Gregg Eshelman
Aug 23, 2017 · 3 min read

“Twitter discovered that by requiring new users to follow at least 10 other Twitter members during the onboarding process”

Good thing I signed up on Twitter before they required that, or I wouldn’t have with that requirement. My only use for Twitter is to contact a person or company that has Twitter as their only means of contact.

Want to improve the interface and experience of software? Hire someone who has 30+ years of experience using *and fixing* computers so they know How Things Work. Someone who has used DOS, Windows, Macintosh and other systems. Someone who has encountered a whole lot of stupidly put together software so they know what *doesn’t work*.

I did some beta testing for some software in the late 90’s. The company wanted a weeks long process with regular reports. I spent 15 minutes with one program, went through *every feature and function* in it. Sent in one very detailed report noting everything that worked as it should, a couple of things that could be altered (and what to change to make them perfect) to be better, and noted one graphical glitch on the main screen. There wasn’t any more to do with it, so why waste time on a program that was 98% perfectly suited to the task it was designed to do?

I’ve used and worked on computers since 1983, longer than many people in the industry now have been alive. I prefer GUI software that has a UI that stays the hell out of the way of the UX. One of the worst ever UI alterations in the history of computing was when Microsoft put the window close button in Windows 95 where the Minimize button had been since the dawn of Windows. Untold millions of work hours were lost by people closing unsaved things when they meant to minimize a program. Microsoft’s UI people just plugged their ears and ignored the complaints until the world adapted. *But that should never have been allowed to happen*. The right way would have been to add the close button *to the left* of the maximize button. When you have established a standard way of doing something, to which large numbers of users have become accustomed, you don’t want to pull the rug out from under them.

With a much larger user base, Microsoft couldn’t ignore the complaints about the new UI in Windows 8, after a while of ignoring their customers, they finally acceded to demand and made Ye Olde Start Menu the default for Windows 10. That’s what they get for getting things pretty much perfect back in 1995. It works, it’s efficient (launch any program with only 2 clicks) and millions of users *like it that way* — though many of us who used Windows before 95 still think the close button is in the wrong place.

But some companies that hit on a perfect or near perfect design for their task early on tend to think that staying with it equals stagnation. So they get an idea to make major changes. Innovation! If it confuses the hell out of the users, if it makes using the software more difficult, even for a while, if it causes them to unintentionally lose unsaved work, it’s NOT innovation, it’s annoyance. You only get to do annoyance if you’re the biggest or only player in the game, like Microsoft was in 1995.

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    Gregg Eshelman

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