Lessons from the Narwhal

There is a lot at stake with the new user interface in Windows 8. Ubuntu’s experience from 2011 gives us clues for how this might work out.

Brace yourself Microsoft. It's your turn now.

With a new Windows version coming out, 8 is of course dominating the tech blogs. I haven’t looked much myself, but I’m assuming there’s gushing praise from Microsoft fanboys and scathing remarks from the hardcore Mac and Linux fans. I really have no appetite for a string of blog posts on one product myself, but having had a look at Windows 8, there’s now one extra thing that’s grabbed my attention other than the Windows Store, and that’s the Metro Interface (it’s now called the “Modern UI” due to a copyright row, but everyone’s still calling it Metro). I promise to move on to something else next time.

This new interface has grabbed a lot of attention, and not all of it’s good. Microsoft’s incentive is to make Windows 8 more friendly to tablet users where they desperately want to compete with Apple and Android, but they risk alienating their desktop customers. I have now tried out their interface and I can confirm it’s a right pain in the bum to operate with a mouse compared to the Start menu it replaced. I can see this being good for touchscreens, but there’s no sign touchscreens are going to replace keyboard, mouse and monitor in the office. Usability is a major issue for mass consumer software, and from the sound of some commentators you’d think this was Windows suicide.

Newbies are your friends

All programmers and testers share one weakness: they don't know what it's like to not be familiar with computers.

Easy to laugh - but in IT the equivalents to push and pull signs aren't so obvious.

(Cartoon from The Far Side, in case you live on another planet.)

I have a confession: for a long time, I couldn’t get the 3G internet to work on my smartphone. When I bought it six months ago, I could make calls and connect to wi-fi, but the mobile broadband stubbornly refused to work. I read the manual from beginning to end, trawled the internet, fiddled with every setting and swore at it, before I finally realised mobile broadband wasn’t switched on.  After all the times I’ve been showing off making things look easy that other people struggle with, I can consider this a taste of my own medicine.

But, embarrassment aside, that was a good lesson in what it’s like to not be a techie. As a late entrant into the smartphone market, I was getting to grips with things that are second nature to most users. To someone who is familiar with Android, checking 3G internet is activated is such an obvious thing it’s not even worth mentioning,^[1] any more than a locksmith would consider it worth asking if you were pushing a door with a “PULL” sign. But little things like this add up and can stop people using new products completely. This is where usability testing comes in.