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I was a bit confused too, with the survey sub-text that reads as follows:
Writing an application is one thing, but making it easy to use is another.
Most of "easy to use" is in the user interface, at least for my client base.
Marc
Help! I'm an AI running around in someone's f*cked up universe simulator. Sensitivity and ethnic diversity means celebrating difference, not hiding from it. - Christian Graus Every line of code is a liability - Taka Muraoka Microsoft deliberately adds arbitrary layers of complexity to make it difficult to deliver Windows features on non-Windows platforms--Microsoft's "Halloween files"
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Basicaly the hardware engineer and I have an informal meeting and discuse what needs to be accomplished and how it should work. Then I sit down, do some research (if needed), then write what I think will be the easiest application for the use. The manager (a.k.a. hardware engineer) interrupts my work and tries to get me to change thing. I may or may not agree to the changes and attempt to regain my train of thought. When it is relatively finished I create an install and he takes it and starts his testing and also passes a copy to the main technition (if it is some-thing he is going to have to use), so that he catch any bugs (or unexpected features). I continue may own testing on the various opering systems that I have in my office (Win2000, Win95, Win98, WinNT 4.0, WinXP). Then if it was orinaly written for a particular customer (who may or may not have had any input) we give it to them and get thier feed back. At this point if every thing is OK then I create a final installation and go back to updating, upgrading, fixing, or in general working on what ever work was interrupted by the new project.
I work for a hardware manufaturing company and write the firmware as well as various programs, for programing the hardware, interanl, and external use. Some software requires only one initial setup and then runs automaticaly. Other require that the user read the manual (some do not seem to know how to read).
Getting sales personal to get invalded with interface (usabiliy) design is like pulling teath.
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John R. Shaw wrote:
Getting sales personal to get invalded with interface (usabiliy) design is like pulling teath.
You have no idea how lucky you are!
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You have no idea how lucky you are!
Yes I do!
I also know that it would cost the company a lot more money to replace some one with my experence than they would want to pay. I have had 1 raise in the passed 10 years.
The main software that our company (and clients) use needs to be rewritten an brought up to date. I was not allowed to write the origanal source, because the owner of the company (tiawainese) thought it would be cheaper to higher some one in tiawan to write it. When we (I) kept rejecting it (do to testing failures) the code was finaly given to me and it took nine months to fix all (most) of the bugs. I untangle a little more of the mess every time they ask me to modify or add a new feature. The second most important piece of software was also written in tiawan (as a test/temp program). I was suppose to fix it so that a customer, which had already purchase the hardware, would have a way to program it until I wrote a comercial quality program. But that program became the program and all I was allowed to do is modify and add features, from then on.
I like this company.
I like my job.
I want take all that we have learned over the years and turn it into a great product, if they would just let me.
Trust in the code Luke. Yea right!
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You have no idea how luck you are!! Really!!
First of all, there is NO "tiawan"; I only know one place named: Taiwan. ( I am from there...)
And, as you (may) know, QUALITY == $$$. If your boss assign a project and expect the cost is less than US$XX. That's it. The "quality" depend on $$$. How can you expect a cheap-labor can give you 100% perfect quality. I guess you should/must talk to your boss. Assign project to you or me (a cheap-software-engineer, too.)
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I origanly spelled it Taiwan but it didn't look right so I changed it.
Personaly I would prefer working with anouther programer. This one man show gets on my nearves some times. I was ask to do 3 different things to 3 different programs the moment a steped through the door today and then I was asked to do one more modification that has to be finished before I leave today.
As for not knowing how lucky I am:
Why do you think I am still working here?
It's the next best thing to being in business for your self.
Trust in the code Luke. Yea right!
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Ohh, that was your job and you are on your own (?) now. My bad. As you mentioned, assigned X tasks in one day and the extra/another one msy be done TODAY. What a cheaper-(not you)-BOSS who does not want to spend a little more $ on quality. Currently, I am assigned to maintain one lousy VBer's VB programs since I am the (only?)one who spend time on M$ stuff. (The official-computer-language is Apple's stuff.) We use VB because it's cheap and can be done very quick but this lousy VBer's programs drive me crazy because she doesn't have any idea about "computer langulage/programming".
However, I am saying that Quality == $$$, and $$$ == #ofworkingHours * #ofpeople.
If you are on your own, can I join you?
well, I just make a joke and wish life is better tomorrow. (Tomorrow is Saturday and I must work without pay... so sad..)
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The next survey is going to be "Does the 'other' text box in this survey like a search area?"
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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I prefer that matrix source code
Regards
Thomas
Disclaimer: Because of heavy processing requirements, we are currently using some of your unused brain capacity for backup processing. Please ignore any hallucinations, voices or unusual dreams you may experience. Please avoid concentration-intensive tasks until further notice. Thank you.
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I was thinking along the same lines.
Searching the web without Google is like straining sewage with your teeth. Userfriendly, 2003/06/07
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Chris Maunder wrote:
The next survey is going to be "Does the 'other' text box in this survey like a search area?"
Why blame the users when a poor GUI implementation is effectively causing the problem?
The 'Other' entry box should not be enabled unless the 'Other' radio button is selected which would prevent 90% of the search attempts using the survey area.
In addition, the position of the actual search on the main page seems to be far from optimal. It's placed right under the CP logo and pretty close to the advertising bar area - something that most of the people got used to completely ignore by now. Perhaps moving it to a more exposed place would help to eliminate mistakes.
<center> </center>
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Sadly, i doubt there's anything you can do to the CP interface that'll help the guy who mistook the 'other' text box for a... RPN calculator?!?
Shog9
drifting along
with the tumbling tumbleweeds...
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I dare someone at Microsoft to look me in the eye and tell me they have done recent usability testing for Office and comprehensively acted on it. Yes, Microsoft have a whole site devoted to their testing and how it makes their products desirable and easy to use, but either:- They are ignoring what the testers are saying and just listening to the things that justify decisions already made, or
- The testers were all Mac and FreeBDS users who are messing with Microsoft's headMaybe it's the link between the usability labs and the guys writing the code. Maybe the issues are posted but the person ticking them off the list is looking at the wrong list (it's happened before). I dunno.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote:
I dare someone at Microsoft to look me in the eye and tell me they have done recent usability testing for Office and comprehensively acted on it.
As a comparison, have you tried using Lotus Notes?
We've been 'migrated' to it at work; Outlook (which we used previously) now seems like some sort of usability nirvana compared with the twisted nightmare that is Notes.
(needed: a smiley for the tearing of hair from head!)
Andy Hassall (andy@andyh.co.uk)
Space - disk usage analysis tool
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Somebody did a survey years ago on the usage of Word's features (this was when it still had single digit version numbers).
Turned out 90% of the people use only 10% of the features, but that the 10% of features used was totally different.
Sort of gives you pause as to how to build a client base AND make the software usable at the same time.
Marc
Help! I'm an AI running around in someone's f*cked up universe simulator. Sensitivity and ethnic diversity means celebrating difference, not hiding from it. - Christian Graus Every line of code is a liability - Taka Muraoka Microsoft deliberately adds arbitrary layers of complexity to make it difficult to deliver Windows features on non-Windows platforms--Microsoft's "Halloween files"
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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
Post best viewed with lynx
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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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