Draw me like one of your French girls, Jack…
(Thing the 1th: his real name is actually Jack. Thing the 2th: took way too much work to not capture my hairy chest in this one.)
This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it.
The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot:
Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph:
Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?
Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.
Monkey got smarter, I reached into the [redacted] chronicles and I check email. Who is going to Mandalay Bay in November?
“
| — | Entirety of an email I received from an American, English-as-first-language client today. Too much coffee and not enough patience to respond civilly yet. *growl* |
When I am working a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
“
| — | R. Buckminster Fuller |
