Microsoft: Still Lost

I was saddened to read microsoft will be making more use of the ribbon interface. While I have slowly gotten used to it in office, it feels slower and more clunky than the original interface. Everything seems like it is lots of extra clicking and dragging to get results.

Reading their post, it seems that their designers are loosing touch with the purpose of a computer: getting things done. Making pretty graphics and making huge buttons the clog screens slow CPUs (or boost install requirements yet again!), is detracting from the point. Moreover, it is not focusing on the basic aspects of making a quality user interface. Attractive design is important, but it also needs to be psychologically intuitive, infinitely and instantly responsive, and non-intrusive. The ribbon, and to a larger extent, Windows, violates these points in several dimensions, and shows something of Microsofts core DNA.

I normally berate Microsoft for copying other peoples ideas, but I am beginning to wish that they would. There are so many good UIs in operating systems and other platforms past and present (Windows 2000 was nearly perfect in comparison.) (Google is really getting its act together, the new blogger interface is great!) There is a lot of information available about what works and what does not in user interfaces.

Fundamentally, the essential core of tasks related to productivity hasn't really changed for 10 years. The focus should be on how to make those tasks easier and more straight foward. Their msdn blog post notes a detailed statistical analysis of commands often used in explorer. Never do they ask why people are copying files around so much, where they are copying them to, and to what end? Could the process be improved?

This may be one of many signs of the slow fall of MS (I have no moral issues with naked shorts on MSFT). The browser and the cloud appear to be slowly taking over, and the OS is likely to be just another application layer for many purposes.