InformationWeek

Microsoft's User Interface: The Need To Emphasize 'User'

By Stuart J. Johnston
February 10, 1997

As Whoopi Goldberg used to say, "Is it just me, or is there really a pr oblem here?"

Twenty-one years after the advent of the personal computer, we are still using systems designed by engineers who think that everyone in the world thinks just like them. That is a critical error because, even today, the user interfaces on software products are nowhere near what every vendor always promises--truly "user friendly."

Although this finger is pointed at all software vendors, since Windows 95 is the current platform for many people and Office 95/97 is the application suite of choice, Microsoft's engineers share more responsibility and blame than other companies for this sad state of affairs.

Now, I generally like Windows 95. It does make work easier than Windows 3.x did and, since it is a popular platform, if I have problems there are usually other people I know who I can call for help.

Indeed, Win95 is probably fine for most users who end up calling their corporate help desk for small problems. These calls, the ones that can be dealt with in three to five minutes, probab ly make up the majority of calls to help desks in terms of volume--perhaps 99% of total calls.

But what about that other 1%? Those are the really intractable problems, and I submit that those are the ones that cost serious money in technical support time. Of course, many of these are bound to happen, no matter what.

However, given all the publicity about Microsoft's usability testing labs and all the thousands of hours of end-user testing the company claims to have invested in and studied the results of, there are many things in Microsoft's user interfaces today that are just inexcusable.

Maybe it is because I've used PCs since 1981 and, as a telecommuter during most of that time, I've had to provide most of my own technical support. But I never seem to encounter those little simple five-minute problems. In the past two years since I began using Win95 as my production system, virtually all the problems I've encountered have been in the 1% category. And I have invested countless hours in trying to solve what should be simple no-brainers, such as getting a 28.8-Kbps plug-and-play modem to work on a machine with a plug-and-play BIOS. Or in trying to figure out why a browser, any browser, will not work on the Internet.

Frankly, I blame lousy interface design for a lot of that lost time. In the modem case, sure, there are Wizards to handle new hardware. And besides, Win95 is plug-and-play enabled, so all you do is stick it in, turn on the machine and it will lead you through the rest. After all, that is how it works in the demos that Microsoft is all too happy to show off.

Only that is not how it went when I tried to use it. I turned the PC back on, and it repeatedly froze before Win95 finished loading. Nowhere in any book or help file does it suggest that if you're replacing an existing piece of hardware, that you should go into the Device Manager in the Control Panel and "remove" all references to the old hardware before you take out the hardware. Would that be so hard?

For example, the Wiza rd could have text on its opening screen that says, "We suggest that, if you are replacing existing hardware, you first use the Device Manager to remove references to the old hardware before physically removing it."

OK, so you may be thinking, "That's a no-brainer." Maybe if mucking around with hardware is what you do for a living, but that is not what the vast majority of users--me included--do for a job.

But the modem still did not work, and that is when I discovered that the utilities provided in the Control Panel obviously did not go through that rigorous usability testing that we've heard so much about. As a matter of fact, pretty obviously neither did most of the help files and Wizards. After going through everything suggested by the Windows 95 Hardware Troubleshooting Wizard--which I have subsequently renamed the "Hardware Troubleshooting Loser"--it simply told me that it couldn't help.

Another case in point is the fact that Win95's Add New Hardware Wizard doesn't even correctly identify a Microsoft Mouse, so it loads drivers that don't work quite right. In the case of the modem, Microsoft's TechNet CD-ROM didn't provide any help and neither did the Windows 95 Resource Kit. Isn't TechNet supposed to contain everything that they know about technical support issues?

It finally turned out that the system had only one remaining hardware interrupt available and it did not allow by default the memory address that the modem had chosen to use. I can't be the only one to ever encounter that problem. Granted that the problem itself had to do with the hardware, but in cases such as this, the software is to blame as well, if only in the poor judgment used in the user-interface design.

For instance, have you ever tried to negotiate your way through the various applets in Win95's Control Panel to set up TCP/IP so that you can connect to the Internet? Using those utilities is like trying to find your way around the Great Bazaar in Istanbul. You have no logical indications of where you are going or whe re you have been as you struggle through endless dialog boxes and dialog tabs, and then you click on a button that appears will take you forward to the next dialog box, and you're suddenly back where you started!

Of course, there is an Internet Setup Wizard, if you can find it. It is hidden in the Windows 95 Help system, but it doesn't automatically pop up if this isn't your first time setting up Internet access.

And a Bronx cheer for the engineer who designed the performance of tabbed dialogs when you have multiple rows of tabs. When you click on one in the back row, they all jump around so you can't remember which ones you have and haven't looked at yet. You end up looking at all of them twice or more.

There are plenty of examples of this kind of out-and-out hubris. For instance, if you accidentally tell the spell checker in the Exchange messaging client to "add" a misspelled word to its dictionary, there is no way to "undo" and remove it and no way to edit the spelling list, so you had better hope that it wasn't an error you make often. Or ask the Answer Wizard--which is supposed to take English-language input --in the Excel spreadsheet how to "divide" or perform "division" and you will get answers that have zip to do with division. Maybe my memory is faulty, but I think that's the term they taught me in grade school for when you want to divide one number by another. The index for Excel's help files does not even contain the words "divide" or "division."

Or ask the Answer Wizard in Publisher 97 how to import a Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) image. I got all kinds of help but nothing that vaguely resembled what I was asking for. Or why does the print setup in Exchange, Internet Explorer, and other programs not accept changes time after time? It finally remembers that I don't want to print in landscape mode all the time, but it still wants to print in color, although I do not have a color printer, and it wants to use paper measured in millimeters instead of inches--despite my repeated attempts to change the defaults.

An experimental Hardware Troubleshooting Wizard that uses some new artificial intelligence technology, which Microsoft showed me recently, could not solve the modem problem described above. It gave out in exactly the same place as its lower-tech predecessor. Given that I was using all name-brand hardware, this problem has to occur with other users, so why isn't it dealt with somewhere?

And I suspect that a lot of users will find the intelligent agent in Office 97 more irritating than helpful. Like the Answer Wizard in Office 95, it uses probability theory to figure out, from your key strokes and mouse clicks, what you are likely to want help with. But my experience has been repeatedly that its forerunner, the Office 95 Tip Wizard, gives me tips that are not the least bit related to what I'm trying to do, and the Answer Wizard gives me answers that are completely unrelated to my questions.

The problem, I think, lies with the fact that Microsoft, and indeed the whole industr y, is run as a technocracy--the dweebs win out when it comes to the final battles between the usability people and the engineers.

Unfortunately, this is not likely to get much better any time soon, based on the demos I've seen of upcoming technologies. Computers will continue to become more complex, engineers will continue to dominate the user-interface design battle, and cute gimmicks that look cool but are not particularly useful will increasingly proliferate.

However, if Microsoft really wants to make computers easier to use, maybe they should hire some people of average intelligence to design the user interface. Instead of going for the coolest new technologies to drive their help systems, it would be better if they just paid closer attention to how people really use the stuff. Providing adequate help files and simple text explanations for things that seem mundane to them but really sting those of us who aren't software engineers would be a good start. I know it isn't sexy, but if they just focus on the basics, users will have a much easier time.

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