Bad UX in Windows10
We have been talking about the poor user experience of windows 10’s force update. There is no point to rub it in again. What I want to point out is the poor UX design during the windows 10 update.
Just last month I finally give in and let windows 10 did its update on my parents’ oldest computer. My parents are not enthusiastic about technology and therefore bad at handling it. I did the update for them. As I expected I have been receiving complains from my parents about how the computer’s performance is worse on windows 10. Aside from that, one of the design has been troubling my parents ever since the update, user login.
The problem is, during the update there is a stage that ask for a Microsoft account for later login. What if you do not have a Microsoft account? Well, apparently that is not a problem to Microsoft because you can always create a Microsoft account. What if you do not want a Microsoft account? Then you need to look really carefully.
I did not search this page very carefully because i did not have much time to spend on this update. I typed in my Microsoft account since neither of my parents have one. Now everytime my parents start up this computer, they have to type in my password to be able to logon. They constantly forgot what the password is and it is normal. It is simply not their account.
The second bad user experience follows this account problem. I decided to remove the logon screen to save the trouble for my parents. But how do you do that? I try to search in setting which seems to be a reasonable place to contain logon options but I only found the change password option. Then I turn to internet for help and acknowledged that there is a command named “netplwiz” which you can use to bring up a user account window and uncheck the option ‘Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer’(https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/skip-windows-10-login-screen/). This process is not hard to me, but what about people like my parents who is not good at technology? They are also users of Windows10, but this kind of design is not at all friendly to them.
Microsoft’s intention is very clear in this two problems, they just want as many users as possible to register with them. But is this approach the best way to do that? As a user I am not satisfied with this approach. It feels like Microsoft is tricking you to be their user and putting obstacles on the way of leaving their service. Why not just give user a choice? After making the ‘skip this step’ button bigger, people who want to register with Microsoft will still do so. And by moving the option ‘Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer’ into setting, will save a lot of trouble for users.
