'Til All Are One

Microsoft claim that their UAC secur­ity prompts in Vista are designed to annoy you. I’m try­ing hard to take them ser­i­ously and to not laugh them off… but did they really think it’d work? OEMs and users have been dis­abling it in droves. Other users have prob­ably taught their muscle memory to auto­mat­ic­ally click the Continue/​Allow but­ton without the slight­est acknow­ledge­ment or thought. I think Microsoft need to get their act together when it comes to UIs. Some of their recent efforts have been frus­trat­ingly incon­sist­ent.

A major reason given by Microsoft in their UAC scan­dal was to encour­age developers to avoid priv­ilege elev­a­tions as much as pos­sible. A noble cause, espe­cially in the security-​​inexperienced world of Win­dows devel­op­ment, albeit poorly executed. It reminds me of Apple’s per­petual oppos­i­tion to the multi-​​button mouse. One stated reason is to enforce more ‘sane’, ‘usable’ and con­sist­ent UI design, and over­all I think they’ve done well. They don’t ban multi-​​button mice (‘XY-​​PIDSes’?), but given the simple one-​​button default there’s less need for them. I might prefer using a con­ven­tional 3-​​button scroll mouse, or even Apple’s own Mighty Mouse (a cleverly-​​disguised multi-​​button mouse), but I don’t lose any func­tion­al­ity by not using them.

It goes to show how much the graph­ical inter­face can be influ­enced by its phys­ical input, some­thing a lot of us don’t acknow­ledge in today’s world of >100-​​key QWERTY key­boards, multi-​​button mice and multi-​​finger touch­pads. The real innov­a­tion in that space seems to be hap­pen­ing in the mobile and embed­ded sec­tor, the iPhone being a good example. Play­ers of games on both desktop com­puters and games con­soles might notice the dif­fer­ence in ‘look and feel’ between games designed for keyboard/​mouse versus con­trol pad. Par­tic­u­larly for action and strategy games, ports from desktop to con­sole (or vice versa) often aren’t suc­cess­ful. The soft­ware was designed with the assump­tion of par­tic­u­lar input devices, and any­thing that devi­ates from this will also alter the feel of the game.

LotD: Your Win­dows licence fees paid to make this

Annoy­ing by design /​ ‘Til All Are One by Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan is licensed under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attribution-​​ShareAlike Aus­tralia CC BY-​​SA AU licence.