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…

Windows 7 Control Panel Screenshot thumbnail

  • 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.

Notes:

See this screenshot of the OSX “control panel.” It’s easy to decipher, consistent in presentation, doesn’t require a ton of drilldown, and it even allows for a kind of junk drawer (the user installed stuff at the bottom) without becoming a total mess.

Special thanks to Bobby Borszich for the Windows screenshots.

November 6, 2009 / Category: Screenshots of Doom • UX Theory • User Experience Reviews

  • Very well said, thank you!
  • Jin
    I don't have Windows 7 so I can't comment too much. However, judging from the screenshot, it seems Microsoft UI approach hasn't changed much. They're still designing for developers. I'm sure an average dev won't have problem with this UI at all.

    For average users, do you think they really want to weed through 50+ icons? Keep it simple.
  • Jin, that's not what the Windows 7 Control Panel looks like. It's not what the Windows Vista Control Panel looks like, either.

    Here's a screenshot of what the Windows 7 Control Panel looks like: http://screencast.com/t/uX7mDlgrlbGP

    I can make Mac OSX look ugly, too, if I view plist's in text mode. The default Windows Control Panel doesn't look like Nathan's screenshot, and it's reasonably difficult to get it to look like that if you want to.
  • When I tried Windows 7 at Fry's the "50 icons" was the way control panel came up. Anyway, the grouped default view is not much better.

    What I was trying to get at is this: MSFT has billions of dollars, tons of smart people, and years of development lead time, but they can't figure out a control panel with a single consistent great aesthetic. My theory is that this is because (as far as I know) no single person is god of Windows UI design.
  • How would you redesign this interface? (Maybe use Balsamiq to mock it up?)

    That's what I tried to do here: http://www.pleaselistencarefully.com/2009/06/ph...
  • I think the point is valid, but the example is not. The default view is well grouped, and the view you've shown, while available, is pretty hard to find.

    The default control panel vew shows the most frequently used actions in clear text. Clicking on any of the headers in the default view (e.g. System and Security) brings up category views. I've used these for a year, and never had a need to go to the All Items view. It took me a little while to find it just now.

    Also, there's little need to go to the Control Panel these days, since you can bring up any actions via the Start / Search feature - you just hit the windows button and type "print" or "printer" or "fix printing".
  • Here's what happened. I was at Fry's Electronics and all the Windows boxes had the "icon view" defaulted for Control Panel. That set me off because after so much money and so many years have been poured into Windows, they'll still allow something like Control Panel to out looking that way. (the same way the font manager and calculator were the same UI from Windows 95 all the way through Vista).

    The problem with the default category Control Panel view is that it doesn't make a ton of sense and it looks sloppy (see my comments to Owen). On reflection I believe this is a symptom of Windows' mixing *preferences* with *utilities* in one big pot, which has gotten unruly.

    Windows' problem is that there is so much user and institutional inertia (think of all the certified sysadmins for example) that Windows can't rework something like Control Panel with all those moving parts underneath. Instead they add more and varied views and ways of finding things, which only adds more confusion.

    Like you, I believe in OS search (I live by Quicksilver), and while I didn't play with Windows 7's search, there's no excuse for having a messy UI and saying "search will fix it". Also users have to know what their searching for. Browsing is still vital in OS design.
  • I think it's unfair that you completely dismiss the "category view". It takes more clicks because it's a task-based interface. It asks you first "What broad category are you interested in?", then shows you what can be done from that category.

    What if one of Microsoft's "hard decisions about what's best" reduces usability for blind users or people with diminished vision? Should I be completely unable to configure how fast my mouse cursor moves and let MS decide the "best" speed for me? MS used to decide for me that every user was an Administrator; this is horrible from a security standpoint. Should they also not let me configure my password?

    Control Panel is the one place you go to change system settings. The only inappropriate choices I see above are the Boot Camp, QuickTime and vmWare application settings that are crammed in there; funny how two of the three poor choices were made by Apple.

    What's your proposed solution to this problem? How do you provide a single place to allow users to configure settings like DPI resolution or whether to enable a screen reader that don't have a "best" value?
  • The problem is that the Category View groups things in weird ways (Hardware and Sound?), makes unimportant things (like the clock settings, and "connect a projector") far too important, and is generally written poorly.

    It's clunky because of nomenclature and emphasis problems, and the categories are generally sloppy and seem arbitrary.

    Also look at the Category View. See how some icons are top aligned, some center, some bottom? And they're all kind of different sizes and shapes, and not aligned in a solid grid with the associated link text. It all adds noise, clutter, and uncertainty.
  • I agree with that stance instead of a complete dismissal. Some of the groupings made me go "huh?" the first time I saw them. The category view may be lipstick on a pig, but it was an *ugly* pig and it's some *nice* lipstick.
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