Beating down Microsoft products is fashionable. And products like Waste-ah makes it so much more simpler (and justifiable) to do so.
In the next few week, I am going to blog about usability improvements in Vista. While the overall operating system still has a lot of work on the implementation, I think the product and program managers have done a stellar job.
For example: Do you remember this age old dialog box?
You could hit F2 in the file explorer to in place edit the name of a file. The entire filename along with its file extension would be highlighted, and when you started typing, the file extension, more often than not, was lost. That was not the only problem though. If you selected No in the dialog box, file explorer would revert back to the old filename instead of allowing you to start where you left and rectify.
Very nicely taken care of in Vista. Hitting F2 automatically highlights only the name of the file, preventing an inadvertent change of extension.
5 comments:
Nice find, Sunil. Reminds me of your post on UX without a UI.
Great. What if i still change the extension... what happens? Or is there no way for me to change the extension?
@Umesh: if you still change the extension, it will show up the dialog.
Sunil's point is that the action applies itself to the most commonly used use case (in this case, 80% or more), and by doing so, pushes up the usability by a notch. Its one of those things that we don't pay much attention to when it is there, but crib about when it isn't.
Another small but helpful feature that I use often is Ctrl+A'ing to select all characters in a textbox. (which was not available in XP).
In the case of a filename, if I wanted to change the extension I could say Ctrl+A instead of using the arrow keys with shift held down to select all.
Similarly in the address bar of Windows Explorer and other places too.
Ragavendra, THanks!
Did not know that !
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