Everyone wants a shiny new UI

Surfing around the web, I often run into web sites that contain critiques of various aspects of Windows UI.

One of the most common criticisms on those sites is "old style" dialogs.  In other words, dialogs that don't have the most up-to-date theming.  Here's an example I ran into earlier today:

Windows has a fair number of dialogs like this - they're often fairly old dialogs that were written before new theming elements were added (or contain animations that predate newer theming options).  They all work correctly but they're just ... old.

Usually the web site wants the Windows team update the dialog to match the newest styling's because the dialog is "wrong".

Whenever someone asks (or more often insists) that the Windows team update their particular old dialog, I sometimes want to turn around and ask them a question:

"You get to choose: You can get this dialog fixed OR you can cut a feature from Windows, you can't get both.  Which feature in Windows would you cut to change this dialog?"

Perhaps an automotive analogy would help explain my rather intemperate reaction:

One of the roads near my house is a cement road and the road is starting to develop a fair number of cracks in it.  The folks living near the road got upset at the condition of the road and started a petition drive to get the county to repair the road.  Their petition worked and county came out a couple of weeks later and inspected the road and rendered their verdict on the repair (paraphrasing):  We've looked at the road surface and it is 60% degraded.  The threshold for immediate repairs on county roads is 80% degradation.  Your road was built 30 years ago and cement roads in this area have a 40 year expected lifespan.  Since the road doesn't meet our threshold for immediate repair and it hasn't met the end of its lifespan, we can't justify moving this section of road up ahead of the hundreds of other sections of road that need immediate repair.

In other words, the county had a limited budget for road repairs and there were a lot of other sections of road in the county that were in a lot worse shape than the one near my house.

The same thing happens in Windows - there are thousands of features in Windows and a limited number of developers who can change those features.   Changing a dialog does not happen for free.  It takes time for the developers to fix UI bugs.  As an example, I just checked in a fix for a particularly tricky UI bug.  I started working on that fix in early October and it's now January.

Remember, this dialog works just fine, it's just a visual inconsistency.  But it's going to take a developer some amount of time to fix the dialog.  Maybe it's only one day.  Maybe it's a week.  Maybe the fix requires coordination between multiple people (for example, changing an icon usually requires the time of both a developer AND a graphic designer).  That time could be spent working on fixing other bugs.  Every feature team goes through a triage process on incoming bugs to decide which bugs they should fix.  They make choices based on their limited budget (there are n developers on the team, there are m bugs to fix, each bug takes t time to fix on average, that means we need to fix (m*t)/n bugs before we can ship).

Fixing theming bug like this takes time that could be spent fixing other bugs.  And (as I've said before) the dialog does work correctly, it's just outdated.

So again I come back to the question: "Is fixing a working but ugly dialog really more important than all the other bugs?"  It's unfortunate but you have to make a choice.

 

PS: Just because we have to make choices like this doesn't mean that you shouldn't send feedback like this.   Just like the neighbors complaining to the county about the road, it helps to let the relevant team know about the issue. Feedback like this is invaluable for the Windows team (that's what the "Send Feedback" link is there for after all).  Even if the team decides not to fix a particular bug in this release it doesn't mean that it won't be fixed in the next release.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2009
  Well the thing is, it's hard to understand your argument when you don't spell out whats actually involved in changing a dialog like the one in your screen shot. As devs we're sitting here thinking, thats an hours work at most.

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2009
  senkwe: I didn't include a description of how long it takes because it depends on the UI.  Some changes take minutes.  Some changes take days.  Some take months.   If it's just moving a control a few pixels one way or another, it might be a matter of a few minutes work.  If the change involves getting new artwork, it might take weeks (there are even fewer graphic designers than there are developers and they're constantly overbooked).

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2009
  this UI will never be correct, you can style a text input with css ;)

• Anonymous
  January 28, 2009
  I'm a developer too and agree with you about the point that you can't do both... But.. We cannot vote what we want in and what not. If Microsoft decides they want to update the calculator with a ribbon instead of fixing GUI problems, we have no vote in this. So it depends on the issue what I prefer to get fixed.

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2009
  Mr Larry, What really bugs me about certain windows dialog is the inability to resize the window. I am forced to use the scroll bar inside the dialog to see the contents. I shouldn't have to scroll to see all the contents at a glance on a 1280x1024 screen. Ron

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2009
  One of the most infamous examples of "old style" UI, BTW, is the Add Fonts dialog, which looks like it dates back to Windows 3.1.

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2009
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• Anonymous
  January 29, 2009
  Robert: Yes.  And you'd be surprised at the amount of applications that depend on subtle internal behaviors of dialogs unfortunately. Yuhong: That's actually been fixed in Windows 7 (the dialog was simply removed I believe).

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2009
  You need to allocate time and resources for keeping the cosmetic issues, year around.  It's part of responsibility if one is going to change the theme of the OS, and it's part of maintaining a software. If you leave it in the hands of technical people to decide, they'll always get to threats about trading features vs cosmetics, because they do not believe in the value of cosmetics in user experience, and in this case the example Microsoft sets for the community.  It's not really about rational, but rather contempt for visuals, graphic designers, user interface in general. Cheap arguement, I know, but Microsoft has 90,000 employees, 4 bilion$ of profit per quarter, the lack of resources is not an issue.  The cosmetic work does not take time from the senior developers who are tackling the more difficult problems, it's something that easily given to juniors or off-shored to India or China.   Programmers often fix dialogs that bother them, no matter what the priority is, if their in that code anyway.  It's not really about time or resource, but they just don't want to be told they have to fix a cosmetic issue because they don't believe it's important, and they want to make a point to the world that it's not important. Personally, I'm in charge of running a team and forcing developers to the right thing with regards to user interface, and I'm used to hearing these justifications given to myself or our users on mailing lists, by developers.  Steves Jobs wouldn't accept it, and neither do I ;) The proper reaction is to say to the user that he's right, not trying to suggest that he shouldn't be asking that in the first place, which is the programmer's natural reflex.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  Larry, following the tradeoff logic in your argument a step further, isn't it reasonable to expect the Windows team to have made the same kind of decisions when it came time to decide what types of enhancements would comprise a given version of the OS? "We can make sweeping UI changes and the associated boring work to make things consistent, or we can add feature XYZ, but not both" (aside: in practice, it seems like Microsoft often tries to take half of each option) I think the rub is that many believe that UI consistency should be a given, and therefore not on the list of negotiable features in the first place.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
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• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
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• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  You are absolutely right that it is a trade-off. And as you pointed out, it might take much more work than people think to fix that tiny UI inconsistency. But getting those UI right is one of advantages that Microsoft holds against other "free software" desktop and MS should really focus on those things. These are one of the most tedious jobs to do and inevitably, in free software world, they lack resource to get these things right-those hackers are more interested in fun-to-implement new features than UX. Yes, UI is hard. Just saying.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  @Tk: The first part: It's about the craftsmanship. The second part: your arguments don't make sense.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  "You can get this dialog fixed OR you can cut a feature from Windows" So, if this gets fixed, we get one more feature in Windows? Either change "get this dialog fixed" to "keep this dialog as-is" or "cut a feature" to "add a feature". But worded as it is, I request that as many dialog as possible be fixed. Even fix dialogs that are 100% correct. :)

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  I see your point, but this also reminds me of a recent blog post by Raymond Chen: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2009/01/08/9292088.aspx To quote: "Generally speaking, programmers don't do the visual design." So, if you have some people working on the layout of dialog boxes, and different people working on (say) IPv6 support, there isn't a conflict. Or is it a question of how many staff Microsoft wants to employ?

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  Maybe the largest software company in the world could just hire a few more graphic designers?

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  It's always a compromise but for me when I see one of these old style dialogs or just dodgy UI in general (and this isn't a criticism of Microsoft specifically, lots of software companies let this stuff get out the door), I just think the developers of the software don't care enough. If they are letting this kind of UI slip through the net, are they letting more serious but equally obvious problems out the door?

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  Larry, I think the problem is that you are looking at this wrong. The time to fix all the built in dialogs should have been accounted for when the theme changes were made and done as part of that project. The real question you want to be asking here is if it is more important to have a new pretty theme on some of the UI or to keep everything consistent. We all know which choice MS has been making. I think it is/was the wrong one, but I am not in charge there.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  Is that "send feedback" button going to be a permanent feature? Can it detect where (which application, dialog) the feedback was orginated?

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  What's wrong with the UI as pictured?  Add some glass (which I presume to be automatic) and it's just fine.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  I understand exactly where you're coming from and I have to deal with this practically every day... except with product management! There's zero hope users will ever get this point but you'd think a product manager would.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  Larry, being a developer myself, I understand your position. However, design is more important than ever, and old dialogs that suddenly appear destroy the impression of a modern, beautiful, and coherent environment (like Vista is intended to be). With MacOS gaining market share, MS should react. Example: The grey multiple tabs close confirmation dialog in IE8 is just plain ugly. Even Julie Larson-Green stumbled across it in her Windows 7 demo at PDC. Why doesn't the IE team replace it with the new TaskDialogIndirect API? We know that IE8 has to run also on WinXP, which doesn't have this API yet. OK, then why not use this API just under Vista/7 and the grey ugly dialog under XP? This IS more work, of course, but users SEE the ugly dialogs under Vista/7, which simply give the general impression that MS is way behind in design or doesn't care about it that much - which is sad, because Vista/7 are actually really beautiful.

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2009
  "As an example, I just checked in a fix for a particularly tricky UI bug.  I started working on that fix in early October and it's now January." Gosh! You are slow Larry. Only joking. :-) Yeah, I agree that things have to be weighed that what goes in and what does not. Its your product after all, you get to decide what's in it.

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2009
  Re: the Add Fonts dialog. It's sad this relic is being removed. 8=[ I've actually been using it for years because I thought that simply dragging the font into the folder won't make it install properly.

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2009
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• Anonymous
  January 31, 2009
  Larry, your post begs a lot of questions about solving the root problem of the Windows development process. Why are the new dialog drawing APIs not simply backward compatible with the old calls? That is, why don't the dialogs simply update automatically to draw with the new UI? Why does a developer even need to touch this? IIRC, this is how it worked over on Mac OS X when they transitioned from the striped window backgrounds to the gray gradients. Second, why must a developer be the only one who can fix this? Is the UI display layer not sufficiently abstracted from the working guts of the OS? If so, why doesn't MSFT fix this? If it is, then why not let PMs, testers, or other technical staff who aren't developers get in there and make the change. Steve Ballmer was talking about the "tyranny of OR" back several years ago when I worked there. Looks like that never caught on with the troops.

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2009
  When you have a competitor (Apple) which are able to do both (add features and keep the UI consistent) this excuse is just an admission that your product is inferior (which I don`t believe it is, but thats what I get from reading your post)

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2009
  "When you have a competitor (Apple) which are able to do both (add features and keep the UI consistent) this excuse is just an admission that your product is inferior (which I don`t believe it is, but thats what I get from reading your post)" See Robert's comment and Larry Osterman's response.

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2009
  Hansii: Actually Apple was criticized with Leopard because their UI wasn't consistent - there were still pieces of the system that still used brushed chrome dialogs. Even a company as obsessive with fit&finish as Apple doesn't get all this right.

• Anonymous
  January 31, 2009
  >Because XP doesn't support TaskDialogIndirect, they would >need to author a completely new dialog for Vista and Win7.  >That in turn incurs a multitude of costs - localization, test, >etc. Welcome to the real world... At least the IE Team knows how it is to have an nice SDK full with functions but can not use them as they still have to support XP or older...

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2009
  Thanks for the post, Larry.  It's interesting to me the level of detail some of these critiques include. Things I would never notice other users notice and document with such specificity you can't help but admire the effort. As a developer, I can certainly understand the trade-off, but I can also see the other side issue. Microsoft releases UI guidelines with the goal of creating a more consistent user experience. It is not entirely unreasonable to expect that each successive version of Windows would lead the way in the adoption of this experience. While some users may be unreasonable in their petitions or criticisms, the vast majority simply want to see Windows become an even better product. I think that's a cause we can all rally behind. :-)

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2009
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• Anonymous
  February 01, 2009
  @JamesNT.. so what ? You are saying exactly the opposite I think -> that it's better (for your career, your managers, while probably not for the product but it's debatable) if you work on appearance than internals because everyone can tell between a nice dialog and an ugly one, not everyone is able to tell between a good alg. and a terrible one.

• Anonymous
  February 02, 2009
  I believe JamesNT was making a simple point - "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" Based on his many previous comments I've read, I think him we'd get along well if we ever met. It's so easy for people to criticize Microsoft but there are business realities at Microsoft just like there are at any company. It's the constant struggle between the idealists and the pragmatists. Do we complain about other people's products/processes/etc. being imperfect or do try to understand the picture isn't as easy as "fix this, it sure SEEMS easy to fix! C'mon!" This isn't about being a Microsoft fanboy - and I can't believe people would throw that around as an insult just because some of us recognize throwing lots of money/resources at problems won't magically make everything bug free/perfect. This also isn't about throwing our arms up and saying "okay, don't fix it then." It's simply about understanding there are many pressures (moreso than us Microsoft outsiders probably realize) so our own pet bugs (like an old style user interface) may not get immediate attention. It's not a perfect world, but it's a real world.

• Anonymous
  February 02, 2009
  Jeff, I love you. JamesNT

• Anonymous
  February 02, 2009
  While I agree with Larry's argument, I think that ONE dialog that would really benefit from an update is the ChooseColor dialog. That dialog has been there, untouched, since Win 3.1, when 4bpp was still the norm. It's simply not much usable as is anymore (tip: it should be more photoshop-like, and custom colors should be global to all apps). As for people complaining that there is no TaskDialog for XP, think again: http://www.korosoft.net/projects/tdemu/ If I could do that in a month, MS sure can too. They could just port the Vista code as well in a redistributable library, should they want to.

• Anonymous
  February 02, 2009
  @JamesNT: I am speechless. Or were you trolling for fun? Anyhoo, that said, there are plenty of people who understand there's limited time and resources on any project in any industry. Whether it's your kitchen renovation or the layout of your favourite magazine or the production of a new car or the writing of a blog post: there's a limit to what you can do before you have to move on and either send it to market (or scrap it). Many people have an unrealistic expectation of MS; are all (or any) non-MS products you use perfect from version to version?

• Anonymous
  February 02, 2009
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• Anonymous
  February 03, 2009
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• Anonymous
  February 04, 2009
  > "You get to choose: You can get this dialog fixed OR you > can cut a feature from Windows, you can't get both.  Which > feature in Windows would you cut to change this dialog?" Wouldn't it be great if the developers could focus on implementing new features while the graphics designers could spend time maintaining the layout of the various dialogs. Then you can actually get both. Oh wait, that's called WPF...

• Anonymous
  February 05, 2009
  @Hino Musouka Well put. But the problem can be controlled in other ways (i.e. there is one "shop" that disregards recommendations from its clients, and there is another "shop" that you can go to that has a different set of priorities and standards).

• Anonymous
  February 05, 2009
  P.S. I like you a lot Larry, but this post made my stomach turn over. I used to have hope. Sigh. :(

• Anonymous
  February 06, 2009
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• Anonymous
  February 06, 2009
  @Mike:  It's more like "Yeah, we have a minor issue in which the glovebox interior no longer matches the rest of the car, but wouldn't you rather we focus on improving the instrument panel's readouts?"  You make it sound like these dialogs people talk about are commonly seen:  they aren't.  I would bet a good amount of money that you can find a lot of people who don't even realize they exist. Honestly, I think that same comment is worth noting to Philip and Mr. Musouka.  You're strawmaning his argument and then defeating the strawman.

• Anonymous
  February 11, 2009
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• Anonymous
  February 11, 2009
  Tihiy: Sometimes.  Sometimes it's a matter of weeks and weeks of work.

• Anonymous
  February 11, 2009
  It depends how to define 'feature'. Vista had a 'feature' of a redesigned user interface. Except that feature wasn't fully implemented for the entire user interface. One would argue that the last 'feature' isn't complete yet until all elements of the user interface that comes with Windows Vista follow the user interface for Windows Vista.

• Anonymous
  February 11, 2009
  Ian: I didn't know that Vista had a feature of a redesigned UI.   There were elements of the XP UI that were updated for Vista just like there were elements of the Win2K UI that were updated for XP and there are elements of the Vista UI that were updated for Windows 7. To my knowledge, we've never had a completely redesigned user interface.

• Anonymous
  February 11, 2009
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• Anonymous
  February 16, 2009
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• Anonymous
  February 16, 2009
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• Anonymous
  February 17, 2009
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• Anonymous
  February 24, 2009
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• Anonymous
  March 08, 2009
  While your arguments certainly compute on the level of any individual employee, in terms of the entire company they make no sense. If they did Microsoft would never invest any resources into new visual themes or UI upgrades. Since the company does so, there must be returns for this investment, in terms of the user experience. Since you don't have any more evidence of how little or how much this return is affected by these mismatched UI's than do the complainers, I find myself unable to sympathize with your plight. Your contention that these issues are less important than some unnamed feature that would prospectively be cut is no less specious than the complainer's contention that the UI issue is more important than that same feature. I don't see any evidence that the triage team is any better at it either. You're awesome at code... why not leave it at that?