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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Totally agree.
I think it's being driven by the cell phone / tablet craze. Everyones trying to make their desktop look like their cellphone. I too think it's a major step backwards.. and I think a lot of the UI design guys are out of touch with what people actually want.
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.
Even better: Circular backronyms!
FILE -- FILE Input Listing Element
EDIT -- EDIT Document Interface Tool
VIEW -- VIEW Interface Element Window
etc.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
> 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
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!
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.