[lesiva]

Agreed. The whole piece was emotional, but just reading that statement took it to irrational.

I think the underlying point of the article is that the experience of using Cortana could be improved, and Microsoft should be providing explicit next steps at every phase so that you aren't left wondering what's going on. I'd agree with that. But claiming someone should be fired is ridiculous, especially considering that the author still doesn't know what the feature does and it could still pleasantly surprise him. It may just need an additional dialog explaining what to expect next.

I assume the feature gives you desktop notifications when the package transitions between tracking stages, and even if that's all the functionality it provides it'd still be more useful than manually checking the tracking website yourself.

[WorldMaker]

It also shows the package tracking information on the Home tab as a card. The flow that the Notebook tab tells Cortana what to pay attention to and the Home tab shows information about the things Cortana is paying attention is a subtle one, but I suppose one UX designers would assume people pick up that Notebook acts like a giant Settings area and Home is the focus area.

Also, there is a happy path where Cortana does pick up things like tracking numbers from email automatically without having to manually enter them into the Notebook. Though it's easy to miss that happy path, because it also surfaces primarily as cards on the Home tab. (Though Outlook.com now has deeper, more direct, integration than that, showing the tracking cards directly above the email; Outlook (OG) has something like that in Preview, though not yet Cortana connected, and the Windows Mail app looks like it will pick up the feature eventually, too.)

[ethbro]

I'm going to generalize a bit here and say that "smart" features have decreased usability, as aside from single-focus products (e.g. Mint) no one seems to priotize deep discoverabity when the "smart" path fails.

Example A: MS trying to funnel all system settings through the search box. If that can't find it because I didn't type in the correct "1996 adventure game"-style keywords, I now have Control Panel (legacy), the Settings app (Win 8+?), and a hodgepodge of single-purpose Metro-ized settings pages.

[Pxtl]

It's basically the command-line probelms all over again, but with english instead of commands.

It's only marginally better. So far nothing has been better than AutoCAD's approach, for me - all GUI commands are echo'd into the command-line as you do them, so you can see what commands you're using if you want to key them in later. Negligible hotkeys because the commands work so well and are more memorable than hotkeys.

[nerflad]

A GUI with a 1-1 mapping to command line arguments sounds like heaven. Of course this exists for something like GVim, but I had no idea commercial software of any kind was doing it. That makes scriptability possible!

[Pxtl]

Yeah, AutoCAD is old so you have a lot of people with old command-line habits. I first used it in like '94. Loved the command-line and gui hybrid it used. Commands were composable too, like the "line" command would then ask you for where the first point was and you could use locator commands like "midpoint" or "endpoint" which in turn would take an existing line object as a parameter to select the origin of the new line. Haven't touched it in over a decade though, no idea what it looks like now.

[JetSpiegel]

AutoCAD script is actually a dialect of LISP, as I recall.

[WorldMaker]

I disagree with you for a number of reasons, but it starts with I think you have "smart" mixed up as search boxes are the epitome of "dumb", even if a lot of work goes into them behind the scenes to make sure they anticipate what the user wants.

Google proved many years ago that average users are more than happy to use a search bar as their primary user interface to everything. I've seen so many users that to go to any website never use bookmarks, addresses, shortcuts, anything, just type it vaguely into a search bar, and that's been some of their norm for a decade or more.

It makes sense for Microsoft to front-and-center the search box because that's what users use the most. That's what Google has been doing for its entire existence. It's about as dumb and simple a UX as possible.

Beyond that it's a "Why not both?" situation. A search bar isn't very discoverable, but it is easy and typically "does what the user wants", eventually, depending on how much effort goes into the "man behind the curtain". But you can have search and try for a discoverable UX at the same time. The Settings app many deride is something like Attempt #15 at making Windows settings discoverable. For better or worse, with as many settings as Windows has, making that discoverable is a herculean task, if not a sisyphean task. Every attempt has annoyed some people. The Control Panel has always been painful to use. The Settings app tried for a somewhat clean break and of course there are ton of opinions on it, because it moved cheese and its so different (though is it really?) from the Windows 3.1 Program Manager folder some people seem to expect still frozen in perfect amber from when they first learned to use Windows... There's no pleasing everyone, and there's no perfect path to discoverability or usability.

There's no "smart" path on either side; one requires currently unimaginable tools to read people's minds based on tiny text fragments they through into the void of a search box, and the other to anticipate every users needs and somehow make them all discoverable exactly when the user needs them. (One requires telepathy/telempath and the other prophecy, perhaps.)

I mentioned a "happy path", but that's extremely subjective. (One user loves it if search works great; another if they know just what to click; a third if they have a good CLI to automate it; etc.) It's also clear that there are many more fewer happy paths, than paths in general, and nearly impossible to "pave" all the really good paths for people.

[ethbro]

I used "smart" because ML / AI seemed overly charitable for what was going on behind the scenes. And it's certainly distinct (or tries to be) from "you must type in exactly and only the name of the thing you want to find".

The issue with MS post-ribbon, and I would say this applies to Settings as well, is that I've yet to see them form a good answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the Ribbon?"

Strictly heirarchal menu items were an initial GUI effort I remember, begat ribbon "everything available behind the scenes / set up your own menu bar", begat "let us find it for you".

The issue being there seems little thought in intelligently mediating a discovery action, to wit that I can describe the thing I'm looking for but the system lacks a representation in which I can do so in.

Magical search box discovery affords no such path, because the functioning of the system is deliberately obscured from me. I simply have to try guessing another key phrase associated with the thing I want.

And therein lies my gripe: I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.

[WorldMaker]

The driving guideline behind discoverability in a ribbon (and to a lesser extent the Settings) is to balance a combination of the most common tasks and the most powerful ones front and center. The answer to "Where do I go if the thing I want isn't on the ribbon?" is sometimes "Maybe there's a more common way or a more powerful/capable way to do it" because sometimes "it's no longer meant to be discoverable". (Though sometimes its simply it was underestimated to be a common need, maybe because its primary users opted out of telemetry.)

Personally, I think most of the ribbons are extremely discoverable, but obviously your mileage may vary. I agree though that the search boxes for ribbon functions should offer a "teach me to fish" moment of maybe somehow helping you see how you missed that option in the ribbon. Office at least uses the same icons consistently between search and the ribbon so you could potentially get used to the landmark and eventually figure out the sign posts along the way (and Help documentation still exists and is also in the search results).

> I wish they'd spend less time paving paths they can think of, and more time improving systems for discoverability that also address all the things they haven't thought of / haven't prioritized.

The Ribbon (and most everything else in this post-Ribbon era) was extremely influenced by user telemetry to figure out what users were actually using day-to-day. It was designed in coordination with user studies to observe how to make it as discoverable as they could. It didn't just come out of thin air in some ivory tower specification, it was prioritized as much as anything else by telemetry from users.

Similar for Settings, I'm sure the things that are moved into the new application and out of the old Control Panel are being prioritized by telemetry. It never surprises me that the users that most often complain about their "favorite" most commonly used settings not getting migrated most often don't have telemetry on.

[ethbro]

I'll shortcut my rant about the focus on cheese and moving thereof by noting that we're talking about two different things.

If any option is buried in an archaic path, that's not a well-formed system of discoverability to me.

I could care less that the top 90% of functionality is front-and-center, because I'm still going to use the remaining 10% once a week. And if it takes 100x as long as finding something on the ribbon and requires non-intuitive logic (because see previous comment about deprioritizing deep discoverability), then that's what I'm going to remember.

[contextfree]

I'd say the Office ribbon is still sort of hierarchical, just laid out differently. tab -> section/group -> item -> submenu/subdialog.

If something isn't on the ribbon or in any of the subdialogs it's almost certainly because it's deprecated and only still exists for some obscure compatibility reason.

As for Windows Settings, it's unfortunately weird not for some principled or philosophical reason, but just because they're still not done reimplementing all the features and use cases they want from Control Panel into the new framework.

In spite of my nitpicking I agree with your general point.

[ethbro]

> If something isn't on the ribbon or in any of the subdialogs it's almost certainly because it's deprecated and only still exists for some obscure compatibility reason.

Am I using it wrong then? I don't dive into Office if I can avoid it, but just yesterday there was some Powerpoint function I needed that didn't appear on the ribbon.

Had to pull out the "everything" right/left boxes, add it to the ribbon, and then I could use it.

I know they've been trying to fix that with context, selected-object specific tabs that appear, but it still has a ways to go.

[wslh]

I am not sure about Cortana but I am sure that other project product managers (e.g. Skype) should be fired. They have historic popular issues. Basic negligence, not bugs.

[gmueckl]

Skype... I am actively trying to get rid of it these days. That ridiculous bloated and slow HTML user interface that many native clients have transitioned to (especially Linux and Android) is beyond description. Why does it need to take up 50% of one core when it is idling in the background? On an i7-6800k no less! On my note 8 it drains the battery in no time while managing to be extremely sluggish and unresponsive.

It somehow feels like MS is actively trying to destroy this product.

[seanp2k2]

In Atom (one of the first public releases), I had this plugin that used CSS animations to fade the cursor in and out. It took ~100% of one core to do this. That’s right, in order to fade a color between white and clear, in 2017...

I don’t use that plugin anymore. Electron is dope because it actually delivers on the “one UI across all OSes” but the number of abstractions and the performance hit for this is staggering. It’s not that it needs to be this bad — I don’t think that there’s some specific problem in the technologies, it’s that it /is/ bad in practice. But whatever, my home desktop has 8 cores, 32GB RAM, ~2GB/sec disk reads, and 100mbit internet, so it works with about the same responsiveness as a normal app under Win95 on the hardware of the day.

https://www.forbes.com/2005/04/19/cz_rk_0419karlgaard.html Still as relevant as ever.

[cjsuk]

I believe the answer is because their talent has left and now there are inexperienced comp science grads, UX designers and marketing left and nothing else.

[gmueckl]

So you think that MS is unwilling to pay enough bribes to talented people to keep this product alive? They could certainly afford it.

[cjsuk]

Nope not that. I don’t know anyone who would accept the cash to work on products with such a bad reputation.

If MSFT offered me £100k right here, right now I’d turn it down.

[dboreham]

Skype (on Windows specifically) just doesn’t work for me now. Fails to deliver chat messages, freezes (not necessarily both at the same time).

[gmueckl]

It works for me on Windows but has the annoying habit of popping up s notification for each and every message that arrived while that client was offline. It does not matter if I had already read it in another client. And the notifications come one after the other with some 5 seconds of delay. I cannot find polite words for how annoying that is.