In my playing with the Longhorn PDC pre-alpha version I have had a horrible sinking feeling about the upcoming Windows Longhorn interface. My suspicion has been that glitz is going to get in the way of a fully functional Windows interface.
Maybe the freaked out paper clip of past Office applications will be gone and the cocky puppy of Windows XP too, but what interface horrors await us in their place?
So, what has this to do with Scoble?
Scoble, it seems, has been interviewing one of the Microsoft Program Managers responsible for these visual aspects of Longhorn, Interview with Microsoft's "visuals" PM .
So what was it in Scoble's blog that has me worried?
Scoble tells us that the Longhorn "visuals" Program Manager has been studying expensive sports cars, fashion designers (their designs presumably?) and the Taj Mahal.
Oh dear!
("Dear" was the most polite four letter word I could think of in context.)
It seems to me that the first priority in the upcoming Longhorn interface is functionality and usability. And reliability would be an excellent bonus.
Flashiness is, in my view, at best a luxury and very probably a mistake. I was hoping that the mistakes of the Windows XP interface weren't going to be repeated. Now I am far from confident that a new generation of interface gaffes is going to be avoided.
It seems to me that a Longhorn interface which is sufficiently "cool" that it attracts the home user is likely to be intractably and intrusively glitzy for the business user.
Merging the code base for Windows 98 and Windows NT might have had maintenance benefits for Microsoft but it seems to me that it has led to a muddle in thinking about what a Windows operating system interface should be.
A few centuries back European explorers used, so it is said, to attract primitive natives using shiny beads and other trinkets.
In the twenty first century isn't it time that we moved beyond the shiny trinket phase in user interface design?
Posted by Andrew Watt at March 19, 2004 11:13 AM