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A Rant About Application Customization
April, 2008
Okay, new rule! If I select the same preference customization when an application starts ten consecutive times, that application must remember and execute that customization permanently. If not, I get ten dollars from the manufacturer for every subsequent failure. It should remember it on the first try. But ten! Ten is insulting. I think this is a fair rule. You ignore my wishes ten times, you give me ten bucks. It’s more than fair, and it should be part of the ULA. I’m looking at you, Microsoft.Toolbars.
I set up the toolbars in Visio to my liking. Like all the apps in MS Office, Visio has a customize function that gives me the sense that the designers wanted me to customize, that they felt it was something I should be able to do. I like this feature and use it extensively. Ah, but providing the interface and then not following through with actual customization is basically cruel. Every time I launch Visio, it loads the Reviewer toolbar. I don’t want to see it. I don’t use it. It also loads the LiveMeeting toolbar, which I neither want nor use. And yet here they are, every single time. So, I hide them every time I launch the application, which is about ten times per day.
Within the span of a single day, Visio could learn what I wanted by observing these simple repeated behaviors. It already tracks the usage of individual icons and menu items, hiding them if they fail to see much usage. That’s the exact same kind of observation and customization I want. But instead it ignores the clear explicit signals, like whole toolbars that I clearly never ever want to see again and explicitly ask to be hidden every single time the app launches.
Filed under Interaction Design, Personal |3 Responses to “A Rant About Application Customization”
Funny that, InDesign remembers your customized toolbars. It actually allows you to save different modes of customization in case you have a preference when working with your big monitor at home, versus different resolution at work, versus on the train, etc.
Let me get get Nathan and we’ll plant the inDesign chip on your brain…
This is why I wish most places would give IA’s/IxD’s a Mac and give them the choice of either OmniGraffle, Illustrator or Visio (BLAH!). At least it’s one hardware platform to manage and if using VMWare, one software (operating system) platform to manage. Yes it’s three separate software licenses, but what is productivity worth to a company? In the end, the file gets pushed to a PDF version for all people to pour over in the business/product/marketing groups.
What is needed is a frameworks within organizations. I’m all about patterns as other folks speak of, but Visio needs to be taken out of the framework.
It is counter intuitive and for folks who do wireframes and design, it’s two separate mind sets.
Stupid Microsoft!
Jason - Agreed! There is a small portion of my brain that continuously works on the problem of “how to bring my Mac to work full time.” It’s a small portion and I’m not that bright, so I haven’t figured it out yet. But I definitely agree. The basic problem is this: there is a staggering level of effort required to bludgeon through the IT and PM bureaucracy to get both funding and access. It outweighs the short-term benefits. I can bring my Mac in any time I want but it is the company’s responsibility to buy me software and give me access. And then there are the ripple effects. I work on a team. If I switch to an Adobe suite or Omni suite, then the rest of the team is cut off from my work products (or needs to switch too). So inertia keeps me from making the switch, much as I would love it.
“You’re only a Master of Evil, Darth”
A final consideration is that I’m pretty darn handy with Visio. I would rate my Visio skills at about 9.5 out of 10; shapesheets, custom stencils, the whole nine yards. I am nowhere near as proficient in the Adobe suite… yet. I scored a demo of the entire CS suite a while back and I will be training myself in it with some side projects. “You must unlearn…”