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Microsoft Ignores Usability With All-Caps Menu in Visual Studio
mikejuk writes "The recent release of Visual Studio 2012 contained a UI element that few believed could make it into the final version — ALL-CAPS menus. After lots of user criticism and disbelief, Microsoft has moved swiftly to do something about it — by tweaking the typography. '... we explored designs with and without uppercase styling. In the end we determined it to be a very effective way of providing structure and emphasis to the top menu area in Visual Studio 2012.' This must be a new meaning of the word 'structure,' because putting the menu items into all-caps means that they are all the same height. When each menu items starts with a cap then there is structure because you can see the change in height, marking the start of the next menu item. The idea that putting a menu into all caps adds structure is something that is very difficult to see. If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color? Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color in favour of the 'everything-is-grey UI.' Developers are the people who invented CamelCase to make sure that the structure of run together words would stand out better — and now we are asked to believe that making a menu all-caps adds structure. I don't think so."
You see, MS is so hip, so ahead of the curve, that they know already that COBOL is about to come back into style in the developer world. Soon everything will be in all caps, mainframes will be all the rage, and GUI's will be passe. Apple will be behind the times with their over-designed software, and MS will be out in front with their all caps, command-line interface only version of Windows 9--renamed "DOS 9 FOR TERMINALS."
GOOD JOB, MICROSOFT!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Iâ(TM)m horrified. Absolutely shocked. I tell you, this is the final nail in Microsoft and Visual Studioâ(TM)s coffin. Oh, and âoeMy eyes, it burns! The goggles do nothing!â
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Previously barring a lot of eye candy that could be turned off , MS did generally get their UI about right. Now with spillover effect from Win8 they seem to have completely lost the plot and this is simply an example of them reloading the gun once more to take aim at whatever is left of their feet.
This is the company that gave us the ribbon. Otherwise known as the chaos strip, since it seems to randomly rearrange itself to ensure that function you're looking for is never less than half a dozen clicks away. It's a bit like a supermarket, where they deliberately move stuff around in order to make shoppers seek out the things they usually buy in the hope they might chance across - and end up buying - things they haven't seen before.
It seems that all of the newest UIs - whether they are from Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. - all suck. They are flat, colorless, abominations where you can't even tell what the user interface elements do or if they are even supposed to be user interface elements. I spent a good amount of time yesterday and today in Visual Studio 2010 and it has a very nice UI. I know they need to "newify" everything in order to say "new and improved" - but damn. All upper case, all grey, all lame.
As I understand it road signs (or many of them) in the UK used to be in caps but studies showed that mixed-case was much easier to read (which mattered more as cars got faster) since we're looking for familiar patterns.
Looks like Microsoft will need to re-learn this lesson...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Only someone who has a website with such bad usability can truly see horrible usability in others' work.
When each menu items starts with a cap then there is structure because you can see the change in height, marking the start of the next menu item.
Call me blind. But this rant is blown out of proportion. He's complaining about structure, yet there is a very clearly delimited blank space between menu items a blank space which is much large than present in the mixed case version. In fact, I find it a lot easier to read the menu item word in the all capital version compared to the mixed case most based on the large spacing alone.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
"Developers are the people who invented CamelCase"
I think chemists has developers beat by a century or two. Now please pass the NaCl.
Maybe we can come up with backronyms for each of them, that way, like the SQL menu, they can all be acronyms that require capitalization.
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible. They've gone through the effort to develop fonts, to determine how to add pseudo-3d effects, how to space things and how to define icons and sizes. Whatever your beef with Redmond, the UI is the one thing that I will wholeheartedly disagree with you about in almost all circumstances.
If they dropped the ball here, then that's absolutely amazing. Literally amazing. They've built a company and made some of the richest people in the world on how pretty and easy to use their software products are, at the expense of what those interfaces run on for lower level code. If they're losing touch with UI now, that doesn't bode well for them for the long term. They certainly won't disappear, but their non-OS products would lose market share and once people stop being locked in to their non-OS products, they have little reason to stay with the OS itself if other vendors have multiOS versions of competing products.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The answer is simple, the person that was dictating the names of the menus was a very loud one. So his assistant wrote exactly what he was DICTATING!!!
At what point did Microsoft need a justification for anything they do? They just do what they want and expect others to live with it. Look at Windows ME. Look at Vista. It is only when users won't pay they back down.
The article, which is based on a blog post, mentions that it is not obvious how to change the case. If you read the blog post it says they haven't settled on how Microsoft will expose a change of case feature. My guess is you'll have to customize the menu, just like what's been done in Visual Studio for years.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
This is such a laughably bad decision, I can't see it making its way into the final product. I even tried to type this post in all-caps, but /. reminded me that it was wrong. When it comes to something people have known and taken for granted for years, it seems very odd that Microsoft would go backwards and decide on this. Exactly where is the leadership for this project?
How come they haven't created a 'ribbon menu' for Visual Studio? Perhaps this is tacit admission that the Ribbon Menu sucks and is inefficient.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible.
Which only proves that trying hard does not mean you will necessarily succeed.
Circumcision is child abuse.
it's been circulating on teh internets _atleast_ since late May.Once VS start reporting back that more and more people are reverting back to regular style menus they'll make it an option inside VS itself, albeit hidden behind some rarely used obscure menu. Nothing to see here, carry on.
Seriously?
What happened to the "if it's not broken, don't fix it" motto? Did anyone complain that the menu list, that everyone knows where it is and what is there to expect, did not stand out enough? Or that it lacked any other visual property? At least with the ribbon they tried re-thinking the topic "menu" and took a shot at providing something different (whether you like it or not is another topic). What exactly were they trying to achieve with this modification? What a horrible waste of resources...
For the record, I find it a bit childish and old-fashioned in caps, but, actually, I couldn't care less.
Mod up! This is absurdly true. Office got a new interface that it didn't need that seems no better (just different) from its last interface. Now the same thing is being done for windows. Why not just add a "Tablet/Phone Shell Mode" and be done with it? I'd me much more interested in a faster file system, fast, usable search (still waiting, Microsoft), fewer blue screens, Azure presented in such a way that anyone can host any windows application, legacy or not (Once again, they miss the obvious).
In the last 20 years, Microsoft has been busy solving problems nobody I know seems to have had. I guess they're just going to continue the tradition.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Developing software for a global bank many moons ago, the software recipients preferred/required capitalized menu items and input fields. As English was not their first language, they explained that CAPS were easier for them to read.
So either Microsoft's focus group is global or their developers are
"Obligatory" bash quote
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
They make change for change's sake, like car companies. I still hate the icon-based Office 2010.
The pictures are meaningless for user "discovery", AKA the process where people figure out what is where. So it offers nothing over purely text-based menus and just uses up valuable screen real estate. I love having all those fat bars taking up a grand total of almost 50% of the screen space, crowding out the actual data.
"Oh! You can reduce them! Just go into blah blah blah cmd prompt tar -xvf..."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Next up: They are going to replace Clippy with a flying chair.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you go to the source, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx, they note that there will be an option to disable it.
There's also a blog post that shows the registry key that works today to disable it.
True, but their consistent domineering market share in OS and productivity suite markets does speak to their general success. Even their arguable failures like Microsoft Bob and Windows Vista have given them things that could be integrated in to other products or could be revised as whole products.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The uppercase is deck chairs. The uppercase does make it look a little cleaner; yes, and the tradeoff is a little harder to read. Not a big deal either way. But if you've read any of the Windows Metro philosophy papers, the "chrome" was supposed to go away and be replaced with blank panels, clean typography, images, and animation -- in short, give desktop apps the same clean appearance as iPhone apps. Then why is there still a strip of little-used icons? Does anyone really click the floppy icon to save? No, of course, not. You either click CTRL-S, or, since it's Visual Studio (and I don't know why Borland and Eclipse don't do this), you just click "Build" and it saves automatically. And all the other icons, I still don't know what they do after 20 years of using Visual Studio.
After reading the Metro philosophy papers, I was initially excited. I was eager to see how Microsoft was going to adapt its products to the new philosophy. Now I see that has gone the way of Longhorn WinFS. And besides, I've since realized that it's better to target HTML5 (with Canvas -- pixels finally come to HTML) than Metro anyway.
> In the last 20 years, Microsoft has been busy solving
> problems nobody I know seems to have had.
That's not entirely fair. In the last 10 years, Microsoft has been very busy solving problems they themselves created in the previous 10 years.
That being said, Windows 8 is looking like they're ready to start another 10 year cycle of creating new problems.
Log in or piss off.
Define "Mainframe". From what I can see, "mainframe" is a term for very expensive ultra performance hardware.
Nah, it's more than that. It's about redundancy, high I/O relative to compute power, optimization for throughput rather than latency, and high availability.
Not everyone does the job for fun.
I have been doing all my development work in Eclipse for the last 5-6 years. However for this specific Windows C++ project I needed to use Visual Studio. Like it or not I have a life to manage. Otherwise why would I do programming day and night at the age of 40, with a PhD in computer science? Salary of a PhD university staff is less than $1500/month and that's not enough (considering that I spent savings of 10 years of my hard work to reach the PhD dream of mine).
When I turned into Visual studio 2012 RC hoping that it will provide better compiler, error messages, error preview and editor, I could not bear it even for 20 minutes:
- The error list uses dark gray texts on gray background (my almost old eyes could not bear it...). ...
- Clicking on an item in errors list would open the source on bottom output/error dock! in a new tab.
- Tabs were on bottom (like the class and solution explorer), now they occupy additional space on top.
- Menus are caps
- You feel bored in a gray and flat environment after 12 hours of programming daily
Meh, using mere ALL CAPS is so ASCII. Can't they at least use CJK doublewidth ("fullwidth") characters (U+FF00..U+FF7E) for yelling? Everything but Slashdot can support those.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Clearly, whoever wrote that article is not a designer. Capital letters are NOT inherently more difficult to read. They're more difficult when you've got a paragraph of text. But when you're talking about buttons and menu items they can aid in legibility and emphasis.
In my experience programmers make for the worst designers. Admittedly they have specific needs, but like anyone else they're slaves to habit. So just because they want something a certain way doesn't necessarily make it right. There's always backlash when someone deviates from the expected, even if it's for the better.
I actually like the all caps approach. The menu items are very clear and legible. They're a lot more distinct than in the traditional initial caps approach. Now, you could argue that it makes them too prominent. It may also have the side effect of de-emphasizing the Application title too far.
So to suggest that this approach somehow ignores usability is ridiculous.
I notice that the article also takes a jab at the all-grey interface. If they're going to knock Microsoft for this then they should take aim at the worst offender of all: Apple. I've always found that Windows provides enough contrast between windows, using distinct borders and colored headers, that it's fairly easy to pick them out. In OSX, however, everything blends together.
I do find it amusing that this I Programmer site is dumping on Microsoft for something so minor when the site itself looks like total shit. Look at that freaking logo of theirs.
We all know VS is and always has been the worst IDE in the world.
Knock, knock.
WHO'S THERE?
The Worst IDE in the World.
Oh, hi, Apple's XCode! Now GTFO.
Sock Puppets: damn_registrars=pudge_confirmer=jimmy_slimmy=raiigunner=cml4524=a_klavan=red4men=ronpaulisanidiot
Speaking of Windows 8, maybe they should just get rid of the menus altogether! Instead, you should have to point to an invisible, 2-pixel-wide area of the lower-left corner of the window to see a full-screen page of active tiles representing what Visual Studio can do with your project. Each tile should move, spin, twirl, or change color in some way to keep your eyes busy while you look for the item you want. And since it's hard to do multi-touch on a desktop, it should require two mice to operate!
Change for it's own sake? Surely not! M$ has to give people some reason to buy new licenses. They've run out of innovations, so they've turned to... whatever this is.
I just wanted to say M$ isn't the only one 'solving' problems nobody but a loud-whining-few had.
We can looks to scores of changes to many OS' and respective UIs, only half of which real people wanted or even needed. Yet simple things we asked for that actually affect our lives seem to never get addressed properly.
Decades later, we still have the notion that in order to eject a cd, you need to throw it into the trash bin! Regardless of the used-to-be-functional button on the drive itself, which of course is disabled because....."we know better"
Or, point your finger at ANY linux distro and claim multiple monitors works right, I dare you. But hey, taking UI element control OUT was the way to go there right?!
Yes Gnome, staring at your collective asses. I won't even go into the other poor attempts some have made.
What gets me, is the ideas in computing now seem to be as lame as the ideas coming out of Hollywood. "Let's make it all shades of grey, you know so it looks hip!" - who here honestly didn't see that in their heads? These ideas are being fed to us as if they are new, as if they help us somehow, they aren't and they don't, unless of course you are trying to do work on some underpowered toy with no real input options designed for work, speed, ergonomics....shit, anything that drove peripheral improvement over the last 20 years.
Newest version of FF is an example....now on what used to be a clean start page, I have monstrous buttons for things I almost never use.....all to make some future tablet user happy. Thanks for the awful waste of space guys! Rock on!
I swear this shit looks like it was developed over at Playskool.
UK road signs were changed to their current style after testing in 1958, there's a nice summary on the BBC. This new mixed upper and lower case style became legally required on 01 January 1965.
So yes indeed, typographical designers understood this in the UK quite a while before it was a widely discussed computer interface debate..
Nah. Ribbon is objectively better than the previous office UI, just look at all the usability studies they did. Watch Jensen Harris's talk about it.
On the other hand, this is just another fad. People have been capitalising letters in every possible way over time. We had the WordPerfects of the world, we had iPods, we had flickr and finally the obvious next step was to try FILE EDIT VIEW PROJECT BUILD DEBUG TEAM SQL DATA DESIGN FORMAT TOOLS TEST ARCHITECTURE ANALYZE WINDOW HELP.
I personally believe the problem is that they themselves are so blind to their own UI through oversaturation that they will do anything to make it temporarily noticeable. Give them time and one by one they will suddenly snap out of it and go ugh.
The other problem is that Apple's UIs really are stylish and attractive. Sure, they cost too much and are basically like electronic prisons, but it's hard to deny that they really know their aesthetics. Microsoft, OTOH, keeps trying to be stylish, but usually ends up failing badly at it, and making something that looks comical or just plain ugly.
True. The factor here is, "The easiest interface is the one you already know." That, and software compatibility, are the two chains that keep everyone tied to Microsoft. At the moment, they're even screwing that up.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Well, they have certainly managed to implement the "fewer blue screens" feature. Can't remember the last time I've seen one. Must be a few years by now.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I installed the German language pack and now I think visual studio is very angry with me.
Maybe the crappy people moved to their UI division.
Illegal tying of OS to hardware, etc etc (go read how BeOS signed a deal with a laptop manufacturer to offer BeOS as an alternate OS, and how Microsoft forced them to "hide" that option.
They dominate not because they were good (go read how early Office versions would have access to secret APIs that competitors did not have), but because they pulled a shitload of dirty tricks.
And then people like you conveniently forget or gloss over those facts.
> Mod up! This is absurdly true. Office got a new interface that it didn't need that seems no better (just different) from its last interface
This is due to their business model. Thet must change things every couple of years (make things slightly incompatible or inconsistent) to drive revenue. If they stopped breaking thins then they lose a lot of money. That is why hey drop their techologies for "teh new shiney" every half-decade. Which means everyone investing in their tech will get shafted and loose a lot of the value of their investment. The old adage, "In order for Microsoft to win the customer must lose" is as true as it ever was.
This is one reason I'll always prefer Java to C# (plus, only the former is truly portable, and I live on Windows, Mac and Linux at various stages of my day). Java tech changes very conservatively - people see this is as a flaw but it actually means the 17 years of code your have accumulated (that is, invested time and effort in) still works nicely and is still supported by the tool creator.
Ballmer's communication style (mostly screaming until you are hoarse and jumping around to get attention) is finally starting to assert itself in Microsoft's UI. Expect the next version to include characters that turn red and jump around, chanting when you mouseover them and screaming "GIVE IT UP FOR ME" when you click them:
FILE!
FILE!
FILE!
EDIT!
EDIT!
COPY!
YEAH! GIVE IT UP FOR ME!!!!
(Then you wait several seconds for your operating system to catch its breath.)
I for one am thankful that I know keyboard shortcuts.
Visual Studio and before that, Visual Basic and Visual C++ always had really lousy interfaces. When I first used VB I wrote exactly the same program in Delphi, and Delphi was easy to learn and pickup while VB was a constant struggle due to the design. Ie, put all of the hundred or so properties into a menu, sorted alphabetically, so that you use maximum mouse movement to set the 3 properties that you need. It was almost as if the UI for Visual Basic was designed by the typical Visual Basic user. Now I'm not a GUI developer at all, but even I can tell when something is messed up in the UI.
If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color? Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color in favour of the 'everything-is-grey UI.'
How do you determine if this writer was American or English? (Pause) -- That's correct, it's time for a horse race!
If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color?
They're out of the gates, and "American Author" sprints into an early lead!
American: 1
English: 0
Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color
Ah, an obstruction in the track! "English Expositor" got its hoof stuck on a sodding large crumpet and is now clomping along alone like a Billy No-Mates! With such a slowdown, it may never catch up, just like the train schedule!
American: 2
English: 0
in favour of the
But wait, "American Author" has smelled the crumpet and is circling back to investigate! It looks like the rider is shouting to "American Author" at the top of his lungs that its going the wrong way, but he refuses to use his riding crop or otherwise take action to correct the problem.
Now "European Expositor" is gaining ground fast! A more in-depth genealogy analysis may very well reveal that Bob is, in fact, his uncle!
American: 2
English: 1
'everything-is-grey UI'
"European Expositor" has shaken off its handicap and they're on the home stretch! They're neck and neck across the finish line -- it's a tie!
American: 2
English: 2
To finish the story, the riders then dismounted and decided to play a tiebreaker match of football. It ended in another tie, one team scoring two touchdowns and the other netting twelve goals.