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Agreed. Joel Spolsky covered it in the article - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/03/talk-at-yale-part-1-of-3/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/03/t

Agreed. Joel Spolsky covered it in the article - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/03/talk-at-yale-part-1-of-3/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/03/talk-at-yale-part-... Quote from the article - "The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one.".

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one I want this laser engraved on a big stick that is then used to beat every UX designer on the planet before they are allowed to touch anything.
the_third_wave 5y ago
Is this the same old it compiles, ship it! Microsoft Spolsky talks about? I remember them in a totally different way, as a company which used paying customers as beta testers, where no single application used the same design language, where spurious windows with indecipherable error messages popped up randomly... in other words something close to the antithesis of what is written above. Part of this comes from Microsoft's focus on backwards compatibility which makes it possible for them to keep older parts around - just click through a few controls in Windows 10 to end up in something which looks like it started off in the Windows 3.x period - but another reason is probably the rivalry between different groups within Microsoft which want to push their own products based on their own toolkits.
kergonath 5y ago
> a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one I have never seen a Microsoft product with a consistent UI, though…

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one I want this laser engraved on a big stick that is then used to beat every UX designer on the planet before they are allowed to touch anything.

the_third_wave 5y ago

Is this the same old it compiles, ship it! Microsoft Spolsky talks about? I remember them in a totally different way, as a company which used paying customers as beta testers, where no single application used the same design language, where spurious windows with indecipherable error messages popped up randomly... in other words something close to the antithesis of what is written above. Part of this comes from Microsoft's focus on backwards compatibility which makes it possible for them to keep older parts around - just click through a few controls in Windows 10 to end up in something which looks like it started off in the Windows 3.x period - but another reason is probably the rivalry between different groups within Microsoft which want to push their own products based on their own toolkits.

kergonath 5y ago

> a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one I have never seen a Microsoft product with a consistent UI, though…