Okay, so, one of the things I have actually done regularly on this blog (to the extent that I’ve done anything regularly at all) is complain about user interfaces. I feel I have a right to to do this because 1) I read a book about it once, and 2) as a reasonably intelligent user I ought to be able to. So, today I’m going to complain about the NXE user interface. This is what it looks like:

For those of you who haven’t used it in person yet, this is a map of what the important areas are:

Basically the whole thing is two-tiered: There’s a top-level list of views, like My XBox, Video Marketplace, etc., which you move between using up and down. Then there’s the second-tier, which is a Cover Flow-ish list of pictures on a shiny floor you move through using left and right. This is a little cleaner than the Blade thing, and I assume they’re trying to emulate the XMB here — I can’t speak for that because I haven’t got a PSP or PS3 to really mess around with. Anyway, I say Cover Flow-ish because of two things: First, it doesn’t do the flippy thing, and second, the current selection is always on the absolute left of the screen. In other words, if you have item N selected, items 0 … N-1 are invisible.

Now, I know it looks very pretty and all, but I see a pair of issues with this. First, it feels really unbalanced. Cover Flow puts the current selection in the center, because it feels really weird if it isn’t. You don’t have to go to art school to know that the focus of a picture should be in the center. The second issue is more annoying: you have no idea what is to the “left” of your selection. You just have to rely on memory or holding left on the stick until what you want appears. Imagine how annoying it would be if you only could see a picture of your current selection in the list, and nothing else: this is halfway there. Note that this isn’t a list where it “pages,” i.e., if you move to the last visible selection item, it moves to the next page, and your selection is at the start of the visible part of the list again. The selection is always the first item in the visible part of the list.

There’s a similar problem with the top-level view list as well, in that items have this falloff effect where the farther from the selection they are, they fade out. The list of top-level views is only maybe six or so items long, I don’t know why we need some kind of a fancy effect to hide two or three of them.

I’m sure they made it work this way because it looks cool in motion, but it annoys me because if they spend a whole lot of time supposedly making the UI better, you’d think they wouldn’t miss things like “if a list scrolls, show the selection in the center” and “don’t hide half of the list so the user has to guess what the previous items are.” I don’t want to drag out the whole Apple versus Microsoft thing again, but here we have a clean-cut example of Microsoft doing something Apple pulled off well, and making some brain-dead mistakes in terms of the little touches that make a good UI, like balance and visibility.

Note that I’m not a Cover Flow fanboy or something here; I have no idea what the heck why we need Cover Flow to browse albums. 90% of my iTunes library has no cover art, and even if it did it is way faster to look through a normal list of album/artist names than flip through the covers. Also, Cover Flow has the albums adjacent to your selection rotated inwards, so you can’t really see them square-on. The only possible benefits I can think of are that it looks cool in ads, and it’s “fun.” So, I can see why XBox wants those, but if you’re going to make it your primary UI, you ought to think it through a little more. This is just going to be bugging me for eternity now.

ADDENDUM RE: NETFLIX

I also noticed some stupid things about the Netflix store, when I was trying to see how the new streaming works. You see, my dad has a Netflix account, but I’ve never used it directly. Anyway, so I go download the Netflix program on the XBox, do the activation dance. (Side note: the activation was surprisingly easy — I was afraid I’d have to enter a username and password on the XBox, which is doubly dangerous because typing on the XBox is slow and my dad probably doesn’t remember either of those, but they just give you a code you punch into the website on your PC and it activates that way.) It comes up with this list of films in my dad’s Instant Queue.

So, this is the first thing: what the hell is an Instant Queue? It seems like one of the rare cases of finding a genuine oxymoron out in the wild — if you can watch the movie instantly, why do you need an analogue of the queue used to send DVDs to your house? After being completely baffled by this concept for a few minutes, I figured out that it’s basically just a movie bookmark system. I guess they just named it a “queue” because everyone on Netflix is already used to queues and they didn’t want them to adjust to a whole different noun.

But this is the weird thing — apparently you have to add the movies to your Instant Queue on your PC, and then you sign in on your XBox and they’re available for showing. In other words, there’s no Netflix browser on the XBox that I can see. This is sort of annoying, and I would make an analogy to having a console web browser where you can only look at things you’ve bookmarked already. I do sympathize: browsing on the PC is a whole lot faster, if you’re actually on the PC. I still think it’d be possible to make a passable system to look through the available movies for streaming, though, seeing as there’s not a lot of them (and 90% of them look like crap).

Here’s the other thing, and this is just bizarre:

The “Add to Instant Queue” button is always hidden, like a rollout, inside the “Play” button. This is really confusing when the help tells you to use that button to add things to your Instant Queue and you can’t see it. Is there any reason at all for this? One of the basic principles in UI design is you make your UI elements visible, not hidden, only to be revealed with some kind of bizarre mouseover action. They could have just, you know, had that button underneath the Play button. It’s not that hard.

Okay, so has anyone else noticed a curious blurring between SDI and MDI apps happening? The main culprits here are Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Let me demonstrate. Normally, a program either has one window per document (thus, one taskbar button per document), or one window and subwindows for each document (only one taskbar button.) MDI apps have generally been decreasing in popularity recently, generally only sticking around for things like IDEs, Photoshop, or web browsing, if you count tabs as documents. However, if you open MS Excel or any Office program, and do a File->New (well, the equivalent now that there’s no actual menus), you’ll find that you have two taskbar icons, but one actual window.

Now, I guess they did this so the somewhat more confusing MDI system is easier to use from the taskbar. But it totally mixes metaphors. You actually have only one window, but you’ve got N taskbar icons. I think they probably should have just converted entirely to SDI, seeing as it’s gotten the better evaluation from UI experts (as far as I understand.) But the practically annoying thing about it is this:

Because of whatever black-magic voodoo is going on to make taskbar icons for nonexistant extra windows, you can no longer close an entire group of them on the taskbar, or do any of the other actions on the menu for the group. I regularly close lots of windows from the taskbar when I finish working on something, going down the line and purging stuff I don’t need anymore, but I can’t do that with this behavior.

The weirdest thing is, if you go into the Excel window (with the documents “maximized” like normal, not in a non-maximized state like the screenshot) and hit the “X” for the whole outer window, only the top document closes.  So basically none of the normal “close all of these windows” actions works at all.

Adobe Acrobat Reader is exactly the same, except the “X” closes everything, which is also somewhat annoying if you had multiple PDFs open and intended to just close one. (I tend to forget an app is MDI if I use it 100% of the time with the document sub-windows maximized, like I imagine most people would.)

The weird part is they seem to have gone out of the way to make the programs behave like this half-single, half-multiple document chimera, as usually each main window gets its own taskbar icon.

I am pretty sure I do not need this many processes to use a network printer.

Okay, you know how there are people who crusade against misuse or misrepresentation of science in news, government, and public education? (A good example is badscience.) Well, I’m realizing that more and more often I’m getting outraged at the amount of things people (well, mainly companies) do with software and technology that are the programming equivalent of kicking your customers in the balls, on purpose. The EFF and related organizations do this from a legal/freedom standpoint, but there’s a lot of cases that are not quite so insidious but that still are enough to tick me off.

To give you an idea of what I mean, let’s start off with some simple examples. I repeatedly see ads for ISP’s that claim that they are N times as fast as their competition. For example, cable claims they’re faster than DSL, budget dialup claims they’re faster than other budget dialup, etc. Here’s the problem: they never say how fast the connections actually are. Car advertisements say how many cylinders the engine has, or what its horsepower is. Internet providers, on the other hand, seem content to tell you something that sounds good, but gives you absolutely no useful information. I do not know whether this is done because they don’t want you to know, or whether they don’t think you care; but either one is somewhat insulting, and indicative of how a lot of technology companies seem to think about their customers. I don’t think you have to be a technical guru to be able to compare how many average megabits up/down two service providers have.

The mindset seems to be: “People are stupid, so we can tell them that it does X, and as long as it does something that you could mistake for X if you weren’t paying close attention, we’re OK.” I imagine there is a whole spectrum of intent (ranging from ignorance to sheer malice) as to why this type of thing is done. But when it gets into software or hardware it’s inevitably bad.

Here’s another example: I recently purchased an LG VX8600 phone to replace my aging phone. My mobile service is Verizon. This is what the LG website says about their phone:

Bluetooth Capable (v1.1) – supports headset, hands-free,* advanced audio distribution, serial port, dial-up networking, file transfer, audio/video remote control, object push profiles for vCard

Okay, well, this is true. The phones do support doing file transfer, in theory, when they were designed. However, Verizon, in their infinite hatred towards any of their customers who do not own Blackberries, decided that they couldn’t tolerate this much functionality.

I asked the guy at the store where I bought the phone: “So, is there USB or Bluetooth to transfer pictures off of the phone?” He answered that, no, there is neither a USB cable or bluetooth support, and I should mail the pictures to myself for $0.25 each over the mobile network so I could get them onto a computer. I picked up one of the Motorola RAZRs that was sitting there and looked at it, and asked if there was a USB cable I could get for that, if I wanted to buy one instead. He told me there wasn’t. Now, if you’ve seen a RAZR, you’ll notice that it has a mini-USB connector on the side, so I could tell at that point he was either lying or totally ignorant.

Anyway, it turns out you can do file transfer over Bluetooth, but not through any normal OBEX link like you might expect. Verizon has specifically crippled the phone’s Bluetooth support for some unfathomable reason. I tried several programs to no avail until I found out BitPim supports communicating with it in a protocol it can understand (I tell it it’s a VX8500, which is basically an LG Chocolate, and specify the COM port manually.) There is also a USB cable you can buy from LG and possibly Verizon, which is basically impossible to find and has absolutely no indication of what software comes with it and what the capability of the software is or what USB device class the phone supports. By “impossible to find”, I mean that it took me two or three days of digging around in Google until I found out that you can buy them on Amazon.

So, this sounds nitpicky to be complaining about Bluetooth file transfer, but remember, I’m buying this phone because it records and plays pictures, video and audio. I got the damn thing because I wanted something with a camera. So, basically they’re trying to sell me a tiny device that’s labeled to be a camera/video recorder, but (as far as they would have me think) is completely incapable of transferring the pictures off the goddamn phone for free. When I hear cameraphone with bluetooth, I think cameraphone that I can take pictures with and get them onto my computer. Actually figuring out how to get JPEGs off my phone was like pulling teeth. This is a big deal. This is stupid.

Another good example is Microsoft’s XNA initiative. (Update: I’m told that they are planning on letting non-Creator’s Club members play homebrew games eventually, so you can ignore this paragraph if you want.) Doesn’t it sound fun to write games that can be played on the XBox 360? Well, I hope it sounds really good because it costs you $99 a year to play them on your own XBox. (You know, the files are on your computer, your XBox is sitting in the room, and it cost $99 a year for the bits to get from here to there.) Moreover, anyone else who wants to play them also has to pay that. Oh, and there’s no networking support in XNA (yet, at least.) Once again, sounds good in a blurb; in reality, it has a very high cost of entry that I would imagine is going to significantly impact the amount of people that try out developing games for it, in addition to totally stunting the penetration of homebrew XNA games to non-developers. So, we’re at almost exactly the same situation as other consoles that try to keep you from playing unlicensed content. The difference here is that Microsoft has decided that they’d rather have the money instead of all that cash going to some Asian modchip company. I’m not trying to hate on MS here, god knows that happens enough without me; but really it sounds dumber the more you hear about it.

So, can anyone think of a word that describes a product that sounds great in an executive summary but totally flies in the face of reasonable engineering practices? (Purposeful crippling, locking, ridiculous fees, woefully incomplete feature implementation, etc. all apply.) I’m worried that if people don’t start having a clear way to tell companies what bad faith their product is designed in, that we’ll just get buried under a pile of software and hardware about as well-engineered as Linksys routers, AOL, the average mobile phone, Windows Media Center Edition, etc.

NOTE: Before you mention that this list only has four items, I’d like to say that these are in no particular order out of the other 5,000 things that annoy me about XP.

1. Most control panel windows are “special” — in a bad way. They do not show up in the taskbar like every other overlapped window on the planet. Additionally, they tend to disappear if they lose focus. At first it looks like they’re programmed to be destroyed if you click out of them, and somehow save the user having to remember that they have a window open; but it turns out that they just end up stacked below all the other windows, like a normal overlapped window, except there’s no way to recover them except minimizing everything else. In pretty much every other normal Windows program (and most other windowing systems as well), a window that doesn’t show up in the taskbar is a child window (like a messagebox or dialog, etc.) and is permanently ‘on top’ of its parent window. I don’t know why they decided to make the control panel windows some kind of weird hermaphrodite between an overlapped window (fully independent with its own taskbar button) and a child window.

2. This awful thing:

This tends to show up in installers and other programs where you have to “choose a folder”. What’s wrong with it? You can’t copy+paste in a full path, or type in paths at all. The closest you can get is typing in the first couple characters of the folders’ names at each level when you’re finding the folders to expand. Plus, there’s no way to sort folders by date modified or any of the other things you can at least do in the normal file chooser dialog. Even though Explorer is not the best file browser in the universe, an embedded Explorer window is better than this half-assed standin.

3. The file copy dialog.

Approximately 1/2 of this dialog is an animation of little files flying between folders. There’s no data rate for the copying, which I often wonder about when I’m copying over a network. There’s no counter for how much time has elapsed, or how much data has been transferred, so you would need to use a separate timer to actually figure this out. There’s no mention of how many files it’s copying, although in fairness it might not know. It’s obviously guessed what percent done it is, because it’s animating a progress bar, but it certainly won’t tell us what that percentage is. I suppose this is nitpicky, but I’m suggesting that all file/data transfer progress dialogs should always have the following:

• Actual percentage value of how much work has been done in addition to the progress bar.
• Amount of bytes copied, and the amount of bytes remaining to be copied, if known.
• Time elapsed as well as any estimate of how much time the rest should take.
• Data transfer rate.

4. The Add/Remove Programs window. Specifically, it taking forever to load the list of programs on the computer.

It takes seven seconds to figure out the list of programs that are on my computer (which is fairly new and doesn’t have that many programs). On older machines, with many more programs and a much slower processor, it takes ages. Why is this so slow? What could it possibly be doing with its time?

Add/Remove programs also has some other fun problems, like no ability to sort by install date or perform a search or batch remove. I also like how it expands the list row to be much thicker when you select it; this lets me have fun finding the other applications I meant to remove in the list again, because they’ve all been shifted downwards.

Does anyone want to place bets on how many silly things like this are in Vista?