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Usability and interface

Posted on 13 Nov 2007 at 11:14

Naming and shaming

A number of the changes in Vista are purely superficial, the intention seemingly being merely to emphasise that Vista is different. An obvious example would be the renaming of certain system resources. In fairness, XP's names weren't perfect: it's great to finally be rid of the patronising "My" prefix before the names of various folders. However, Vista's new names aren't much clearer than the established ones. For example, the Add or Remove Programs feature now has the much more ambiguous title of Programs and Features; Display has been bundled into a catch-all window called Personalize; Accessibility has been repackaged as Ease of Access - and the word Start has been removed from the Start button.

Things have been moved about, too. In XP and before, display settings were grouped neatly together into a tabbed dialog box. In Vista, these same functions are separated out into five separate dialog boxes. It's a step backwards from XP that only slows down the user.

The Explorer window

While the little things make a difference, if you use your computer to get real work done your Windows experience centres on the Explorer window, and it's here that interface design will have the most impact on productivity. Seemingly realising this, Microsoft has given Explorer a thorough reworking. Some changes are largely aesthetic, such as fully scalable icons, more pervasive thumbnailing and previews of a folder's contents appearing within its icon.

Some updates, though, have a significant impact on usability, such as the new Favorite Links panel. This lets you create instant shortcuts right within Explorer - a huge time-saver if your work is spread across multiple file system locations. Your shortcuts even appear in standard Open File dialogs. There's no cost to using it except the space it takes up in the Explorer window, which you can reclaim simply by hiding the panel. It's another steal from Mac OS X, but a great addition to Explorer.

Windows XP's Explorer menu offers an intuitive way to navigate between folders.

The new search engine is another time-saver - indeed, a revelation after the slow and inflexible search in earlier versions of Windows. The technology underpins not only basic searches, but also the new "stacks" and saved searches features. A stack looks like a folder, but instead of showing all the files in a particular location on your hard disk it shows all files on your system that meet a user-defined criterion. For example, you can open a stack of all the Excel spreadsheets on your system, or of all photos taken on a particular date, and work with it as if it were a folder. For greater control, you can use a saved search, which lets you predefine complex search criteria and then open a window containing the results at the click of a button.

These systems work well, so long as Vista has indexed the folders you want to search, and it's especially useful that you can use them within the Open File dialog box. In everyday use, you may never have a use for these advanced functions, but almost everyone will appreciate the fast, handy search field built into every Explorer window.

One final change to the Explorer UI is perhaps less inspired. The familiar toolbar at the top of the Explorer window has been replaced by a simpler design, modelled on the Internet Explorer interface. Simplicity is no bad thing in itself, but while back and forward buttons make sense in a browser they're not a perfect fit for navigating a hierarchical file system - yet these are now Explorer's main navigation tools, while the "up" button has vanished entirely. The new crumb trail at the top of the window does let you jump quickly up the folder tree, but it's not as usable as it might be because the crumb buttons have neither a consistent size nor a consistent location. Thankfully, there's still a keyboard shortcut to go up a folder level .