Quality is fractal

My UX Hero curse super power is this: Within five seconds of using a product, I stub my toe on what’s broken about it.

Quality is fractal. Just by touching a product you can make reasonable assumptions about the characteristics (or the corporate pathologies) of the people who made it.

Which brings me to the Windows 7 Control Panel…

• There are 50+ icons there, all equally weighted, all hard to read. No one made any hard editorial decisions about the Control Panel.
• Speaking of editorial decisions, what’s with calling everything a “center”?:  Network and Sharing Center, Windows Mobility Center, Action Center (what does that even mean?).
• Yes, the default Control Panel view groups things by category, but A) it’s almost as useless, B) it requires many clicks, and C) why offer three different views? Just design one great solution and use it.
• System setting controls do not belong in a normal file explorer window. It’s lazy “junk drawer” design.

So what does this tell us about Microsoft?

• There is no god of UX for Windows, or if there is, that person has either no taste or no teeth.
• Microsoft does not make opinionated software. They’d rather add more preferences than make a hard decision about what’s best.
• Microsoft will always choose “don’t change what people already know” over “make it great.” There’s value in stability, but over time the conservative approach leads to lazy “squeeze one more option in there” thinking.

All the money, smart developers, and time in the world isn’t worth a damn without good taste and the will to use it.