This /. post neatly captures my own feelings on the subject:

Microsoft had some good standards but they constantly ignore them these days. I saw a quote that thanks to Web application, which forces people to use really crappy UI, and the preponderance of high-resolution with lots of colors and everyone trying to take advantage of it (skinning is just another word for “angry fruit salad”), UI has been set back to about 1984.

And this tendency to make regular Windows apps look like Web pages is just ludicrous. There were so many violations of common sense in just the installation of Visual Studio .NET, I could write a book about it. The app itself isn’t too bad, but in some ways Microsoft has become the worst UI innovator because they are making lots of stylistic changes that have a negative effect on usability.

You can read the other side of the story (about Inductive User-interfaces) on MSDN. Frankly, IUI works well for certain classes of problems. Good examples include Money, Management Console, Office XP’s Task Panes. But IUI can be carried too far– look at Windows XP’s horrendous (default) Control Panel interface, for example. There, trying to find any given applet is by and large a trial-and-error affair.

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Did anyone within the Office teams even try to use their ‘Internet Integration’ features? If yes, could they please explain why right-clicking a hyperlink in a Word document (and, I’m pretty sure, in the rest of Office) when you’re viewing it in a IE frame doesn’t have a ‘open link in new window’ option? It’s irritating, because I lose the doc I was currently reading. So much for encouraging the use of Office formats on the web.

Charitable explanation: they are holding this off so they have something to add in the next release :-).

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Over the way (while on browsers), if Mozilla and Opera are such hotshot browsers (definitely, Mozilla’s popup busting is sweet), how come neither of them see it fit to provide a shortcut key for the address bar, which poor ole’ IE has provided since version 4? And what about an overridden edit control for the address bar (again, like the one in IE) that understands slashes, periods, question marks and semicolons as word breaks so that I can Shift+Control+LeftArrow through a URL easily to edit it? Ah, usability, usability…

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I kept typing start “E:/Apps/Editplus 2/editplus.exe” into a Windows 2000 console today and was frustrated as to why the darned thing would open up another empty console instead. Then I had the bright idea of looking at the help: START ["title"] …blah… [command/program]. The stupid thing assumed anything in quotes would be a window title. Someone gift the author a copy of Joel’s Book, this breaks my model of how command line programs work completely. I can’t imagine what harm a command like START [command/program] [/TITLE="title"] …blah… would have done.

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mpt: [History] is annoying in Mozilla in almost every respect. Yes!

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Note to Apple: In 1996, when Netscape 3 ruled the world and PNG was a newcomer, handling PNG via the Quicktime plugin made sense. In 2002, both IE and Mozilla have made significant advances and can now render PNG natively. So make Quicktime stop grabbing PNG images by default! Quicktime doesn’t do this when the a PNG image is displayed inline within a page, but on links like this one.) And yes, I’ve turned off this behavior in Quicktime’s settings, and now IE displays PNGs natively. But Mozilla 0.9.7 continues to show PNGs via Quicktime :(.

Update: Re-installing Quicktime solved that one.

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Joel Spolsky: I’ve asked a lot of my ‘power user’ friends about this; hardly any of them do any customization other than the bare minimum necessary to make their system behave reasonably.

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Indian E-com sites still need a lot of work. Most are characterized by churlish interfaces, bad writing, poor grammar, pathetic delivery options, poor searchability, and often, blatant mis-classification of the goods on sale. Add to the this the extremely limited selection available at most of these places. Even something as slick as Fabmart fails in this department. My two bits on the subject are in this piece: Why Many Indian E-Com Sites Suck.

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