Utter stupidity and the Windows experience

Apr 14 2008 Published by Ben Chong under The Daily Geek

Last Friday, I left a Windows Vista notebook running over the weekend because I needed to download an ISO image.

For the non-techies, an ISO image is a copy of a CD that exists as a file your hard disk. You can use the ISO image to re-create a copy of the CD. ISO images tend to be very big. The one that I was downloading was more than 600MB in size.

This morning, when I came into the office, the notebook had been powered off.

What the….!?

I found out that Vista had downloaded an update and had automatically powered off the notebook after that update.

Needless to day, my download was 95% done when that happened.

Think of this: the download was for work. Now I have to restart the download and WAIT for it to complete. Think of how much money this is costing my company in terms of manhour costs.

Multiply that by the number of Vista users and you can imagine how much Vista is costing businesses in wasted time.

This automatic-shutdown-after-an-update feature of Windows is of a monumental stupidity.

I have had that happen to me while I was running virtual machines on another PC: the host operating system (which was XP) shut down by itself after an update. All this without first shutting down the guest operating systems that were running on the virtual machines. This is like powering off a PC without first shutting down the operating system. A big NO-NO.

I cannot imagine what must be going on in the heads of those people in Redmond when they came up with this scheme. Were the technical aspects of “doing it right” so daunting that they had to take such a shortcut?

For this is an engineering shortcut. There is no doubt about it.

Unfortunately, it just kills the user experience and wastes everyone else’s time and money.

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Do you still Yahoo? Part 2

Apr 13 2008 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product

I had a conversation with a classmate yesterday and we got down to talking about Yahoo.

Apparently, there is now an effort to make the search bar more obvious on the Yahoo home page (URL: www.yahoo.com).

This really surprised me.

My question is: How many people are using a search engine’s home page to do a search on the Internet?

Most popular web browsers today have something called chrome search. This is the little text box next to the address text box. See picture below of the chrome search box on FireFox. This is on the top right corner of the web browser application window.

Chrome Search

Most people would be, by now, accustomed to using the chrome search box to do Internet searches. All you need to do is to click in the search box, type in your search text and hit enter. You can do this while you are at any website. There is no more need to navigate to www.google.com or www.yahoo.com to do a web search.

So what are these Yahoo folks thinking?

Or do they think that people still go to www.yahoo.com explicitly to do a search?

I go to www.yahoo.com multiple times a day. But I do that because I like the news and informational articles. See below.

Yahoo articles

Do I go to the search box on the page and do a search after reading the articles? No. I use the chrome search feature.

Perhaps the Yahoo folks know something I don’t. Perhaps they have done some usability surveys.

The Intel anthropologist that came to our class a few weeks ago brought up a very good point: people don’t use technology in a vacuum. In this case, you don’t surf the Internet in a vacuum. You use a web browser that runs on an operating system on a physical computer. How you surf the Internet is affected by the web browser, the operating system and the computer. Who knows? Perhaps the kind of mouse you use can affect how you surf.

I am also doing a usability survey for some of the same issues. The survey is here. There is no cost to participate :-)   In fact, you get a chance to win an Apple 8GB iPod Nano of the color of your choice.

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Ubuntu: A Windows Vista-wannabe?

Apr 10 2008 Published by Ben Chong under Business, Marketing, Product, The Daily Geek

For the purposes of work, I just installed Ubuntu 7.10 Linux on a Parallels virtual machine on my MacBook Pro.

For some strange reason this morning, the Ubuntu virtual disk was just going on and on, spinning away and responsiveness was near zero.

Running “top” showed that a daemon called trackerd was eating a bunch of CPU cycles.

A quick search on Google revealed that trackerd indexes your hard disk for quicker searches.

Does that sound familiar?

Anyone who has encountered Windows Vista would have seen that same problem: the total lack of responsiveness in the user interface while the hard disk chugs away.

One would think that the Linux folks are generally more “progressive” than the people at Redmond.

But nooooo! As they say:”Fools seldom differ”.

OS X Leopard also has the same problem.

I think the issue is that no one in a product development organization goes through the end-to-end experience of an average user. Usually, someone has a machine all set up and all he does is to plunk in new binaries and run them.

On the other hand, the average user has a brand new computer and has to go through all that initial set up (and indexing à la trackerd/Vista).

So development organizations have to sit at the place of the end user and really examine every step the user goes through. Only then will their products be really user friendly.

I am still waiting…

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