The Extra Parsec

I’m probably either preaching to the choir or the completely uninterested here, but over the years I’ve often made comments to the effect that Microsoft’s products are bad. Among what I consider to be numerous flaws, I find their interface design to be completely boneheaded, as it has been since Windows was born.

The screen shot at the right is something I ran across on a coding web site while searching for C# information. I had no idea Visual Studio .NET had a “Method Wizard.” But such a thing is a perfect example of Microsoft’s bass-ackwards approach to creating an intuitive user experience. For those of you who don’t code, a Method Wizard is completely superfluous. If you can’t write the skeleton of a method yourself (which is all the Wizard does), you shouldn’t be coding in the first place. You should be reading a book on coding, or taking a class.

To draw a comparison to a more accessible notion, imagine Microsoft Word had a Sentence Wizard. First it would ask you “What kind of sentence is this?” and you would click a button for, let’s say, Declarative or Interrogative. At that point, the Wizard would go ahead and put a period or question mark at the end of your prototype sentence. Then it have you fill in a blank for the subject and verb of the sentence. Then it would ask you “Would you like to use any conjunctions to add other subjects or verbs to the sentence?” After filling in a dozen more blanks, you would click a “Finish” button, and the Sentence Wizard would insert your sentence into the Word document, at which point you could manually input Creative Flair (for which there would also be an optional Wizard).

The Method Wizard is just as absurd as my hypothetical Sentence Wizard. But programming is a more esoteric art than English composition, and Microsoft dictates what’s “normal” in the computer world. So when Microsoft adds completely boneheaded tools to their products, calling them “features,” few question them.

In computer-user interfaces, less is more. The more unobtrustive and transparent a new feature is, the better it is, generally. I’m tempted to draw a comparison to politics (i.e. small, out-of-your-face Federal government is inherently better) but, hey, that’s politics. Instead, a good computer interface is like a good employee. A good employee should know what the Big Picture of his job is and get it done with minimal guidance. A good employee is not good because he coddles his supervisor; he is good because he can anticipate his supervisor’s needs and then fulfill them without even need to be told to do so. Supervisors never have to micro-manage a good employee, and conversely not having to micro-manage makes the supervisor a better one.

Microsoft exhibits an interface design philosophy of “if less is more, then think how much more more would be!”. More buttons, more Wizards, more hand-holding, more bloat. Microsoft’s products are analogous to an employee who doesn’t bother to step back and think about the Big Picture, so he brings every little tiny decision to the attention of his supervisor. But the extra attention is all condescension, because he doesn’t actually think his supervisor knows anything about how to do his own job. So the employee presents every question in terms of multiple choice. The buzz-term “thinking outside the box” only exists because such employees boxed themselves in in the first place.

Incidentally, Microsoft is only the juggernaut that sets the bar in the industry with consistent stupidity. But sadly the vast majority of computer interfaces are designed with minimal forethought, producing piss-poor results. Gnome is the only Linux product that even shows evidence of thinking about these issues (though one could argue that its efforts fall short in execution); every single other aspect of every single distribution of Linux I’ve ever seen has completely missed this key principle, all the way from the Windows-mimicking, “even Grandma can use it” window managers to the kernel recompilation process. Even the Mac OS, the lone bastion of halfway good user interface design, took some boneheaded turns with OS X which only show signs of getting worse.

To Microsoft: next time you get the idea to write a Wizard, don’t. We’ve already left the nest, and we know how to fly. You’re supposed to be the turbo jet engines strapped to our wings, not an overprotective mama bird constantly reminding us how to flap. Boy, that was a dumb analogy.