Win 7, IE 8: features by the numbers
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Beta, Web browser, Windows, Internet, Microsoft on
Windows and IE get the features that people use; that’s good if you’re in the majority.
In early betas of Internet Explorer 8, when you typed a search into the address bar rather than the search box, the list of results you got was five URLs from your history and five URLs from your RSS feeds. Less than 1% of the IE8 beta testers ever clicked on those RSS results and most people said what they wanted was URLs they’d typed in - so the shipping version of IE 8 doesn’t give you RSS results when you search in the address bar, just ten results from your history. ..
Well, actually, it does, but only if you dig into the options and turn RSS results back on. There’s some confusion in the IE team about this. Depending on who you ask you’ll be told it’s relegated to an option and off by default or it’s gone completely because having everything be an option increases complexity and the number of combinations you have to test. The ‘ordering pizza for 150 million people’ analogy that Dean Hachamovitch is applying to simplifying Internet Explorer and Steven Sinosfky is applying to simplifying Windows comes from a boss they once both reported to and it’s true that you can’t have all the features and only the features that suit everyone, and that if everything is an option there will be many users who never figure out the right options for them. (And that the more combinations you have to test, the longer it takes to ship.)
If RSS results from the address bar had gone away, that would be bad news for 1% of IE 8 users, which is quite a large number of people - except, of course, it’s not really 1% of everyone who uses IE. It’s 1% of everyone in the beta test group, Paul Cutsinger of the IE team told me, and “it would drop way down in the mainstream population”. Beta users are different; we’re actually prepared to use beta software for a start. “They’re early adopters, they tend to be power users, they tend to have more tolerance for problems that show up - but they also complain more!” Dev teams at Microsoft have to compare what they see from beta users with what they see in usability labs and in other tests. They have to filter out the biases from internal Microsoft users as well; nearly half of all Windows user have between six and nine windows open at once but most Microsoft employees have 20, 30 or 50 windows open at the same time.
Balancing that out is a difficult problem and I’m not sure Microsoft always gets it right. In the M3 and beta builds of Windows 7, Win+E opens the Explorer pointing at your document Libraries; in RC it will go back to opening My Computer, so that wherever you want to go is a click away. I should start by saying I’m a huge fan of libraries - I’ve been waiting for years for an easy way to search all my documents without having to remember which drive the one I want is most likely to be on. But most people who open Explorer are going to be looking for a document - at least most of the people who will use the final version of Windows 7. Beta users are implicitly more technical folk so a higher percentage of them will be going to a variety of places and so they want My Computer; but users will want documents more often than they’ll want multiple drives. Libraries are the way that we’re ‘intended’ to get at the majority of our files so having them as the default target of Ctrl-E made huge sense to me, both for immediate use and as the way going forward. If Libraries become as widely used as Microsoft must hope, not having them be what you see first every time will come to seem a confusing thing in a few years time.
And that’s the other problem with relying on users voting with their mice, even if you manage to remove the bias of early adopters, technical experts and other oddities. If what you want to do isn’t already a feature, how can Microsoft see in the statistics that it’s what you want to do? And if there’s a visionary feature that may not become part of the way you work until you’ve used it for a while, should Microsoft give up on it because the usage isn’t there at first? At the MIX conference this week, Senior User Experience Designer Stephan Hoefnagels claimed that the taskbar in the 1985 release of Windows 1 predated the Apple Dock by 15 years. If you want to take credit for a feature, you have to have the courage of your convictions and make it prominent - not hide it away behind the old way of working, even if it doesn’t win a popularity contest on the first day.
-Mary
Rated: 20% (1 votes)
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