I would argue that THIS is what made Apple's OS hang on all those years it was in the severe minority. There is a segment of the population that wants only one mouse button to click, not 3, not 3 plus CTRL or ALT or etc. Apple did end up having to rely heavily on their option key to extend functionality but at its root the UI was designed so that the average user could do things in a simple, straightforward way. MS sees visually exposing commands to the user as their way to do it and while I may not entirely agree, I don't think it's without merit. My kudos to them for also letting me as a "power user" collapse the "newbie visual noise" off my screen and drop what I want on a custom quick access bar.

Remember: don't let your status as a power user cloud your view of how your grandmother might want to use her computer. There are FAR more 'grandmother' grade users than there are us.

I was a HUGE Apple fan for the early Macs. I totally get what you are saying. But we LOST in the workplace. It was just too slow for the other folks in the office to use (of course, the real death blow was having only a graphics mode to the display so the typing was dreadfully slow-- and the secretaries wouldn't use them- but that's another story).

But I get your point. That's why I phrased my response as I did. I have never done UI/UX testing- maybe the parent has and was sharing his insight.

But if we are all just speculating, I've got to throw out a shout for the other point of view. Yes, too many (how many is too many? I don't know) and it gets to be like using VIM. But two buttons? Seems like it should be ok.

Trust me, I agree that this new ribbon is very cluttered and contains too much visual noise, but in turn I don't mind exposing things visually to the end user. I hate MS Office with the ribbon, but I deal with people all the time who love it. Just let me turn it off :)

Well she no more typical a computer user than you are I would think. I like to see a curve of typical computer users age distribution (but I understand it would be a little skewed if it's hard for the older generations to use computers).

I feel that ribbon is designed for a select group of new users who need that kind of help. And I hope it's easy to disable it. It's fine for Microsoft to use something like this as a default mode as long as power users are able to turn that stuff off.

This is what turns me off on OS X, there is often no way to do certain more advanced things. Or it's hidden so well it requires hours of searching on the web for what plist to modify.

The shortcut for move is Cmd-Option-V, if anyone wants to know.

1. Why?

2. `rm huge-file`

That reminds me of the first few times I tried to learn vim.

Now though, any other editor that's not Vim or Emacs feels like that...

Just double click on one of the tabs.

In a desktop OS, you have a seemingly infinite set of modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Double click, click, right click, Ctrl + Shift), which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they must be learned and remembered.

I'm sure there's a few more buried in there that I haven't discovered. (Like swipe backwards to delete an item from a list)

And now even those are getting out of control:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/gestures.html

Pretty soon I'm going to run out of fingers, and these certainly aren't easily discoverable.

This same pattern continues on iOS devices. They don't ever use complicated gestures, certainly not as the only way to accomplish something. The most complicated gesture you need is pinching.

The new iOS 5 has gestures to switch apps and get home, but those are really like keyboard shortcuts since the home button is still there and offers a simpler alternative.

Easy? Maybe for some. I bet the same people who have to be told to right-click also have to be told how to work their bluetooth/wifi connection (and never bother to turn it off to save battery).

But I'll grant you this point if s/easy/possible/

I think that you overstate the importance of turning off wifi and bluetooth. Those are power user options, for sure. When you're trying to conserve battery power, you're trying to streamline how you use the device, which to me, smacks of 'power user'.

The flipside to that argument is that it is ridiculously easy to browse a web site, check your email and play Words with Friends and Angry Birds. These are the things that the majority of people care about... not whether or not a given physical interface is active or not.

And you are right, of course, in that ios allows most people to do the things they most care about very easily-- that's probably the takeaway. If you do that, then, apparently even if the other stuff is hard, people will probably figure out how to do it when they need it. Somehow.

Android devices on the other hand, need constant fiddling. My Droid would barely last a day with everything turned off, and with wifi, etc. turned on, it would die after only about 6 hours.

Disclaimer: I don't own an iOS device, so don't know how intuitive it might or might not be.

The only reason to turn off the cell radio but not the wifi radio is to conserve battery, which again puts you well outside the use case of the typical apple user.

In my experience, this is rarely enforced.

(In fact, I just got off a plane, and the announcement is "electronic devices must be off, not in airplane mode. that's for after we're in the air.")

The actual removal of abstraction (mouse) have made it much easier to use it. This is why my son at 2 can use the ipad and he can't use the mouse and keyboard for the desktop and laptops.

I have no doubt that this UI, though cluttered, will help users out but I question whether this is ultimately the best solution.

ie there's an inductive leap between "I want to delete all files except this one" and "I can select that one file and then invert selection before deleting". At minimum it requires you to know what "invert selection" means. Ordinary users may take a different, more fiddly, path.

I don't know if that's the case here. My intuition says it is. However, in my optimistic heart I hope Microsoft did a bunch of usability testing and determined that ordinary users do grasp an "invert selection" concept more often than not.

That's how design for mass-use user interfaces works, right? By evidence-driven testing, not by what the programmer/designer thinks makes sense? Clings to idealistic belief.

The dangerous button is much easier to find than the fix-it button. One is right there, with your files. The other is someplace else, related by metaphor alone. Once you have selected the recycle bin you then have to search through your very long deleted file list, select the file you want, select another button to restore it (which appears in the same place as a different button existed before selecting the file), and then navigate back to the place you were expecting the file to be. We're talking about users who can't figure out a menu, but they can perform this multi-step task. I can easily see a new computer user screwing this up.

Next time you look at the context menu of a removable drive, see that "Format" is right there with the eject menu item. One should be used every time you use the drive, the other very rarely and only when you're sure. The latter should be removed to a sub-menu under "advanced", or similar.

Myself, I'd make it harder to delete things and a lot easier to find them again.

Or maybe two. One to go from selected file to all other files, and another click to get back.

Selection only comes handy when you will be doing something to several items at once. Thus, the selection function could be turned on via a menu item or a button: it's a totally different operating mode where you click on or drag around the items to select them.

For new users I might agree that they could figure out a right click because everything is new. But for users where everything is familiar ("I've always done it this way"), it gets much harder to break those expected actions.

Second part is about explorer itself. While it might seem like a common utility (even necessary), I find it very rare for a general user to know about it (my wife does not, nor my parents, siblings, their friends,...but my wife's father does). Once they see it, they have no idea what to do. Copy a file? Really, they have no idea.

Spending 2 years in hell doing phone tech support for an ISP after high school was probably the most valuable career experience I've ever had bar none.

Nothing has prepared me for making and selling software to regular people better than this experience. Entire assumptions about how users interact with computers, ones based on my own experience, were rendered useless.

The ways regular people think about technology is endlessly fascinating because it very rarely has anything to do with how I think about technology.

At my day job, we eventually decided to put our development lead as tier-2 tech support because we couldn't get this across. He receives every single piece of support mail we get and is asked to respond to a pretty good percentage of them.

It's been a 2 year, very difficult, education for him.

Experiencing the mind of the typical user day after day has caused some major changes in his UI design philosophy. Don't bury things in menus, limit the number of ways you can do something, walk users through set procedures, etc.

There's a bunch of different approaches to interface design and many of them don't work well. We've all seen the beautiful but hard to use designs made by professional designers, and the control-panel-of-a-spaceship design made by developers.

It seems that what both cases miss out on is spending time working with and understanding the average guy on the street. Or rather, good interface design means spending lots of time optimizing for regular users.

Seconding. Especially before Windows 7 added Explorer as a pinned item by default, the less-technologically-literate persons I know would simply called it "My Computer", and used it in the large-icon, single-paned view. On one occasion while helping a friend find a file, I opened Explorer and switched it to the Details view option. Between that and the folder hierarchy in the left pane, I guess it looked different enough from "My Computer" that my friend was used to and I was given the reaction "Wow, you're really in the guts of the machine, now."

Now the idea that you actually have more problem with experienced users is interesting. I can see that in myself (damn new microwave!). But I still feel like it's no harder to learn, however, than what a bunch of icons are supposed to represent. But once it's shown, then is it really hard for them?

Seems like the problem is one of discoverability, not complexity.

Their old MacOS Finder was clear and simple - my wife would spend hours arranging her work in coloured folders, each of which opened in a window whose shape and position she had chosen, and was meaningful to her. It was a powerful tool that enabled her to arrange and group her work.

Now, both Apple and Microsoft compete with each other over how bad they can make their file system interface. Microsoft wanted to do away with the filesystem in Longhorn, and Apple have actually done so in iOS.

Is this progress??

You're absolutely right. I don't have the citation on me right now, but spatial mode has been found to be easier to grasp for new users in every single test ever. The only reason it was dropped was because (1) Windows Explorer, (2) power users whined about too many open windows and (3) a lot of people got used to URLs opening in the same window thanks to web browsers, so people sought to apply the same principles to file browsers.

Spatial mode used to be default on GNOME for a long time. There, too, it was dropped because of the same reasons.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager and http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html

You can easily have two Finder windows open on the same folder, meaning you lose the immediate recognition that spatial mode gives you. My personal take - they should have two types of Finder window - a spatial "folder contents" window and a folder-browser (probably in column-view) that only shows folders and maybe a preview of the files within.

So you can navigate quickly/enter file-paths in the browser, but to actually use a folder, you enter spatial mode, so you have the instant recognition of where you are.

The problem is that there's no global switch to force Finder in spatial mode coming from anywhere, anytime. This results in a messy affair when suddenly a non-spatial Finder pops up because you never opened that folder directly and previously put it in spatial mode.

Disclaimer: I believe the best UI for a filesystem manager was Windows Explorer 98, the last iteration with perpetual, irrevocable and non exclusive root access, with Norton Commander as its only rival.

From the moment we cared about maintaining our system's safety from the user's "big fingers syndrome", it all went down (starting with hiding file extensions) to the atrocities we now have to deal with. And yes, I put Seven's Explorer in the same basket as Finder and the likes of Nautilus, mostly due to /that/ horrible folder scrolling bug that MS refuses to hotfix.

Wonderful though Linux is, it's applications are not consistent or mature enough to support a totally document-centric UI. Microsoft could achieve that with Office, but they would probably be accused of over-integration, and hit with the anti-trust stick.

All of those actions require knowing how to [delete], [open folders], [drag and drop].

As someone who has done a fair amount of tutoring seniors on basic computer usage, I have a large amount of anecdotal evidence to indicate this is definitely not the case for them. Depending on the person, I would sometimes try to not show them context menus or keyboard shortcuts at all and just teach them how to use the File, Edit, etc. menus.

There are people who just want to learn the correct order of incantations so that they can check their mail and do things with their photos. And that's okay! Trying to show them that that there is more than one way to do a given action often just leads to confusion as they meld them together (right click on Edit..)

I have seen a fair amount of people with a similar approach as well, but my largest body of personal experience comes from the tutoring, which is why I mentioned it.

I have been seeing the same thing with research colleagues.

What a lot of us in IT or related fields do not "get" from normal users is that the way they "see" the icons and pictures in the computer is completely different from what we do. We have a "mental model" of what Word or Excel or Firefox is doing. Some of us have a more accurate and detailed model than others.

But "normal" users only know what they see and what will happen after they do something (either because they have done it before or because we told them, and they trust us). For them, there is no more meaning to "click on the File menu" than if a Scuba diver told you to "check your SPG every 10 minutes".

Apple has learned a lesson here. They are now heavily optimized for ease and comfort of purchase.

(since we're on topic: I'm an MS employee. I do not work on Windows Explorer)