Not A Blog™

There is an interesting psychological phenomenon which—like all phenomena psychological—never ceases to fascinate me. It is something called the aesthetic-usability effect and it says, in essence, that a product which is well designed will be perceived as higher quality than one that is poorly designed. Apple knows this, and their products always look good even when they completely blow. (See: The G4 cube and the first generation iPod Shuffle, among others.) Actually, come to think of it, the iBook G3 laptops looked like crap, and the original fruity iMacs, while innovative, looked cheap—but Apple does a pretty good job most of the time.

One tech company which does not do a pretty good job with this is Microsoft. They have yet to master that mysterious alchemy known as “making stuff look good”. Some people call this design, but we don’t want to place ourselves outside of Microsoft’s league here.

Evidence of this is the OS everybody loves to hate, Windows™®© Vista©™®. (Fully aware that this article will be pointless in three weeks, I forge ahead.) Vista’s release candidate has been out for sometime now, and screenshots abound. I wasn’t going to look at any of them. I’ve heard all kinds of things, good and worse, relating to the Aero theme, but I didn’t want to see it in action until I could actually use the software. Well that lasted until this week, where someone posted a screen shot comparison of the four—yes four—versions of the GUI that Vista will ship with (more on this later). Having nothing else to rant about, I took a look.

Sigh.

I should have waited to see it in action because there must be something enthralling with the animation that makes it look good. Oh wait, no, I lied. The animation is gorky. No, wait, I lied again. The whole freakin’ theme is gorky. I hardly know where to begin.

Let me start by saying that I hate Windows XP’s theme. I still use that old standby, Grayboxville, the standard from Windows2000. (It’s also one of the four that comes with Vista, thank the gods.) It’s not pretty; it’s not ugly; it’s functional. In fact, it’s very nearly transparent to what I’m doing which is the point. It is wholly not noticeable and that’s why I like it. In any case, it’s infinitely better than the Fisher-Price version that comes standered with XP. XP is like the worst of early dot-com design rolled into one giant pile.

Moving on. The first thing you’ll likely notice about Aero is that it looks like Microsoft’s graphic designers just discovered Photoshop filters two weeks ago. [Note to Microsoft designers: Photoshop has had filters for about 8,241 years now. They’re old. If you use them, real designers will laugh at you. Stop. Please.] They’ve hit just about every cliche of bad Photoshop-filter design in the book including (fig 1) 1. glow around words, 2. horrible unrealistic drop shadows, 3. bevels with internal glow, 4. shinyness, 5. distracting auto-generated background patterns.

Figure 1


I want to expand on number 2 for a second here, because it’s a favorite of mine. I love going through print and finding the worst drop shadows I can. It’s easy because everyone uses them, but not many people use them as incorrectly as Microsoft does. This problem is made ten times funnier when you consider that 1. Microsoft has millions of dollars to throw at this problem and they still screw it up, 2. They make a big deal about the “glass effects” so it’s obvious they at least wanted to make it look like they spent a lot of time on them and 3. it’s a mistake which I, and a dozen of my fellow classmates, stopped making my junior year in college.

First note in Figure 2 the areas where you can see through the glass. There’s a blurry kind of muddy-looking image of what’s behind the window. Now look slightly above and next to the window, around the edge. What do you see? A shadow.

WHAT? Why is there a shadow beneath the glass? Okay, I’ll concede that semi-transparent glass does cast some shadow—but it does not create that huge crap of a shadow! Furthermore, the object isn’t dimmed at all. It’s like there was no loss of light—until you get to the edge. Then it’s Dark City. Light doesn’t even remotely behave like this, and I’m supposed to be impressed? I’m embarassed, frankly, that the brass at Microsoft finds this “good” much less “professional” design.

Then there’s the fact that Microsoft went to the trouble to develop themselves a new system font. I’m going to give them kudos for that one because that is a dang tall order and, truth be told, they did a pretty good job with it. In fact, they made roman, bold, and italic faces, all primarily for screen, but also printable. It’s legible, clean, and contemporary, if not suspiciously similar to what appears to be Frutiger. They go through all this work and effort to update the look of the copy and then what? See figure 3.

Figure 3


They don’t use it! Why why WHY after five years are my eyes still being assulted by the mind-boggling ugliness that is Microsoft’s system font!? And not only that—it’s not even anti-aliased! Wow. I can’t—no. Just wow.

There are dozens of these stupid details. Another example: Microsoft made a big deal out of having widgets or gadgets or whatever the heck they call them. What I want to know is, why do they take up this huge space on the right side of the screen? Screen real estate is vitally important. Why are you wasting mine, Microsoft? At least—please—give me the option of turning it off. Hopefully that’s what the “plus”—or maybe the “right triangle”—is for.

The most obvious question is, of course, why did someone even spend their time making a clock thingie? THERE’S ALREADY A CLOCK ON THE FREAKIN’ SCREEN! Why are there two? Why is the second clock like three hundred pixels tall? Why do I want to spend the extra couple seconds of brainpower processing the time from a pseudo-analogue clock where there’s a perfectly good digital clock right at the bottom of the screen? Has Microsoft totally lost it? At least in OSX the dashboard goes away and you can never look at it again. I’m surprised Vista doesn’t come with a mirror widget so it can reflect more of its awesomeness on itself.

Then there’s the super-faint but visible line that differentiates the thingiemabob bar. This is a classic example of “looks like a mistake” syndrome. It’s intentional, but it looks like it could be a happy accident. “Hey—the wallpaper tiled right at the edge of the doohicky bar. Cool.” I looked at it about three times, myself, trying to decide if there really is a seam there, or if I imagined it. This is bad design. If there’s supposed to be a distinguishing feature showing the edge of the space for stuff, then put one there. Pin lines aren’t evil. Don’t leave your elements just hanging off in space with some implied but-not-quite-there boundary. It’s distracting.

Speaking of distracting, the contrast is all whacked out. (You’ll note that at this point in the rant that I’m fed up with making screen shots.) If there’s one thing that makes for convincing 3D effects it’s SUBTLETY. 3D effects don’t work when they’re all in-your-face tryin’ to be hip like that waiter I had at Chili’s the other week. The shine-line is so shiny that it interferes with the legibility of the type on the buttons. This goes beyond annoying. This serves to insult the user’s intelligence.

Essentially, the interface is saying

HEY HEY! Did you notice me?! Yeah! Right here! I’m here—I’m there! I’m everywhere! It’s me: your new interface! What’s that? A new project? Looks dumb—let me shine it up for you! Haha—much better. Now you can’t read it! But it’s SO web 2.0! Now with BETA! Just like meeeeeeee!

In other words, Microsoft managed to take everything that made Clippy the despicable hateful character that he is, and distill it into the very essence of the user experience of Vista. You can’t go anywhere or do anything without being beaten over the head with the ego of Windows. It’s so prominent, it serves to obstruct usability, all the while looking like some pathetic junior design student’s project they cranked out last night during a rerun of Family Guy.

Now, seriously. Why am I ripping so hard on Microsoft? This is why. Aero glass has been pushed—repeatedly—as a feature of Windows Vista. It’s not like they said, “hey, by the way, we changed the look of the GUI from XP. Hope you like.” No, it was, “Aero glass aero glass aero glass aero glass!” until they released the first beta at which point the entire internet said collectively, and I quote, “Yawn.” So Microsoft came back with, “well, screw you guys. I didn’t want to hang out with you anyway… stupid Linux using lam3rz,” and took it’s aero glass ball over to play with Joe Consumer who doesn’t know a computer from a hole in the ground. In a few weeks, we’re going to hear about it all over again: the chorus of aero glass praise.

But I digress. Because aero was hyped as much as it was, it invites scrutiny. Okay, I’ll play your game, Microsoft. Aero glass is a feature for my consideration in your new product? I just considered it. I consider it to be underwhelming in the extreme, and not representative of professional graphic design. Besides, if you’re basing the merits of your computer operating system on what it looks like, you’re in the wrong business.

Although based on the look of aero glass, we don’t want you in graphic design, either.

Finally, one last point. Aero glass is only the most advanced iteration of the Vista user experience. There are, as I mentioned, three other versions of the GUI you can choose to use. Well, sort of. Apparently one of them is only available in one of the 683 versions of the program, but I heard that wasn’t quite the case, so I honestly have no idea. The point is, Vista also comes with “Standerd” and “Home” versions of Aero which are less glassy. Frankly, since the see-through-ness of the windows looks like a muddy pile of whatsit, I actually prefer these “inferior” versions as they’re much less distracting. Oddly (and I still don’t have pictures), “Standard” is more consistent with “Aero” as far as window sizing, button placement, etc.—but it’s inconsistent with the contrast between shine highlights and shadow. It’s more flat. Then for reasons unknown the “Home” version looks like Aero with the glass turned off but the buttons are in different places. Close, minimize and maximize are no longer docked to the top of the window but float inside it. Why?

Microsoft, who of all people should know this, have not even released Vista yet, but already managed to obfuscate the brand to the point where people aren’t even sure what Vista is supposed to look like. This is in addition to the fact that to get the “best” aero version, you have to have a video card with like a billion gigs of ram—why would I even want to allow Windows to use so much video ram in the first place? It takes up so much, in fact, that Windows has to switch to a less graphics intensive version any time it’s tasked to run video or other graphics-oriented processes. Talk about a freakin’ annoying resource hog. And for what? Photoshop filter-ey interfaces.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is this: everything about the Vista interface screams “why?“. Why, oh why, did they even bother with lame glass effects? Why are there three variations of the same redesign that aren’t internally consistent? Why is Windows Media Player like it’s own entity that doesn’t adhear to the UI “standards” of the rest of Vista? Why did they move buttons around?

When these kinds of questions are raised, it doesn’t matter if the design looks good or not. It becomes of an issue of gimickery for gimickery’s sake—something which should have no place in enterprise-level solutions. The aesthetic-usability effect can be a powerful tool, and leveraged properly, it can elevate a mediocre product into a powerful brand. But if you’re going to advertise your aesthetics as a feature of your product, you’d better make damn sure they’re solid.

-Ted

[Screen shots stolen from Long Zheng at istartedsomething.]