This is a pretty fun submission. I like peering into the lives of computer users that don't have the level of computer literacy I'm used to day to day. It's a good reminder.
> This answer is not helpful. There is no start button.
Because it's just a little windows icon now - easy to forget that that doesn't just make sense to some people.
> Thank you, Brian- I would surely never have looked there, for anything, never mind notepad! It is on my start box now.
Some people just haven't/won't learned the grammar and vocabulary of computer literacy. I think this person means "start menu?" But it looks like a box to them so that's how they described it.
A while ago there was an article where a woman was trying to user testing in a mall and instead found an old guy who had literally never touched a computer. Reading that experience was fascinating.
"A while ago there was an article where a woman was trying to user testing in a mall and instead found an old guy who had literally never touched a computer."
I believe that this approach to UX testing is to blame for some of the most infuriating UI changes: when you design UI experiments with actual users you do that because you want objectivity. And what could be more objective than selecting "perfect blanks" as you test subjects?
The problem with this approach is that everything you gain in objectivity is lost many times over in relevancy. Those people are not representative of your actual users, not even when you are building a geriatry self-serve kiosk.
Unfortunately, once that kind of experiment has taken place, it inevitably dominates all other concerns. Every critical voice will reliably get shouted down with "We have the numbers to prove it. We did science, you didn't. You are just a grumpy old power-user disrespecting the needs of the weak".
I agree. That old guy is not a computer user, so there is no need to build a UI for him.
To further this point, imagine testing HN with people that can't read. Do we rebuild it for children under 6 or do we wait they learn to read and grow to an age that let them make sense of the contents of the site?
And a car analogy/tale. If you drive different models of different makers you find many little differences and unobvius ways to operate some controls. I remember I had to read the manual of a rental car 25 years ago to figure how to reverse. I had to lift a ring on the stick and I never saw something like that in my life as a passenger or as a driver before (and I barely saw automatic gears by then.) That was not very discoverable. However one shouldn't bother to design car controls for elderly people like my mother. She never got a driving license, she'll never will and yet she had no problems living their life. Not everybody needs computers.
> I like peering into the lives of computer users that don't have the level of computer literacy I'm used to day to day. It's a good reminder.
Yep and sometimes it happens in unexpected places. I just went to the dentist the other day.
The receptionist accidentally moved her task bar to be oriented vertically on the left and couldn't get it back to the horizontal bottom position.
We're on very friendly terms so she asked if I could show her how to fix it which involved going around the desk. Naturally I requested she hides any windows that might violate HIPAA compliance before I swung around.
It was interesting to see her facial expressions and "whoa!" reactions when I mentioned how you can left click and drag the task bar to different spots and how to prevent this from happening in the future by right clicking and locking the task bar.
What was really interesting to me was when I said right click on the mouse, her eyes immediately looked at my hand on the mouse so you can't take left and right clicking as granted knowledge that everyone has as muscle memory.
This is someone who has been using that computer for years to manage appointments and whatever else, but things like right clicking the task bar is a move that very few people do out in the wild unless they are approaching enthusiast levels. She's not out of the loop with tech either. She has a smartphone and does a lot of things with it.
> The receptionist accidentally moved her task bar to be oriented vertically on the left and couldn't get it back to the horizontal bottom position.
A lot of people hate the lack of features in gnome, but this is why I think KDE's style of configurability is a terrible idea. I can give my dad a gnome desktop and it just works, give him a KDE one and 3 hours later there will be six menus bar taking up half the vertical area of the screen, and that's from a locked config. As a power user I'd prefer text configuration or to use the separate tweak-ui app anyway.
The thing that happens online, and especially in the linux space, is that the people who participate in the conversation are not the people who the feature-set is restricted for.
Yes, when I volunteered to help senior citizens with computers right click was something none of them knew they could do, nor could they remember it from week to week. Phones and web sites are much easier.
Remember how much flack Apple got from tech pundits when they got rid of the other buttons and the middle clickable scrolling wheel? “Only one button? Savages!” But Apple was acting on observation of non-expert users, democratizing computing.
Today it’s interesting to see the favored device at both kindergartens and retirement homes: iPads.
They didn't "get rid of it" so to say. The Macintosh only ever had one button on the standard mouse. I can't recall any Apple computer shipping with a multi-button pointing device until the Magic Mouse.
I don't own a Mac so I don't know how new Mac users discover how to do it. I remember there is something like a right click on Macs and I asked how to do it last time I had to use one for a few minutes. But if there are people that don't explore a UI with a visible right button, what are they doing with invisible controls?
I used to give basic computer courses for seniors when I was still in highschool to earn a little money.
One would always let go of the mouse to click. He would position the mouse, lift his hand a few centimeters above the mouse button and then press down on it fast. Sometimes worked, mostly didn't because the mouse would move during the click. Now imagine him trying double clicks..
Another guy would make extremely detailed notes. I would show him some setting in a dropdown menu of Word, and he would perfectly draw these menues in his notebook. By the end, he probably hat 20 pages of beautiful notes, it was actually quite impressive.
> A while ago there was an article where a woman was trying to user testing in a mall and instead found an old guy who had literally never touched a computer. Reading that experience was fascinating.
I missed that article. It sounds fascinating -- I don't suppose you have a link?
If you've never seen user testing where users try to use your software, it's one of the most eye opening experiences a software engineer could have. I've seen a number of these tests at MS in early 00's when I worked there. It's as though the people using your software are from another planet, with a completely different set of rules in their head as to how programs should be used.
This kind of exposure tends to generate a lot of empathy towards the user, as well as to the demands of the designers and user experience specialists. It also helps engender the right kind of intuition as to the level of UX complexity and cognitive load non-engineer users are prepared to tolerate. And that level is very, very low indeed.
The "Start" button was never really about starting things in the first place. After all, clicking "Start" was the first step to shutting down your computer! Perfectly intuitive...
Now it doesn't even say "Start" on it, and yet they persist in calling it the "Start menu".
> The "Start" button was never really about starting things in the first place.
What did you find when you opened the Start menu (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Windows_95_St...)? Programs (click on one to start the program), Documents (click to start a program handling the file), Settings (click to start a Control Panel applet), Find (click to start a find dialog), Help (click to start the help viewer), Run (click to start an executable by name), ...
> After all, clicking "Start" was the first step to shutting down your computer!
You are, after all, starting the shutdown procedure.
This reminds me of the best "feature" that windows 95 had to me as a kid. If you clicked the start menu, then hit alt + -, you'd get the standard menu for playing with a window. Minimize, Maximize, Move (greyed out), and a few others. Importantly though was that Close was an option. Clicking it would remove the start button. This lead to lots of fun playing with computers in stores at the time, closing the start buttons on them all.
I never stumbled into that one. What I do remember from Windows 95b through 7 is if the keyboard focus was on the taskbar and you pressed Alt+F4, it brought up the Shutdown/Restart/Logoff dialog. That made it possible to cleanly shutdown the computer blindly from the keyboard. Win,Esc,Alt+F4,R,Enter
Yes, every verb can be prefixed by "start". There's no functionality that could not be squeezed into your explanatory framework. But personally I think it's a real stretch to say that, say, viewing your collection of documents is "starting" anything (and starting the shutdown procedure is still bordering on obtuse).
No, the point of the Start menu was to provide a root node to a navigable hierarchy of all of Window's available functionality. Calling it "Start" makes sense from the perspective of the act of navigation - it is the user's "start point". While logical, I think this metaphor was subverted in many ways even when it was new; the hierarchy afforded by the Start menu was neither particularly well structured nor even the easiest way to access much of its functionality (it seemed to compete with "My Computer" for the title of "blessed root node").
Nowadays it seems that it is not even possible to navigate to all Windows functionality through the "Start menu".
> After all, clicking "Start" was the first step to shutting down your computer! Perfectly intuitive...
Ah yes, because the competition's UI of having you click on an icon of a literal piece of fruit to shutdown the computer makes more sense!
You can of course push the power button and Windows will go ahead and gracefully shut down, been that way since at least XP, if not 98 on computers that supported it!
Shutting down become a rather destructive option, putting it as a first level item on the task bar would lead to accidental clicks. Putting it as a first level menu item on the most prominent UI feature of the entire OS seems like a decent alternative!
> Now it doesn't even say "Start" on it, and yet they persist in calling it the "Start menu".
Eh, and we still say we save stuff to "disk". Never mind that it probably isn't even remotely disk shaped.
If I am writing instructions for a website, should I tell people to tap or click on things?
The pantomime for talking on the telephone is to stick thumb and pinky finger out to make it look like a device that a lot of people under 20 have possibly never even seen.
Starting the shutdown process is hardly the worst English faux pas the technology industry has made!
The history of Windows 95 is fascinating. The Mac had a GUI, but overall the penetration of GUIs was very low. Windows 3.1 was getting popular, but Microsoft knew they had to something special to make GUIs mainstream (remember, DOS still ruled) and expand the market for PCs to people who'd never considered buying a computer.
It was a different time. The Windows 95 team had this idea of a "beginner's UI" to make computers more approachable -- an idea they subsequently shelved. But their research told them that:
> Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost
exclusively on visible cues for finding commands.
They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and
tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or "context") menus,
even after training
Ironically newer UI designers have forgotten that 'visible cues' lesson -- both on Windows 10's Flat UI and on touch interfaces such as iPad OS, which imho suffers from really poor discoverability.
> Although we abandoned the idea of a separate shell for beginners, we salvaged its most useful features: single-click access, high visibility, and menu-based interaction. We mocked up a number of representations in Visual Basic
and tested them with users of all experience levels, not just beginners, because we knew that the design
solution would need to work well for users of varying
experience levels. Figure 5 shows the final Start Menu,
with the Programs sub-menu open. The final Start
Menu integrated functions other than starting
programs, to give users a single-button home base in
the UI.
The upshot is: "Start" is just a label that worked well during UX testing, what mattered more was the anchored, affordance-rich, highly consistent button that let you interact with the GUI in a predictable way.
"Start" does not refer to starting things, it refers to the first button you need to click to make the computer do things, i.e. it's the starting point for doing anything. In a bare Windows 95 install, you have your "My Computer" and "My Documents" icons on the desktop and to do everything else you start by clicking on "Start". I don't think I could come up with a better name for the button that serves as the starting point of almost any interaction. Nothing else comes to mind that will both communicate the button's purpose and simultaneously entice users who don't know what to do to click it.
I think the intent of the name was for the millions of new computer users at the time to think 'start here' when their computer booted up. And besides, if they didn't call it Start their Windows 95 ad blitz with Rolling Stones music would have made no sense at all! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chTftktWmto)
If I remember correctly, the very first time you ran Windows 95 a little animated text box saying "<-- Click Here!" would fly across the taskbar to draw you to it. Coming from Windows 3.11 with Program Manager, it was initially a little confusing. Where was everything?
Yup, a little red airplane animation with a light yellow banner, on the taskbar, if I remember correctly. Didn't see it on all installations, though. Is it a specific version?
I was troubleshooting WhatsApp over the phone for a relative work different hardware... Took me a bit of time to realize "solid triangle-ish" was wifi and "cup" was microphone. But for the Gen-Z and after, how would you intuitively represent Save and Call to people who've never seen a floppy disk or a phone handset?
Floppy disk, sure. But phone handset? Old movies and TV shows set in the past will keep that image alive like it did for us with knowing what phones looked like before our time. Unless you think movies/TV will go away too...
I agree that outdated symbols won't be a problem for younger generations, but for different reasons. The "save" icon has long stopped being a floppy disk. It may still look like one (to those who know the object depicted), but it is identified as just "save" and nothing more. If people would identify it with portable media instead of the act of storing the current document, they would also try to use it for loading a document. Nobody does that.
Old entertainment content however, I'm afraid that it might be pretty much lost to those growing up with on demand streaming. In the age of linear TV, back catalog content wasn't just available to consume in lieu of something new, it was actively fed to us by the fixed schedule on failure to tune in when the new stuff was aired. This introduced us to a lot of content from before our time. But with streaming, I just don't see how it would happen, not in culturally relevant volume. Nostalgia is an acquired taste. Just like so many of my generation I madly binged Friends when it appeared on Netflix, but how many streamed Friends who completely missed it's original run?
> but how many streamed Friends who completely missed it's original run?
23 year old here. I had never seen Friends, thus I never had any nostalgic interest in visiting it.
One weekend last year I had an onsite interview in Denver just before a blizzard hit, snowing me into a Motel 6 for 2 days. No wifi, so I did nothing but watch Friends and Seinfeld reruns on the TV. Probably the first time I'd used a television in my adult life.
I also caught Forrest Gump for the first time late that night. Not a bad film.
I Love Lucy had fans over generations thanks to reruns. I've mentioned the show a few times in conversations with people in their early 20s and usually they have never heard of it.
I was starting to get uneasy about the problem that later gained prominence under the term "filter bubble" quite early. But the "now bubble" that is taking shape in this little discussion sidetrack? Totally did not see that one coming. We were not only wrong about mainstream news sources back in the 90ies, but also about mindless channel hoping: it can have horizon-widening qualities?
Anecdote time: I surely did not learn anything about the Korea war from MASH reruns other than "the time depicted is too recent for ww2 and too long ago for Vietnam, so apparently America had yet another war in Asia". But that was enough to create a gathering place inside my mind for all those tiny information scraps about this part of history that would otherwise new lost, surprisingly helpful.
For save I've seen an arrow pointing into a folder (opposite of the typical 'open') or a computery-looking grey square with an arrow pointing downwards overlaid.
The problem with the folder idea is that a lot of young people doesn't know how folders work. And nowadays a lot of files aren't saved to local storage, and even then, local storage is probably not a computer but a phone.
> Some people just haven't/won't learned the grammar and vocabulary of computer literacy.
Techie snobs scoff at the iPad but without its simplicity some of the older people in my family would have never used a computing device.
It wasn't something they ever needed – having done without computers for so long just fine – but it did bring them joy and entertainment and even helped them with some tasks, like notes and contacts.
And yes, abstracting away the file system played a big role in the iPad's accessibility.
Just vanishing the keyboard and mouse alone greatly lowers the intimidating barriers for some tech-averse people.
I remember being called by someone to whom we'd sent a trial installation CD, this was in the days before remote desktop software. They didn't know how to insert a CD and were defensive with it Why can't you make it easy for normal people?
Probably because they didn’t have a cd-rom unit and they were trying to push it in the 3 1/2” disk drive. If they had a real floppy disk drive (5 1/4”) they probably would have succeeded, but I seriously doubt that the installation would have gone through smoothly...
Fifteen years ago, one of the Microsoft fanboy arguments against both Linux and LibreOffice (then OpenOffice.org) was that neither worked exactly like Windows / Office.
Then Microsoft comes along and changes everything. The Ribbon instead of the pull down menus. Now which office suite works more like what users have used for a couple decades?
Windows 8 comes along with a totally different UI. So different that ordinary users don't know how to do the most basic tasks like print, or even how to shut down the computer.
Windows 8 UI (no matter what you call it) "fixes" things by adding back a start menu, but not calling it start.
No search box in the start menu -- you just have to magically know that you can start typing.
And magical key combinations to type in commands.
IMO, it really is change for the sake of change. And generally change for the worse. The interface we had with classic Mac, and Win 95 was pretty usable. And stable. (Nevermind the underlying tech it ran on top of, no real kernel, etc.)
Office 2007 ribbon was a terrible release. I am an Office power user and I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing.
This really shows the power of habit. Now that it's been 12 years, a whole generation has grown up with the ribbon UI. At 22, I'm one of them. Office 2003 and earlier (+ LibreOffice) feels clunky and arcane to me. 2007 was the first Office version that I seriously used, and I remember being confused as to why my parents complained about the ribbon.
Sometimes I wonder if UI design matters at all beyond what users are already acclimated to.
It goes beyond habits. I know what Office was capable of many years ago. Many of those features became completely hidden by the ribbon. Once I managed to find them again, I would be looking at the unchanged dialog boxes from Office 97 inside the pretty Ribbon interface.
Let me put it this way - I am qualified to write a book about Microsoft Outlook. One of my presentation interaction points when talking about Outlook was to tell the person asking the question "This was already a feature introduced in Outlook __".
Outlook got especially destroyed by Ribbon. It is capable of so much more than is exposed by the UI. The same is true for Excel, especially once you add various add-ons.
Ribbon made it easier for novices to learn a handful of shortcuts using multiple key strokes (press alt and follow the letters that appear). It also destroyed workflows of countless power users.
> I still have to dig through well hidden “advanced” dialog boxes that were previously exposed in the UI to do things that I remember Office was capable of doing.
The search button in Office apps is super useful. Type in a vague suggestion of what you want and it'll pop up a button for the appropriate feature!
The ribbon is very nice for some things. It is meh for others. In Excel I'd argue it was a dramatic improvement. I remember spending forever digging through Excel menus trying to find out where some feature had been crammed in 10+ years prior before the concept of good UI even existed. The ribbon was a nice opportunity to reorganize things into more meaningful categories.
But yeah, there are still some things I can never remember quite were they are at.
The search feature is a good improvement. You see it used to various degrees in other complicated programs with lots of features (eg emacs, blender, even jira). It’s good because it can make things better for people looking for a function they don’t know and for advanced users looking for something they do know. And it provides a good intermediate level of speed between digging through menus and knowing the keyboard shortcut.
On the other hand, the built in help system before 2007 or so worked out pretty well (maybe it was slightly dying by 2003. I remember the vba help worked well and maybe the rest didn’t work so well), whereas the help system in 2007 was completely awful and I think it was getting worse. I haven’t used office recently enough to know if they ever fixed it or if it was just replaced by incomplete documentation, google searches, and obscure forums.
Office can do many things that I wouldn't be able to even begin to describe as a search query. They are all well-hidden. Dig a little under the facade and look at the VBA methods. Most of that functionality is or was available somewhere in the UI.
When the ribbon was introduced, I went from a semi-expert (not quite power user) with Office to a newbie, struggling to find even the most basic functions such as indent-outdent! Now, after a few years of occasional use (I'm usually editing in Emacs or an IDE) I can sort of wing it, but in my opinion the ribbon is simply Wrong.
I get what another commenter said, who grew up with the Ribbon, but it's very difficult to adapt to if you've memorized the old menus and dialogue boxes. Thus, Libre Office now feels like a much more familiar and accessible tool.
Similarly, when Windows pivoted in v. 8 to a tiled interface, the more traditional UI's like KDE and Mac remained familiar and comfortable. Now Win10 is okay; it feels like Win7, only slicker and with lots of hidden power features (such as power shell, Linux subsystem, better copy-and-paste in cmd, etc.).
Putting back the things that worked was the right thing to do, and clearly someone with some sense of listening to the users is still in charge there.
Weird thing to think about too was that it came out right as we were seeing 16x9 monitors become the standard. So you have more real estate on the sides but MS decides to just take a big old chunk of the top away on all of their Office products. I still haven't bothered to relearn all of the shortcuts since then either, used to be nice since you had the pull-down menus as a sort of training wheel.
I guess I feel a bit less stupid now for never getting comfortable with the ribbon. Anything beyond the basics that I use frequently, I'm maximizing my window then digging through every menu. I thought the old menu system was so much more intuitive. I generally embrace change for dumbing down software, but even after all these years, I still think this went in the wrong direction.
i liked the ribbon! it expanded out the nonsensical menu dropdowns from the previous excels. most users memorized shortcuts because they didn't want to remember functions they needed four levels deep. it's not like the ribbon destroyed old excel shortcuts; you could still use them, as you type them out they show up as small text box above your ribbon.
the one thing i thought was nice about the ribbon is that they remind me of the old 123 / commands. as you slash through the 123 menus they popped up where the input box is, changing across the screen. the ribbon is sort of like that? if you type out the ribbon shortcuts the ribbon changes across the screen.
Fifteen years ago, Windows 95 was only 9 years old. I think changing something 9 years old over the course of 15 years is probably an acceptable speed.
After not having used Windows for a couple of years, I installed Windows 8 on my old computer before giving said computer to my mom. Out of the box, Windows update was broken. Known bug, the fix for it was to download a patch, and the said patch, after being downloaded could only be installed with network access disabled (???). What garbage. How did Windows update ship broken out of the box? How did this pass quality control? I don't know how anyone can trust Microsoft and let themselves get sucked into their vendor lock-in.
Everyone is looking down on the users, but they're right. Usually the most correct UI design is the most obvious one, and showing off how clever you are might make the designer feel smart, but it makes the consumer feel dumb. It's one of the reasons I now live almost exclusively in the terminal. The terrible Windows redesigns are usually justified as being more intuitive to users who aren't "powerusers," but when you can't even get something as trivial as opening notepad consistent and logical, whose fault is that? Not the users. The users are just using the abstractions Windows gives them and it's failing becaus Windows didn't implement it correctly.
At what point do you stop blaming the user and start blaming the designer? Who's fault is it if a user doesn't know how to use a mouse and keyboard? Should we expect all apps to be built with text to speech and touch input as the primary interface? That just seems like a UX nightmare to me.
To apply that extreme to this case, I think it's not too much to ask that users know what the start menu is and how to use it to find and start apps.
> I think it's not too much to ask that users know what the start menu is and how to use it to find and start apps.
It is when you provide icons for most applications, but only provide text search for others (which has a confusing interface that sometimes displays webpages and local documents). There are limits to blaming the designer, but inconsistent, half implemented, with few affordances, that uses mixed metaphores is neither good programming or good design. It's not always the fault of the design, but this design is the fault in this case.
I agree, don’t look down on these people at all. I’ve been using computers my whole life but UI intuitive usability peaked at Windows XP or OSX. I often require multiple attempts to do simple tasks in Windows 10 because its so goddamn inconsistent. There are like 4 different types of search bars and who can remember which one is searching the internet, just your files (depending on if they’re indexed yet), the internet AND your local files, installed programs etc.
Windows has become a complete UI disaster. I feel like Windows 7 was the last cohesive UI. The control panel is a great example. I'm not sure how it could possibly be more of a train wreck. Settings are in seemingly random locations split between the new and old style control panels. The deeper you get into dialogs it is like stepping back in time. Printers or network adapters you end up jumping back and forth to find the correct setting.
Well if it isn't Ben Morris ..... Thanks for your valuable blog posts on microservices etc. No way to contact you privately? I'm making a stateless .net core cms ...
To the topic, I agree fully. In swedish, it's even worse. Wanted to change some environment variables yesterday (golang path) and tried to find the "system" dialog that is opened through windows + break key that is found on non-laptop keyboards
Search for system? You get system information, system configuration, etc, but not the classic control-panel "app" called system.
Also, remote desktop (the tsclient) isn't anywhere to be found except by typing the improbable and kinda arcane translation "fjärrskrivbord"
I'm on mac, but opened up my windows laptop to check this. I clicked the start menu, typed "mouse speed" and the first option was "Change the mouse pointer display or speed", I picked that and there I was.
The main issue is that a search for "mouse" or the like takes you to the new Settings panel for mouse instead, which has some options but not all. A small "Additional mouse options" link under a "Related settings" heading then takes you back to the old Control Panel mouse settings, where you can actually change the speed.
Your search was good, and got you straight to the old Control Panel version. But the fact that the settings are split over two not-fully-overlapping systems is a bit ridiculous, and confusing.
I started using windows about 25 years ago.It was 3.1 and now my Dell XPS runs on Win 10 and my job is technical. Despite all of this,with every additional release they somewhat manage to make it less and less intuitive and more difficult. There's no logic in so many design decisions- it's mad. Anyone,who's never used a computer doesn't stand a chance nowadays.
But did it get moved? The article is from 2015 and I didn't start using 10 until 2018 so I don't know where it was then but as of today I can find Notepad on the Start Menu under Windows Accessories. I feel like that's where it's always been. It's called Windows Accessories now instead of just Accessories but surely that's not enough to confuse people so much?
As with most everyone here of course I don't launch it from there, I do Win^R, notepad, enter just like I do for calc, excel and winword. But if I never learned how to do that and always relied on the menu shortcut I feel like it never really moved that far from where it's always been.
In the Windows 95 era start menu [1], the steps would be click "start", move the mouse over "programs", move the mouse over "accessories" then click "notepad". The start button itself was the only 3D-ish outlined button on boot, "programs" was the first entry in the list, as was "accessories", so the navigation path was super clear.
In Windows 10, the start menu button doesn't have any affordances, there's no border, just a white on black icon. On a desktop, the start menu has a uniform dark grey background, the user has to work out that there is a strip down the middle that can be scrolled. The only clue is that the bottom entry may be clipped and on mouse move a 2px wide scroll bar thumb is shown near the top. After working out that this is a scrollable pane, they need to know to scroll down near the bottom of the alphabetically grouped list of entries to "W". Rather than just moving the mouse over the entry in the 95-style start menu, the user needs to work out that "windows accessories" is clickable to show more entries, indicated only by the small grey arrow to the right of the button. Finally notepad is one of the entries once the list is expanded.
So yes, I'd say it has moved. It used to be accessed through the top entries in the start menu, now it is accessed through one near the bottom that is inside a scrollable panel with no clear indication that it can be scrolled.
Sure it is. People are very set in their ways of using computers. Not to mention they are on opposite ends of the Alphabet so also the list. The other link posted here about the guy who had never used it, he didnt explore, just froze when something wasnt familiar.
Ruggedized keyboards for self-service kiosks don't typically have a windows key or ctrl, alt, and ESC (and if they do there is usually a hardware switch that disables them)
There were a number of things that go missing when going from win7 to 10, like the games, Chess Titans (and others) disappear and replaced by ad driven crap. Also, DVD player, in Windows 7 it was included in Win10 you have to buy one or get a "free" one that is ad driven. Hard to blame Microsoft when it seems like everything has ads stuffed into it now days.
Don't forget the calculator, which used to start within milliseconds of clicking the icon, but now takes a, sometimes not even countable on your fingers alone, number of seconds to load.
The Win10 calculator is also missing a lot of functionality. Luckily, there's an easy way to put back the old calculator... but it's only really launchable if you pin it.
The DVD player might be because you need to pay a license to play MPEG-2 video. You still need to buy a license key to use the MPEG-2 hardware decoder on a Raspberry Pi.
This is a shockingly common problem for people. I can tell they feel uncomfortable just typing without a place "where" the typing will go. Many people will click the magnifying glass and then again place the cursor into the search field. Same with google, they will click the search field, then the cursor moves to the address bar, they feel surprise, and then place the cursor in the address bar a second time.
In many applications (JIRA, Vim) typing without being in a text input field can cause all kinds of trouble. Heck, in browsers if you type 'backspace' you can end up going back and page and blowing away all of your precious form input. Not to mention the very real possibility that their work, the text they've typed, will be dropped on the floor. We have been trained by these dangers to avoid typing without a text prompt.
This is why Google switched the 'Back' function to Alt+Left Arrow in Chrome. You could be trying to delete something out of a web form and accidentally leave the page.
That's when I switched to Firefox. I've been using the backspace key to go to the previous page or directory since the mid-90's and I never accidently left a page when trying to delete stuff.
I think in the current iteration of Windows, you're supposed to get a permanently visible keyboard icon in a taskbar when in tablet mode, clicking which will summon the on-screen keyboard. At least that's how it worked on the two Windows 2-in-1s I worked on over the last year.
I will admit still being baffled why Google wants us to type searches into the address bar. When I first saw that behavior, I thought "but what if it's a valid URL?". Sure enough, I've made that mistake several times.
I'm sure it's a mess for less tech savvy people trying to do searches on companies that have .com or .net suffixes on their names.
Because they want you to use google as your portal to the internet.
I change my Firefox copies to have separate boxes, and no search from url bar. I don’t recall offhand as it’s muscle memory, and I’m on a phone, but I think it’s ctrl-k for location and ctrl-l for search.
I know a computer programmer, well former web developer, who still tries to dabble in programming who "clicks the magnifying glass" to search the start menu. Same with the chrome search bar on a new tab.
He also refuses to learn shortcut keys because he never learned to touch type, and refuses to type even 1 character more than he has to, so he has a lot of common things he would type stored on a virtual clipboard that he recalls with ctrl+`, and will paste from that to avoid typing.
I would not at all be surprised if the Cortana-powered (or whatever it is) start menu search failed to find Notepad if you started typing. I don't know how they can screw something like that up so badly, but it's almost unusuable without installing Classic Shell to override the normal behavior.
I can't count the number of times I've hit the Windows key, quickly typed in "Windows Update", hit enter, and was presented with a web search result for "Windows Update".
I'd wonder what MS is smoking, but I think I know. Windows is such a low priority to them these days that they put all their most inexperienced or terrible coders to work on it. That's why it's full of webdev-flavor awfulness.
It used to be the case in older versions of Windows 10 that typing in Start would just sometimes mysteriously not do a search... that seems to have been fixed for a while now.
It's still broken on my machine. Half the time typing doesn't do anything in the start menu, and I have to close and re-open it for the search to work.
I think this might be a case where keyboard shortcuts are more descriptive and fool proof than trying to use tech specific phrases like "Go to Start menu".
"Hold down the windows key on the keyboard and press the S key while the windows key is held down, and then type notepad and press enter".
And if they get hung up finding the windows key on the keyboard you can explain it by saying it's likely near the bottom left in between the ctrl and alt keys and has the 4 squares.
I have a similar problem: I'm so goddamned intelligent that this world seems like the movie "Idiocracy" to me. ( I can't watch it: it's too painful. )
When I was younger, this advice from the Book of the Subgenius helped me a lot to get by, "Act like a dumbass and they'll treat you like an equal."
Eventually, I calculated the existence of God, called out "Ollie Ollie Oxen Free", and He showed up and Shook my hand.
Since then my intelligence has been idling: there's nothing further to compute. That, combined with diligent administration of THC, has brought my general intelligence level down to that of an average smart person.
Here's the thing: now that I experience it for myself, normal intelligence is terrifying. It's no wonder everyone is always so stressed out and worried. Their brains are not adequate to the complex artificial world we have built for ourselves. (Are you familiar with the "Peter Principle"? That's what we've done: not promoting people to level their level of incompetence, rather the world has grown complex to the point where most people are now incompetent, through no fault of their own.)
Robert Anton Wilson points out, "Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being."
What I'm saying is, pity them, they know not what they do.
This reminds me of trying to explain the "Home" button and Touch ID on an iPhone to an older relative a few years ago. They could not figure out how to reliably unlock the phone and they'd most frequently end up with Siri from holding the button down.
Losing the ability to type a program name into the start menu and drag it onto the desktop to create a shortcut is one of the more baffling and infuriating feature regressions in Windows 10.
Yeah, and its a good thing that video is now an option.
When I was a kid, often in the position of helping old people with computers, there was a major behavior difference I often observed.
I looked at the screen "globally", and would identify elements of interest within it. So you could tell me to find something on the screen, and I'd look at the whole screen to spot it.
They had a small mental "viewport" (maybe 2"x2") whilst looking up through their bifocals, that they would only be able to notice elements within. So you first had to steer their viewport to the right region of the screen, and only then could tell them what to look for within it. This gets especially frustrating when dealing with a windowed UI that could ostensibly pop up a dialog box anywhere.
Yes, the story is not that notepad is in some weird place in windows 10 - it is still where most HN readers know to find it.
The story is about how regular people deal with computers, as can be read in the comments.
It's like that story about how one day the google search 'facebook login' took people to a forum page that let people comment using their facebook credentials, and we got to find out how many users just type 'facebook login' to whatever text field they run across, type their username and password in, and then get really confused when it's a random forum page and they can't see their normal feed.
It was a news article on ReadWriteWeb, with Facebook comments. The number of people that not only blindly clicked the first search result out of habit, but also didn't realize that they've landed on a news article on a completely different site was stunning. Truly an Internet classic, thanks for reminding me.
> Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work...
> The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.
> I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!!
> EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY NOT JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!1111
> I just want to log in to Facebook - what with the red color and all? LOLLLOLOL!!!!!111
> This is such a mess I can't do a thing on my facebook .The changes you have made are ridiculous,I can't even login!!!!!I am very upset!!!
> Seams like all of the comets i read agree with me you people messed up royal i was enjoying facebook now i am thinking of getting rid of it all
Is it in a weird place though? Notepad has been under Start -> Accessories since the debut of the start menu in Windows 95. The only change is naming the folder Windows Accessories instead of Accessories.
Seems like a pretty big change to me. Not only has the folder name changed with no indicator that it has changed, but now since it's "W" instead of "A", it's near the bottom instead of at the very top. Plus, Windows 10 now has /way/ more pre-installed applications, which means you have to do a lot of scrolling before you get all the way to the "W" section.
Beyond saving anything bigger than a sentence it really has no use.
I almost dropped dead in shock to see they updated MS paint to Paint 3D, but then I realized that Its still intentionally limited and severely clunky to encourage you to spend money on Photoshop. :/
I prefer txt files for config and notes. I don’t care about formatting so word or word pad are too much.
I also use notepad as my goto “paste without formatting” as it’s typically faster to wash the clipboard through notepad than use whatever “paste special” ui an app has.
I prefer something like notepad++ for config and notes. Syntax highlighting is useful for config files (especially larger ones). The auto storing of unsaved files is great for notes. Many of my notes are temporary but I still want them to survive a reboot when necessary. Plus I find tabs easier to manage when I have a lot of notes and files open. The Windows task switcher becomes awkward in that case.
I prefer notepad++ over notepad, but notepad is always installed. If I’m on a computer for a long time, I’ll install notepad++. But most of the time I’m in transient computers that have notepad but not notepad++.
It’s a similar preference to how I like vim. Vim is ubiquitous on *nix systems. Lots of better stuff, but I’m ok enough with vim.
Ah "washing the clipboard", I guess that's the term for it.
I turn on the address toolbar on the taskbar (underneath all the icons); it's great to navigate to files/directories by typing (especially with auto-complete, which wasn't there on Windows 9x!), and I also use it for "clipboard washing".
I call it "sanitizing clipboard", and I usually use either Win+R or browser address bar (Ctrl+L), whichever is quicker, for 95% cases, in which I have only one line of text to sanitize. In the remaining 5% cases, I go through Notepad. On Linux I don't have a Win+R equivalent, so I always use a browser or Emacs session, whichever quicker to switch to.
I used to use the browser address bar for this, too. Then browsers started sending the crap you paste in it to who knows where. I even used to paste passwords there to make sure they don't have leading or trailing characters unintentionally included. I'm sure at least some people do that to this day and Google and others have their logs full of passwords this way.
I did that thing with passwords too! Perhaps even when browsers were sending what you type in the address bar to some servers somewhere, but back before I knew about it.
I'm not talking about txt format specifically... I'm talking about using Windows Notepad specifically... There are much better tools like Sublime Text or Notepad++
Notepad only supports CRLF, wordpad can read Unix-style files, which is a lot of files even on Windows. A great deal of software was written to unconditionally insert \n.
Formatting isn't the only reason to use it. I never bother to try notepad.
Interesting perspective; FWIW, I have OneNote, Sublime, Word, and ToDoist installed on my computer, and use them daily. But I still fire up Notepad several times a day. It's responsiveness and simplicity still make it useful for me. Basically, if I have several screens open and need to quickly type something somewhere, I'll use Notepad; but I'll also use it for quick review of config or small log files, where again it's speed and simplicity beat Sublime's features and syntax highlighting.
Also, I use it several times a day when I need to strip formatting in paste or otherwise do quick manipulation - granted, an edge case that perhaps shouldn't exist... but there it is anyway :)
To me, the most compelling feature of Notepad is that it's installed automatically on every version of Windows. It's the MVP for a surprising number of tasks.
Yes, its one of the best places to go on an unfamilliar computer to quickly get somewhere to paste data and/or edit it with a monospace font.
I often find myself also just pasting old bits of text in there similar to how some people might leave old versions of code commented out while working on a replacement - its a sort of shelf/sidebar to place things that I might need later.
It's limited because it's mostly just a wrapper around the default Windows edit control.
Then again, it does have some strange little features. Like if you put the string ".LOG" at the top of a .txt file and open it again in Notepad, Notepad will insert the current date/time at the bottom of the file and move the cursor to the bottom.
I can get that being a useful feature, kinda. It's like someone snuck an extra feature into Notepad and it never got caught.
I teach a class in a small high school about building websites. Right now I'm teaching CSS. For HTML and CSS I have the students use notepad or textedit.
It's really nice to have a plain text editor that doesn't help them in any way, produces files that will work in the browser and they get to learn better I think. Maybe a small use case but one that makes me glad the tools exist.
Notepad got an update too. It now supports other line endings, UTF-8, wrap-around find-and-replace, more keyboard shortcuts, zooming, and various bug fixes.
> This answer is not helpful. There is no start button.
Because it's just a little windows icon now - easy to forget that that doesn't just make sense to some people.
> Thank you, Brian- I would surely never have looked there, for anything, never mind notepad! It is on my start box now.
Some people just haven't/won't learned the grammar and vocabulary of computer literacy. I think this person means "start menu?" But it looks like a box to them so that's how they described it.
A while ago there was an article where a woman was trying to user testing in a mall and instead found an old guy who had literally never touched a computer. Reading that experience was fascinating.