

Why do you have to click Start to shut down? - marketer
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/07/22/54559.aspx

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warwick
This goes to show the value of actually watching users when they sit down in
front of your system. Even though 'Click Start to Shutdown' seems unintuitive
to all of us programmers, the usability study showed that it's what people
expected. You can't really fault the Windows designers for following the users
existing mental model rather than trying to change it.

~~~
dazzawazza
Usability studies also show the cunning of the average user. It's difficult to
know if what you have presented to them is good design or 'good enough' to
allow _most_ users to cope. Combine this with people's knowledge that they are
in a usability test, most people's desire to please authority figures and the
natural skew to any process where you can affect outcome in your favour and
usability studies become a mine field.

Windows is an exercise in 'good enough'. That's not a bad thing for a
commodity OS. It doesn't mean that it should win any accolades though.

~~~
etal
The catch is, once they do figure out one way of accomplishing a task -- even
if it's complicated, unintuitive, and not really what you intended -- they'll
cling to it and base future actions on that point of reference. So you can't
"correct" the interface without further annoying the users who already figured
out one way to do it.

Miguel de Icaza has an amazing post on this:

<http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-24-1.html>

On the Mono download page, available versions for each platform were available
as text links, with the platform's logo next to the links. Because of some
configuration of the wiki engine they were using, images automatically linked
to another page listing all the places where the same image is used. So,
rather than clicking on the text link to download the latest version, _95
percent_ of Windows and Mac users would click on the logo, see the listing of
other pages using the logo, scan _that_ textual list for the highest version
number (it's near the bottom of the list), visit the page for that one ancient
version, and download it.

Aside: Noting that users will only read text as a last resort, and not always
even then, I wonder what the success rate is for getting past Firefox 3's
"this page's certificate is self-signed" warning. It can't be any better than
Mono's.

~~~
eru
"We of course feel terrible to all of the 95% of the users that wanted to try
Mono on Windows and the Mac and ended up using a two year old version of
Mono."

That's humility.

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dazzla
Is it really that unintuitive to click the start button to start the shutdown
procedure?

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froo
I think that as tech people, we often forget that the vast majority of people
that utilise tech are often less logically inclined than we are.

Or to put it another way, simplicity + attractiveness sells.

David Pogue did an interesting TED talk on this in 06 in which he made a quick
stab at the start menu thing at about 10 minutes in. Linked below for
reference.

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_pogue_says_simplici...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_pogue_says_simplicity_sells.html)

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bkbleikamp
I actually knew someone who could not figure out how to shut down their
computer because it did not make sense to them to click "Start" to shut down.

~~~
Tichy
I hope they figured it out eventually, though? It is not that hard a skill to
learn.

No offense, but I think there are a zillion other things that would be more
important to simplify.

Hasn't Joel even argued that shutting down the computer should be unnecessary
in the future anyway?

~~~
baha_man
'Hasn't Joel even argued that shutting down the computer should be unnecessary
in the future anyway?'

Yes, he was also complaining about there being 9 options to chose from when
leaving your Windows Vista computer:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/11/21.html>

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mhb
Will the sequel explain why, on Macs, you drag disk icons to the trash can to
eject them? That always made me think twice about what I was doing.

~~~
breily
As of at least 10.4 the trash can becomes an eject icon when you drag a disk.

~~~
mhb
I guess that shows you how much that freaked me out.

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Elepsis
For what it's worth, the first time I used a Mac quite a few years ago it took
me a good five or six minutes to figure out how to log off.

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lallysingh
I think I just lost a little more faith in humanity. Thanks for that.

