There’s something that two software design experts, Steve Krug and Joel Spolsky, both agree upon in regard to usability: in order to be considered good, an interface should behave in a predictable manner that the user expects, and it should do so consistently.
Windows XP, by that definition, fails even at the simplest task. Allow me to prove my point.
I’m a keyboard user, and when I have a file in explorer selected, I delete it by pressing the Del key. This in turn pops open a dialog box asking me if I’m sure. I am, so I press Enter to accept the default OK, and the file gets moved into the trash bin. What could be simpler, especially since those two keys are near each other on my keyboard?
I’m also a power user. I often have numerous applications up, and when one is busy doing something, I switch focus to another while the one I just left continues to process in the background. At any given point in the day, I may be compiling in one window, copying server files from another, have spiders crawling website contents, have a BitTorrent pulling the latest Linux distro, email polling in the background, version control doing a checkout, all the while burning a DVD backup of our database. This is not unusual at all, but it does mean that my computer is busy, and that can induce a few millisecond lags here and there.
And there’s the problem. XP is temperamental.
As a power user, my muscle memory tells me that to delete a file I simply select it and rock my hand over Del and Enter in an instant, and there will be a quick flash, if I see any at all, where the dialog would have come up and gotten its answer, and gone away. For the majority of the time, this works.
However, if my XP system decides to be busy for a few milliseconds between the Del and Enter, which I have no way of knowing if it will or won’t, then this happens: The Del is seen, but not acted upon, Explorer gets control again, and this time it sees the Enter, which means “open this file.” At that point, the program starts running, which may not be a good thing if the objective was to delete it. Now I’ve got a rogue program starting up, and I want to shut it down quickly, only I can’t, because a new dialog box comes up and steals all control of the machine, telling me I can’t delete the program because it’s already running, and now I need to acknowledge that dialog box. Meanwhile, the evil program is in the background, taunting me, doing all the evil things it wants while I’m trying to navigate through this unexpected path.
In short, if I select a file and press Del Enter, sometimes it deletes my file, and sometimes it runs it.
Sure, I could slow down and wait between keystrokes, however this breaks my train of thought and slows me down to the speed of the computer.
And, yes, I could change the behavior of the recycle bin confirmation, but in some cases I want that prompting, otherwise I would have turned it off already.
In short, I shouldn’t have to reconfigure my environment and change my habits because the software is unpredictable.
I understand perfectly, by the way, why this behavior is happening. The difference is, just because I happen to know why, I don’t let Microsoft off the hook.
The “delete” messages is caught by explorer, but doesn’t get processed fast enough to pop up a dialog which “steals” the next keystroke. Consequently, when I press enter and “open” message is performed, and priority wise beats the delete message.
One fix is to simply know that if you’re going to be opening a dialog box, than any enqueued keystrokes should be queued for it for when it does get control. However, Windows is not architected for that.
I made reference to me outrunning the computer. I find this statement humorous in knowing that my computer is running 2,800,000,000 operations per second. This is a testimony to the performance bloat that is carried in XP.
Back when PCs were first coming out and running at 4Mhz (4,000,000 operations per second), it was not physically possible to out type them. I remember using a Word in college and it could keep up with my fastest speeds, even when emulating italics without hardware graphics.
Today, we’ve got dual and quad processors and multi-core chips running on some of the fastest systems known to mankind, and pressing the START button, which simply draws a rectangle, can take several seconds.
Something is wrong. Something is very wrong.