Windows 8 and Creating Rules

In light of the Windows 8 release today, I thought I'd share some thoughts from the perspective of upgrades. Yesterday, I upgraded from Outlook 2007 to the 2010 version. That's a three year difference for upgrading, updating, and coming up to speed on the nuances of, oh, say, network connectivity.

One of the first things I did was create a rule for an incoming e-mail and submit:



2 minutes? Yes, that's about how long it actually took. A 1/10 of second procedure (comparing to most client-server requests of a similar nature across the Internet) took almost 2 minutes. This was what it was like 2007 and all previous versions of Outlook I can remember, even before I started with my current company. It's frustrating that with an "new" update from 2007 to 2010 that Microsoft was not only unable to update the look and feel of this dialog, they didn't bother to improve the behind the scenes performance.

What does this have to with the Windows 8 release? Well, here's what I've noticed in my decades of working with Microsoft products. They fail to pay attention to these little details. What does two minutes mean to a leviathan like Microsoft? Nothing. What does it mean to me, the lowly user? Two minutes, plus the time it takes me to switch tasks back and forth as I wait and then check back to see if it's done, and the worry wondering if the application crashed and I'm going to have to waste ten minutes instead of two and so on. It means my time and productivity which are priceless.

What you typically see in Windows 8 reviews out on the 'tubes is the Metro skin all of its nifty tiles. But as far as I'm aware, the main, commonly used interface will actually be the same old desktop we're used to seeing and underneath the skin is the same old software. The same software that causes me to have to wait two minutes to send a few bytes of code to a server. More to the point, this attitude of missing the small details has been pervasive at Microsoft for decades. 

Companies are allowed, even expected, to make mistakes. The vaunted Apple has many a times, as has Sony (root kit!), Nokia, IBM, our rivals at Qualcomm (oh, and do I know what kind of mistakes they've made! Bad QC, no biscuit!) and more, but when a company's culture is so ingrained to only look at the superficial appearance and the profit motive, they are bound to fail time and time again, and on the same issues.

It gets harder to forgive Microsoft as they simply seem incapable of learning from their mistakes. Case in point: Three years and no fix for a simple problem: Make the "Create Rule" feature in Outlook faster and easier to use.

Before a company can upgrade its technology, it has to upgrade its relationship to its consumers. The conversation has to transform to a place where the small issues that affect the regular user are heard and replied to. 

And Microsoft hasn't done that with Outlook 2010, Vista, Windows 7, and now likely Windows 8. I look forward to the reviews and opportunity to try it out. Prove me wrong, Microsoft!

-=-

Infuzer Failure

Infuzer is some sort of calendar support tool; I was using this as part of a travel site. It puts your itinerary info into Outlook for you. Allegedly.

I however, after installing the software, only got as far as this. That in itself is annoying. But two additional issues remain to discuss:

1) "Unexpected errors" are inappropriate errors. Yes, there are tons of conditions that might not have been accounted for, but I get the impression from the way this all went down that lazy programming was more involved than an actual out-of-the-blue failure.

2) Really? You want me to retype the e-mail (note that we can't copy and paste the e-mail address) and then send you details? As in, "I installed your software, and now it doesn't work?" Lame.

Infuzer... please treat us better than this.

Stop asking!

It's really quite rude if your user tells you they don't want to be asked about downloading the current upgrade and you keep asking... iTunes. Please stop.

Technical Fields

I like that in TurboTax, they present "flags" and "notifications" that indicate something that user will need to come back to an look at. Good plan; if the field isn't critical at the moment, then the user can continue on with their process and return when they're ready to focus on the suggested task.

The problem I have in this example is the tech talk that is used: what is "service-1?" I have no context of what the issue is. I have to click on Fix in order to understand what the problem is so I can decide if I'm going to Flag or Fix it (of course, I've already clicked on Fix).

Better is to provide a more natural language of the field in question, or the title of the page.

Checking for solutions

I'm not a big fan of computers attempting to solve an interal problem for me. Like this:

In all the years I've worked on Microsoft's OS, it has yet to ever successfuly find a solution. So what is it really doing? I suspect it's just waiting for the program to respond to something. What, I don't know.

It's a useless dialog in this sense as well: it has only a single button, "Cancel." So now I have to take action which still won't do anything.

Here's my proposal, part of which is stolen from Apple. Actually, let me first suggest that computers should never have these types problems. It's a flaw in the OS to have applications lock up as often as they do on a brand new (as of August 2011) computer (yet they do. Get with it, computer maufacturers!). In lieu of that pipe-dream ever getting solved, I would like to propose that if an app is non-responsive, the OS takes it and hides it away, clearing up the desktop for us and not tempting us with thinking we can click on it. Then, a la Apple, have its task bar icon bounce up a couple of times, or glow red when I move my cursor near it. Then, if I actually click on the icon, have a message drawer extend out and tell me, "Sorry, this app is behaving badly. What would you like to do?" then have some options: "Force Close", "Ignore, for now", "Give it 10 secs, then force close" or similar.

Force close is the most common thing I'd imagine would happen. On my Mac, if an app freezes up (i.e. Firefox. What happened to you guys?), I have to force close it about 20% of the time. On my PC, if it freezes longer than 20 seconds, I have to end the process on it 100% of the time. If I have to do it that often, make it easy for me.

Funny how it takes a human to fix a computer's problem.

Simple things

From Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things:

"When simple things need instructions, it is a certain sign of poor design"

If not hyperlinked, at least copyable!

Got this error below (see image for the URL I'm talking about). The take away is this: If you're going to provide a link, make it a hyperlink. I most likely have an Internet connection, since I downloaded the app to begin with. And you're all ready assuming I'm Internet savvy by providing a link to begin with.

If you can't make it a hyperlink... than at the very least, make it copyable so I can paste into a browser!