 is really, REALLY low resolution these days - you'd be hard pressed to find a Vista-capable computer that couldn't display 1280x1024 and be sold with a monitor to match. I suspect this particular element was influenced in part by the possibility that Media Center PCs would be hooked up to TVs or some other such case. I'd imagine the chances of a general application actually being constrained to this requirement is very small.
This should probably read "Only use sound effects for critical error messages, not for less important notifications and warnings which do not require immediate user response." On the other hand, MS may have decided that if the user really cared about the operation, they'd be sitting at the machine actively tending the UI, and making undesired sounds would interrupt their other activities. I personally find the flashing window notification method in the task bar to be suitable when I am at the machine, even if I am reading a book. Again, if the immediate completion of the operation is important to me, I'll watch it. In the corporate IT environment perhaps this requirement is different.
MS is clearly trying to make computers "feel" less opaque than before, even if to the tech-oriented person that feel actually obscures the underlying operations. There is also an underlying meaning in this rule that the application developer should design their software such that cancelled operations have user-predictable outcomes. For instance, cancelling an install should NOT leave the application half-installed - it should revert any changes it has made. Cancelling the copying of a file shouldn't leave half of a file copied. On the other hand, users are expected to know that cancelling a format will not revert their drive to the previous state - this is why such irreversib