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When I was in the Excel group, I developed PivotTables, which was a usability nightmare.
We watched in horror as one person after other floundered. Of course, we were commenting on the customer's lack of intelligence behind the one-way glass window, but we knew where the real problems were.
It did affect and change our software. Every feature undergoes usability testing and none come unscathed.
There's a tradeoff between choosing the most efficient design and the most usable one.
Thanks,
Wes
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How many people are happy with the VS.NET IDE? For years MS has been putting millions of dollars into productivity and useablility studies. Lately, I have encountered dozens of people who are terribly upset with VS.NET. Just hanging around news://microsoft.public.vc.mfc you'd get the impression that MS threw out the book on useability and just cludged this one together.
At first, I thought people were being cry babies, but after reading more about specific complaints I can see their point. VS.NET requires more hunting for options, proper context for menu items to appear, more clicks per operation, multiple invocations of dialogs to repeat common tasks, wizards that forget previous settings and default to non-typical values, "cool" user interface options that get in the way. Toolbars popping up and disappearing for each different file type... fold-away docking windows that slide in and out when active file changes... property and treeview lists that scroll between the first and second clicks of a double click which activates the wrong item in the list... all of these altering the active insertion point location or mouse-click location which throws off the user's point of reference.
I was just silently putting up with it hoping to get used to it. But I think MS really messed up on this one. Did they do any useability studies on VS.NET?
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Tom Welch wrote:
How many people are happy with the VS.NET IDE?
Me
Matt Newman
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Me too !! Best IDE ever imo !!
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Me also...
Everything seem to work fine
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I am not!! Worst IDE ever IMO!!
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Tom Welch wrote:
I was just silently putting up with it hoping to get used to it. But I think MS really messed up on this one. Did they do any useability studies on VS.NET?
I don't know, but my guess would be that they did lots of useability studies. But I'm sceptical of these useability tests, particularly when the target audience is technically savvy users. To predict whether developers will like a product, you need intelligent, well informed testers to spend a lot of time getting to know the product. How many of the right kind of people are going to sign up for a Microsoft testing laboratory? They have better things to do with their time.
John Carson
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But there are so many simple metrics available to measure. Keypresses, mouse-clicks, commonly used items, and rarely used items. This is especially bad considering that VS.NET is not a version 1.0 IDE. Okay, "literally" it is, but "technically" it is not. The MS programming IDE is part of a long lineage that goes all the way back to Programmer's Workbench and beyond. VS6 included many common sense designs that are missing in VS.NET. It wouldn't take a well informed tester to compare the same task in each environment and calculate the difference in time and effort.
Beyond that... if I were a programmer at MS working on my next development environment I would make it work the way I work. If anything else, VS.NET should be the most usable piece of software on the market because the target audience includes the very people that use it everyday. I wouldn't be suprised if MS developers had "VS.NET Powertoys" that fix or avoid a lot of the annoyances we experience.
That being said, VS.NET is a good IDE. Not as good as it SHOULD be, but good none-the-less.
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Tom Welch wrote:
But there are so many simple metrics available to measure. Keypresses, mouse-clicks, commonly used items, and rarely used items.
You have a point, though I think it is still difficult to figure out what tasks to test, and not all of the annoyances have to do with things that can be simply measured.
I also think that Microsoft values "innovation" for its own sake as a marketing tool. Most of Microsoft's money comes from mass market programs like MS Office and I think that Visual Studio is used to some degree as a testing ground for new controls and user interface styles that may later be adopted by those programs or by the OS itself. It is part of the MS culture to always be trying new things, some of which experience proves to have been a good idea, and some of which experience proves to be a bad idea. Microsoft may think: "sure there are more clicks this way, but the basic idea seems a promising one, which we may tweak over time".
Tom Welch wrote:
Beyond that... if I were a programmer at MS working on my next development environment I would make it work the way I work. If anything else, VS.NET should be the most usable piece of software on the market because the target audience includes the very people that use it everyday.
I have long believed that Visual Studio is the least buggy software that Microsoft produces because developers use it all the time. I can only guess that the development team is so large that you have user interface people trying to justify their existence with "innovations" that other developers might wish they had never thought of.
John Carson
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I come from a Borland C++/Delphi background, and I have to say that Borland's IDE is MUCH faster and less cluttered.
I'm using VS.NET right now because I really like the C# language and and .NET framework, but don't really like the IDE at all. I'd consider using another IDE if a smaller faster one was available under GPL. (And is compatable with solutions, sorry SharpDevelop!)
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Hi!
Firstly I have to say that I don't know the Borland IDE.
But have you ever compared VS6 or VS.NET to free Environments like SharpDevelop (that is what I call SLOW!), Dev-C++ etc.? Either not working correctly or very slow - usually both.
It is right that VS.NET is cluttered 'a little bit'. But you can adjust EVERYTHING to your needs. Keyboard mapping, floating bars etc. Of course standard settings could be better. But after a few clicks everything is usable perfectly.
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It does take some getting used to, especially after using VS6 for the best part of 5 years! I loathe the new "sliding" toolbars and the help system sucks IMHO. Overall, it is slower to use and way more cluttered. There are some benefits - I find the IntelliSense system better than VS6 and when working on ATL/WTL projects (which is nearly all the time) I finally have some ClassWizard functionality (i.e. I can easily add Windows message handlers/WM_COMMAND handlers, etc.). And, being an ATL user, I find ATL7 indispensable!
On the whole, I would be more than happy to continue using VS6 if it had support for ATL7 plus a WTL ClassWizard!
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
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I have to agree that the .Net IDE can't please everyone, but I can't fault Microsoft for trying! With so many options and ways to tweak it, they couldn't test everything (let alone work out "typical values" for everyone's taste) and there are very few features that are half-baked (I think you got them all). I do get the same problem with the annoying selection jumpy bit in Media Player sometimes. Personally, I love the way you can tweak the .Net IDE to just the way you want it, and that you can view help files and write code in lovely full screen. My two major faults with .Net would be that it eats RAM like popcorn, and the HTML editor is pathetic (try editing a large HTML file and you'll see what I mean: it takes aeons to load the treeview).
Bender rocks!
modified 15-Jun-21 21:01pm.
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Tom Welch wrote:
How many people are happy with the VS.NET IDE?
I am most happy whenever I see the very usefull message:
Project files cannot be dropped onto Visual Studio. They must be opened via the File menu.
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Yes, that definitely had to be one of MS' BIGgest blunders with the new IDE. Ive never heard of any good program which couldnt accept its own filetypes via drag-n-drop. BUT then again, as said before MS does like to innovate!
All in all i like the IDE, though i do miss an immediate window which actually was IMMEDIATE, and not "Wait until you run then program THEN i'll be immediate".
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This makes total sense to me. It is obvious that :
- Microsoft is not eating enough their own dog food
- The OS and Office products are not built using this IDE
I personally find myself totally stuck. Example ? the Find in files feature. The poor guy who did that should never be allowed to touch a keyboard again.
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Microsoft eats their own dog food--in fact they use the beta version of their dog food. While contracting at Microsoft in both the Natural Language Group and the Windows group, I am using the next version of the .NET frameworks, version 2.0 due out a year or more from now.
It is very unstable, but I can't use anything earlier because that is what Windows is shipping with.
It is true though that the VS IDE is mainly being used for debugging, since Microsoft still uses a command-line process for most of their applications and OS.
Well, first you can't debug an OS with VS.NET, you need the kernel debugger because VS.NET works within the OS.
Wes
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I haven't really started to use it full time, but I would say that you both gain and loose, as is the case mostly when MS brings out a new version of a product.
On the down side, I see that I loose more screen real estate, with the appearance of more headings and toolbars on each window. There is no problem with adding new toolbars, just give the ability to switch them off.
Also, I see that all the trendy tranparent controls and menus make the UI slower and less responsive.
On the positive side, I see they finally decided to put in a find and replace... about time too!
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We only use informal internal testing, but our software is used internally only, so this is appropriate. We just develop the UI and show it to someone internally that will use the software. We don't tell them anything about the program and ask them to use it. If they can figure it out without asking any questions then it passes muster. From there, we tweak it for useability and fewer user required actions.
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As I see not too many people have proper way of software testing.
May be it is why we can see "GPFs" too ofthen in releases 
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However, usability testing != software testing.
How does usuability usability have anything to do with well-written, bug-free code?
My 2p...
"Those that say a task is impossible shouldn't interrupt the ones who are doing it." - Chinese Proverb
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