Sometimes I glance at design choices and really wonder, ‘what were they thinking?’ Various widgets in MSN Messenger are a prime example of this; the IM client is a product in a field where nobody cares to use conventional UI chrome, and there’s the identity crisis between being a desktop app and a web application. Look at this:
I guess it works, but can’t imagine what thought process would culminate in deciding that ‘Cancel’ should be a button and ‘Connect Now’ should be a link.
Veteran Microsoft hacker Raymond Chen is chafed because of all the attention surrounding Google Maps:
Let’s see, Google Maps adds the world outside the United States, Canada and the UK, and people go ga-ga. Nevermind that Google’s new “maps” have nothing beyond country boundaries. “Aww, look at Google, she’s so cute and adorable!”
I’m sure the people at the existing online map services like MapQuest and MSN MapPoint are sitting there like older siblings, wondering when exactly they turned into chopped liver. MSN MapPoint has actual maps of most of Europe, and MapQuest’s library of maps is larger still. (Kathmandu anyone?)
I’m surprised that a person of Raymond’s calibre would miss the whole point. For a user, the interface is the software. It’s hard to argue that any of the interfaces Raymond pointed to are better than Google’s endlessly draggable, window-wide maps and unbounded input boxes. Perhaps the other software has clever datastructures, awesome algorithms, lots of information sitting there in the database. Who cares? I guarantee that your satisfaction level with a tool will be far more affected by whether it behaved well than by its other, more subtle capabilities.
Tellingly, Raymond’s next post harps on the fact that the Date/Time control panel is not a calendar.
Unaware of its design, people have been using the Date/Time control panel as if it were a calendar, not realizing that it was doing all sorts of scary things behind the scenes. It’s like using a cash register as an adding machine. Sure, it does a great job of adding numbers together, but you’re also messing up the accounting back at the main office!
Way to miss the point. I need to check a calendar far more often than I need to adjust my system clock.
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